On Day Six, we got up to have breakfast with j.pal and Big Man at the Harrah’s buffet. I’m not going to say “No stars” or anything like that, because it was fine for what it was, which was a clever riff on the complimentary breakfast buffet at a Jameson Inn outside Youngstown. For fourteen bucks, you could eat your weight in vaguely familiar-looking, slightly squashed pastries with the toothsomeness of Play-Doh. Which was a weird culinary experience, because the diner’s childhood experiences lead one, when met with that familiar dense chewiness, to also anticipate Play-Doh’s deep saltiness, not cloying sweetness. A clever juxtaposition, I thought. I believe Thomas Keller and Ferran Adria consulted.
They to the airport, we back to bed. Time passed while our bodies rebuilt. Then to Angel Park.
I am aware few of you enjoy talk of golf. Of course, it’s my blog. So you are lucky that I do not yet enjoy talking about golf, just playing.
I will tell you, however, that we arrived at Angel Park on Baby Rabbit Day, and you people are lucky Luna did not die of joy right there. She would have been very happy to. For three hours, around every corner sat a half-dozen tiny rabbits. (’Handbunnies’, in Lunese.) It was fun, but eventually got a little unsettling. If they had turned on us, we would have been swiftly swarmed under and dispatched. At least Lovegood would have died happy.
Wouldn’t that be the most extraordinary epitaph?
DROWNED IN BABY BUNNIES
MAY 5, 2008
Anyhow. Another postgolf cupcake, and by this point it was late afternoon. Showers, fresh clothes, and it was finally time for dinner. We had successfully secured a reservation at B&B, which we’d been looking forward to for approximately eight months. I was a little disappointed in the choices on the menu, but notin the food. It turns out that the menu is confusingly but intentionally understated. Example: “Salad with pancetta” is a composed green salad with crispy bits of pancetta and dressed with a very soft-cooked duck egg. “Pork trotter”, which I had, was a disk of something extraordinary covered in panko and fried. The star of the meal was beef cheek ravioli, which produced one of my life’s great pairing-wine-with-food memories.
Generally, I’m not a Wine Person the way I am a Bourbon Person or a Rum Person or a Barbecue Person. I can tell and appreciate the difference between five-dollar wines and twenty-five dollar wines, and I think they both have a place in the world. But only maybe four times in my life have I had a glass of wine where I thought, “Oh. Well. This one makes me totally understand how a person would pay any sum for something like this.” Of those four times, three of those occasions have come while drinking Italian reds from the Piedmont. (Amarone, Barbera, Barolo.) So at least I’ve picked out a pattern. And happily, making beef cheek ravioli would give me a chance to buy a bunch of Barolo. Because the one we had at B&B — Damilano “Lecinquevigne”, 2003 — was a revelation.
The Fontana Lounge was brought to my attention by Paisana, who had talked about it having a great view of the Bellagio Fountains. She undersold it. Might be the best view of them you can get without booking a room. We sat on the patio and drank Champagne and watched the fountains for a very long time.
At some point one of us looked straight down off the ledge and noticed that there is a small colony of ducks living in the Bellagio Fountains. If you had asked me that morning if there was any way to make Luna love the Bellagio Fountains more, I would have said “No”, and I would have been wrong.
And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.