Food and Fic

[itsallovernow]

Sunday night, as part of LA's dineLA Restaurant Week, (lunch and dinner prix fixe meals all over town to encourage you to try new places you might not otherwise), we went to Dakota, which , as it turns out is the restaurant in the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

I love the Roosevelt, even though they've chichied it up, made it hip and expensive. It's old Hollywood, dark and gorgeous and lovely and has always been one of my favorite places in the city despite the new penchant for a $14 martini (and side note: as I mention martinis here fairly often, I hope those of you who don't know me understand that I am not talking about a frou frou drink. I'm talking an ice cold gin martini, very dry, with a twist. Preferably with Hendrick's gin, but Sapphire will do in a pinch. Or occasionally a dirty vodka martin with three olives missing their pimentos. No, I don't order this in public very often because I WILL NOT eat pimentos and will pick them out and sometimes, you just don't want to subject your companion to the squirmy little pimento piece wrapped in a napkin). Anyway...

Because I'm lazy, here's the menu: dineLA menu

We had one of each and it was really... just spectacular. The steak was perfect - tender and flavorful and beautifully seared with this amazing bordeaulaise sauce (basically a red wine reduction). The scallops were lovely (in a ginger soy sauce that was nicely balanced and which I wanted to drink), seared on both ends, firm and sweet. The salad of tomatoes, watermelon and fromage blanc was about 80 times better than I thought it'd be, despite the ingredients being somewhat out of season, and the desert was just lovely - rich and chocolatey and not ovwerwhleming.

Plus, the restaurant is all dark wood and leather and low lighting and good acoustics and I would NEVER have eaten there otherwise because steak is not really my thing and it's prohibitively expensive. But, for those of you who live in LA who haven't taken advantage of Restaurant Week, I'd highly encourage it. Dinner is either $25 or $34 depending on where you go (deluxe or premier) and lunch is a total bargain at $15 or $22! We had lunch at Luna Park a week ago, and while I don't find their food spectacular, it was still a fun lunch for a great deal!

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Onto the fic, in honor of the primaries, give me a character and I'll tell you something about their attitude towards government or politics - a first time, a thought, a moment of participation, a moment of disgust, or a moment of joy.

Comments

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Aeryn has no use for politics. She's a weapon not a diplomat. The explosion, the jab, the thrust. She's not the nuance. She's the bright burst of change. The end point. The spark. As an assassin, and yes, she'll say it out loud now, she learned how words could be weapons, how the twists of the tongue could be just as lethal as a pulse blast. As a parent,as a mate, she's learned subtlety and rage and the art of offering choice in it's purest, most controlled form. She's learned not everything should be solved by violence, learned it far earlier than any of those careers in fact, but she still preferred those moments of clarity when she was told to strike and she did, swiftly and perfectly and with unmatched grace.
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Neither Pullo nor Vala have much use for politics. Politics are for other people - people with time and wealth and no blood on their hands, who've always got coin in their pockets and wine at the ready and dark, cold eyes betraying the kind of ambition that involves more than a warm bed and someone to share it with a bag of gold tucked under the mattress.