Le Colonial (birthday lunch)

It's been a busy busy pair of days just completed. I'm knackered, and my body is telling me so through the inconvenient onslaught of a bad cold. Yay. I LOVE growing older!

Back to Friday: Conrad and I took the day off, and after a lazy morning of sleeping in and a few busy and not so busy things done, we met CG for lunch at Le Colonial. A French-Vietnamese restaurant down near a part of town known as (I'm not making this up) the Viagra Triangle (well, realtors and the city of Chicago don't call it that, but...). I'd never been before, so this really was a treat for me. Conrad looked very handsome, and CG was no less lovely. We ordered a bottle of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and started on a leisurely lunch.

Sharing dishes was the idea, and so we had two appetizers between us: a salad with beef tenderloin (this was, I think, my favourite) and some monkfish with sesame crackers.

Similarly, we shared a dish of chicken in yellow curryand a mixed seafood dish(and I was delighted by how the seafood was NOT overcooked, a danger in a dish like this) along with rice and a plate of sauteed pea shoots. Tasty tasty pea shoots.

All was good, and we kept picking at it, waving away the staff trying to clear our plates from time to time.

Eventually we moved on to dessert, at which point CG tried predicting what I would have based on her past dining experience with me. Conrad is easy - there was a chocolate and raspberry dessert, so that would have to be it. CG nailed me with her second choice - she knows I'm very fond of custards and puddings, so it would be the crème brûlée or possibly the tapioca with banana. Tapioca it was.Which makes me giggle in hindsight because it makes me think of the episode of Friends wherein Monica makes birthday flan. Truly, I'd be quite pleased with that! CG, by the way, had the lemon tart.

And then it was off to see Harry Potter 5. Kind of a Harry Potter weekend with the various gifts of books and DVDs, plus I finished the final book. But a heck of a good way to spend my birthday, thanks very much to CG and Conrad treating me to a great lunch!