Sunday, June 6, 2010

Bitter Critter




Saturday night a gang of eight gathered for dinner at B Restaurant in old Oakland. The downtown restaurant scene is thriving and I wanted to tick off another restaurant from my list. John made a rare appearance which made the evening special.

The restaurant had received good Yelp reviews so I was feeling optimistic. Here's what they didn't say on Yelp: they have one oven for pizza in which they can fit only three at a time. So what happens when you have a table of eight who want four different pizzas? What they didn't do is tell us that up front so we could order something different, instead we had our table set for four pizzas and then one came out. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally they brought out steak (on the house) because we had been waiting for so long. About a half hour later two more pizzas came out, and then finally, the third. Thankfully conversation flowed, but the food delay was frustrating.

The pizzas were delicious though, thin crust, interesting toppings. We ordered the olive pizza which had artichoke hearts and other goodies, the potato pizza, the margharita pizza and one other, plus two orders of truffled fries. But first we started with their delicious cocktails. I had an updated margarita made with grapefruit juice. Dale and Sue had a "Love" cocktail with raspberries, Kaya and John had a gin and cucumber refreshers, and Kate had a lemony-snickett, an updated mojito. The drinks were fabulous. We topped off the night with three desserts: pound cake, pot du creme, and peach cobbler.Each dessert was fantastic.



But the food was overshadowed by the company when conversation switched from golf (john and tom) to John's new studio. The discussion turned to the name. What were we going to call the new studio? Options: Studio 589, Studio 294.5 (it's half the size of the house), or, Bitter Critter? Bitter Critter named after one of Sue's songs. The restaurant was smart to sequester us in the back because at the mere mention of Bitter Critter, Sue and Pete began rapping the lyrics. After that, there was no stopping the entire table from chanting, "bitter, critter, read about her on twitter" which carried us out to the street as we said our good byes.



Alas, birth-week is nearly over. Just one-or two more events and that will be it until next year.

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