A Comedy of Errors

A COMEDY OF ERRORS!

How many times have you agreed to meet someone and you were both at what you thought was the appointed place at the right time, but once there were never able to find each other???????????

Well, last week, while I was sitting in the lobby of the Gramercy Carlton Hotel waiting for Paul who was to meet me for dinner at the "Cafe at Country" restaurant, he was at the table smug in the thought that he had beaten me to the appointed spot. Since Paul didn't have his cellphone it took us 30 minutes to figure it out. Not an auspicious start to dinner, but nothing that a cocktail couldn't remedy!

The Cafe turned out to be a good choice. Portion sizes were reasonable (especially for people on diets) enabling appetizer and entree without feeling any guilt about over-eating. Appetizers were equally wonderful. Paul's was a poached egg atop delicate mushrooms, and artichoke hearts (which I scored because they are on Paul's list of undesired eats), and a delicate sauce. My own salad was less interesting but fresh and I did have the artichokes. My salmon was perfectly cooked, served with fresh spring vegetables; Paul's fish, a type of bass was good, but less flavourful then the salmon. No dessert for us, but there was lots of good looking chocolate choices and ice cream on this menu.

A nice atmosphere, interesting bar and worth a return visit.

Cafe at Country

Carlton Hotel

90 Madison Avenue

212-889-7100

The House Restaurant

Last night we went to a new restaurant in the Gramercy Park/Union Square area. It was located in a small, converted,house (hence the name). It's a very attractive, comfortable, place with a bar and a few tables on each floor. The menu is Italian-accented American with a focus on fresh ingredients. It's only been open four months and they are still getting their act together.

I started with a martini made with the Plymouth gin that was voted best gin for a martini in the WSJ. It was very good and so large that I never got to have a glass of wine with dinner. Chris had a nice glass of Tuscan red also a generous portion.

Chris ordered a Yellow Fin Tuna "Crudo" served with olive relish. It was quite good and attractively served. My order of "Mediterranean Seafood Salad" was a disappointment. Oddly, the only seafood was boiled shrimp and red potatoes. It was not what I imagined, in fact, pretty ordinary.

I followed with the daily special Rotisserie - Barbecue Amish Chicken with a side order of spring vegetables (ramps, morels, fava beans and fiddle-head ferns and peas). The chicken was the way I like it, on the bone. The BBQ sauce was a little too sweet for my taste. The vegetables were very fresh and tasty - a real highlight. Chris had Garganelli Pasta with Spring Vegetables (similar to those I had), The hand-rolled egg pasta was reminiscent of penne. It was quite good and attractively served.

We tried a Key Lime Tart for dessert. It was awful. The cracker crust was heavy and soggy. The selection of coffees did not disappoint.

Overall, a little disappointing, considering how attractiveness of the restaurant. Prices were moderately expensive. It might be worth a revisit in a couple of months.

The House

121 East 17th Street (between Irving and Park)

212-353-2121

Thomas Ricks - Fiasco

Paul's comments...

A really well researched and readable Iraq book.

Book description...

Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps, has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds responsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--the runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from books like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more skeptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the heart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and then failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sources--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the thousands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought