Chicken Feet

Yes, chicken feet. Bony. Savory. Mildly gelatinous. And very difficult to pick up with long, plastic chopsticks. That is one thing we discovered this weekend.

Amy, in her brilliance, realized that we needed a weekend off. We love our boys. They're great. So full of sweetness, and cuteness, and bouncing-off-the-walls energy. Sometimes, that last little bit gets to you; especially, if - like Amy - you live with it 7 days a week, 13 hours out of the day (in one form or another). Amy needed a vacation; not much, just a breather, just a little time away from the boys and any other responsibility. Thankfully, she invited me along.

When she initially proposed the idea a few weeks ago, we pondered where to go. Austin (great barbecue, the state capitol, lots of music clubs), Memphis (great barbecue - we...er...like barbecue, oh, and I guess Memphis has some music history, too), Oklahoma (eh...well, it's nearby, and it's out of state, which makes it exotic, right? Oklahoma?). Ultimately, we decided on something closer to home: Dallas.

Sure, we live near Dallas, but it isn't as though we visit it all that often. It's like living near L.A., a less creepy version of L.A., but still, just about as far away as Simi is from L.A. You still tell people who ask, "where are you from," that you're from, "Dallas," but really, you're - well, we're - from a small suburb North of Dallas that probably very few people have heard of unless they happen to have (1) lived in Texas, (2) visited Texas, or (3) known somebody who lived in Texas.

What really drove the decision for Dallas was last weekend, when we took the boys out for lunch and a drive. We needed to get out, so we drove to Denton (for barbecue), and as we finished up lunch, Ben began dropping broad hints about how much he'd like to visit a museum. So, we decided to visit the Dallas Museum of Art, which is way out of the way for Denton, but sounded like fun.

It was fun, for awhile. Even the boys seemed into it, they were certainly excited to see something new, and Ben and Josh both have such a love of art - both admiring it and creating it; they were equally awed by the architecture of surrounding downtown Dallas. Eventually, though, little boys can only look at so many paintings of tooshies, and so many 500-year-old vases, and can only stand so many "don't touch"-es before they lose interest.

Amy and I both wished we could spend more time really looking at the art, and that's when the idea of taking a weekend away to Dallas really struck us. Amy searched online and found a wonderful hotel, the Adolphus (sorry for the lame music), in downtown Dallas, that has a rich history and a great reputation. We found a nice weekend package that fit the bill perfectly, with a room for the night, breakfast at their Bistro, and two tickets to the Museum of Art, which is very close by. The hotel was amazing, by the way. I don't know when I've seen a place so opulent, and the elevators were wicked fast (maybe I'll write sometime about the slowest elevator on earth, at the St. Joseph's Hotel in San Diego). The hallways in the Adolphus must have been about a quarter-mile across, well, spacious anyway.

After leaving the boys with a friend of ours, we headed into Dallas, but stopped in Uptown Dallas for dinner first. Meals were my self-appointed assignment for the weekend, and I'd chosen a little Japanese restaurant. Amy was feeling ready for some food adventure, so she was game to try some sushi for the first time. I hadn't realized that "Uptown Dallas" exists, but it's a trendy neighborhood filled with great restaurants and almost zero parking. We drove around for 30 minutes or more trying to find someplace to park that didn't have a menacing sign about towing any car that wasn't associated with a patron of some establishment, but we eventually found a parking garage close to the restaurant and hoofed it from there.

Yutaka Sushi Bistro is tiny; the dining room would probably fill about half of our downstairs. It has a great reputation, though, especially amongst those who have a taste for "real" sushi (I gather that a lot of what we eat is an Americanized version of the original). The owner and chef, Yutaka Yamato, comes from New York, and he flies his fish in fresh, twice a week. This was a good place to go for Amy's first foray into raw fish.

The food was wonderful. We had katsuo and toro sashimi that was presented like a work of art, and man was it good. Tuna and yellow fin sushi served in a more mundane style, but with the wasabi-tinged rice that gave it a real kick. That would probably have been enough for most patrons, but we really wanted to give it a whirl, so we also ordered kobe beef (also served raw, in thin slices) with thin slices of black truffles on top, and - at the suggestion of the waitress - mushrooms, stir-fried with asparagus. The kobe beef was amazing, and Amy's favorite dish of the bunch (there was a brief stand-off over the last slice of beef, but I conceded victory to Amy), and I still cannot get the taste of the mushroom in the stir-fry dish out of my mind (I don't know what kind it was, but it had a nutty taste with a hint of a white wine aftertaste - which I know only from sauces, btw). Kudos to Amy for trying something new, and hopefully it won't be for the last time.

