Shameless Gloating About My Friday Night

Friday night, a coworker and I went out to see a movie after work. (Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Excellent stuff. I highly recommend it.) And after the movie, despite resolutions made earlier in the day of getting sleep that night, we went to a bar.

This particular coworker grew up in California, went to college at Berkeley, and as far as I know, except for a brief stint in New York, has stayed there since. He knows the area quite well, he's got a list of his favorite haunts a mile long, (and these are good haunts, by the way. Not the local-bowling-alley-that-everyone-knows-about type haunts, but the "go in and blow straight past the hostess and head down a small nondescript hallway to the left to the secret elevator which you take to the r0of to get to the rooftop restaurant with an unparalleled view of the city and by the way it's 68 degrees and there's just enough fog to make everything spectacularly beautiful and to top it all off you got there early enough to get a table and can mercilessly mock everyone who has to stand" type haunts.) and we share some interests. This puts him at the top of my List Of People To Get To Know For The Purposes Of Learning New Things.

I'm not completely without a conscience. First of all, like I said, The Coworker and I are into a lot of the same things. We do legitimately have fun when we hang out. So I'm pretty sure I'm not imposing an undue burden on him. And I've got something he wants. Bargaining chips, as it were. In this case, my desirable assets are my books, movies, music, and the people skills necessary to figure him out enough that I can introduce him to my multimedia paradise in a way that makes sense and will be enjoyable (if you have ever tried to get someone else hooked on Tool, you know how hard this can be).

The end result is that I spend a fair amount of time scheming ways to get him to show me more of the city. Though after Friday, I might just let events run their natural course.

Friday we went to a bar of The Coworker's choosing. And The Coworker has a flair for the dramatic, because all of the places we go involve navigating through secret entrances or back alleys and generally escaping the beaten path. This particular bar involved the requisite back alley in the middle of the financial district with the added bonus of carefully threading our way through a collection of large dumpsters and vehicles scattered all over the road and the sidewalk. So I honestly had no idea where we were headed, which meant that I was totally unprepared for what I saw when we actually arrived.

We turned a corner and I was in Greece. The bar was all lit up with outdoor tables and lights everywhere and full of people. It might even have been on a cobblestone side street, although I think I'm making that up. I've seen many such places in Greece and Italy and France, and never in the States. I couldn't believe it.

The bar is actually an Irish bar with...get ready for it... a confessional. They ripped it out of a church and put it in the bar with a few benches and a small table. It's the best place to sit because it's quite comfortable for 2 people and it isolates you from the rest of the bar, so you can actually hold a conversation and not worry about some idiot wildly gesturing into your drink.

But wait, it gets better.

At this point, it's probably about midnight. We're in the confessional, talking about random stuff, and we start talking about food and cooking and...something. I don't remember what something was. It might have been my cooking or a restaurant I'd been to or something else, but whatever it was, it wasn't as good as Alice Waters, and I said so.

"[something] isn't as good as Alice Waters, but it's passable."

"Alice...who?" And he asked this not as if he hadn't heard, but as if he hadn't quite believed what he'd heard.

"Alice Waters."

"You know who Alice Waters is?"

Yes, I do know who Alice Waters is. She's a very famous chef and restaurant owner who has been getting a lot of press lately. She's all about quality food, fresh and local, and I have read nothing but good things about her. She recently figured prominently in an interesting article in the New York Times, and so she's been on my mind a bit, which is probably why I picked her as my basis of comparison to whatever it was I was talking about about. Good thing I did.

I was running all this through my head, trying to figure out why it might be so important, why The Coworker would also know about Alice Waters, etc. And then it hit me. Her restaurant. Chez Panisse. It's in Berkeley. Where The Coworker currently resides.

Long story short, he's also into food in a big way. We're so going to Chez Panisse.