Saturday morning, we ate at the hotel's Bistro, where a great waitress named Petra recommended in an unidentifiable continental accent the huevos rancheros or the cornflake-crusted brioche french toast with caramelized Texas peaches (both dishes had caught our eye); Amy had the french toast and I opted for the huevos. I know mine was great, and I can't see how Amy's would have missed. The dining room is decorated with a vast collection of teapots of various shapes and sizes; it's a serious "must visit" for any teapot afficianados.

Then we were off to the museum. Of course, it was great. What can I say? The Dallas Museum of Art has a wonderful collection, especially of ethnographic and decorative arts. They're also currently exhibiting a collection of J.M.W. Turner's art (if you haven't heard of him, join the club), who was one of the foremost landscape artists of the late 18th and early 19th century. I'm actually glad we were able to see that exhibit; his work was amazing, and I enjoyed seeing its gradual change over the course of his lifetime; some of his late works were just moving, to me.

We had to cut the day somewhat short. We had intended to go see the new movie, The Forbidden Kingdom (love those wire fu flicks), and by this point, we were hungry, too, but we couldn't find a way to do both in the time left to us, so we decided to eat and put the movie off. For linner (or dunch, whichever you prefer) we stopped in at a place called Kirin Court in what passes for Dallas' Chinatown (really a sort of concentration of Chinese Americans just North of Dallas, in Richardson). Kirin Court was a place that I had heard of via coworkers, most of whom are of Chinese descent. It's a gigantic dim sum place covering the entire upper floor of a two-story strip mall.

We walked in with only a half hour to spare in their lunch hour. The restaurant was largely empty at that time of day. A plasma screen T.V. stuck to the corner of the dining room was inexplicably showing "Prince of Egypt," and thankfully, we weren't the only gringos, or gaijin (or whatever the Chinese call out-of-place, white folks) in the restaurant. The dim sum cart came to our table and away we went: shrimp dumplings, pork dumplings, peanut and pork dumplings, balls of some-sort-of-meat, steamed dumplings with barbecue-like-pork-or-beef-something in the middle (I think these are the real names of the dishes ;-) ), and chicken feet. I had to try chicken feet (and Amy did, too).

You see, I've conquered most of my basic food phobias, and that really only leaves bizarre foods. Frankly, chicken feet aren't that bizarre, but all of my coworkers acknowledged that it's an unusual dish for whitey-mcwhite-folk. Still, I had to try. The waitress was great. Every time she pulled off a cover from a dish that was a little outside the normal American boundaries, she almost seemed embarrassed even to be offering it to us. She'd laugh a little, "you want some chicken feet, tee hee?" and I think she was surprised when I said, "oh, sure!" Had I been a little more astute, we would have had some pig intestines, too; oh, well.

Thank goodness we watch Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel, where Andrew Zimmerman recently explained how to each chicken feet (mostly, you just gnaw a bit and suck the meet off of the bones). They were really tasty, actually, and I'm glad to have tried 'em. Amy got a real show, though. The table behind me ordered roast duck, which was presented with the head still attached; this served as a great handle for the waiter while he used his other hand to carve off crispy-skinned slices of duck. Amy got to watch, while I could only hear the yummy sound of crisp, crackling duck skin with every slice. I know what we've got to try next time.

All the food was savory, so I asked the host for something sweet for our last dish. He checked to see what was available, returned, and like our waitress told us, "we have sweet bean churro, tee hee." I think he was surprised that I asked for it, and even more surprised that we liked it; I in turn was surprised (and somewhat less perplexed - I can't imagine how they would have pulled it off) to discover that I had misheard him, and our dish was a sweet bean jello; that was a total Christmas Story moment; anyway, quite good.

So, that's the weekend; in brief: sushi, sashimi, kobe, black truffles, mushrooms, huevos, cornflake-covered-brioche-french-toast, art, lotsa pork, sweet bean jello, and chicken feet.