"No more drama in my life" -- Mary J Blige

Thursday night we meet friends at Montmartre for dinner and the Beaujolais Nouveau release.* These friends have lots of other friends that they invite to join in and it is a fun evening.

Montmartre is a small, modestly attractive bistro within a block of the Eastern Market metro. The service is good, I like everything I taste (and I taste everything that is offered) and the presentation is quite nice, too. I have a surprisingly generous portion of mussels as an appetizer (a big bowl of them for $8.95) and the monkfish with gnocchi for my entree, which has a really lovely, light sauce to set it off.

But the release was a little disappointing, and not because of what Restaurant Refugee had to say about it. I'd never been to a Beau-Nou release before and I don't know what I was expecting. A "release" sounds so momentous. You know, a BIG DEAL. I guess I was expecting something dramatic. Something extraordinary. Something amazing!

Maybe something like the running of the bulls at Pamplona but with wine.

And, okay, no one had said to me "You know, you really ought to experience the Beaujolais Nouveau release, it's like the running of the bulls at Pamplona." I mean, here we are at a French restaurant so where I got the idea that this would be a similar thrill is beyond me. But I did. I thought "This is going to be really astounding!"

Er, no.

At the start of the meal, our hosts ordered wine for the table (quite a bit of wine because there were fifteen of us) and the servers poured it and we drank it and they poured some more and we drank more. The servers weren't even particularly flourishy when they poured the wine.

Don't get me wrong. We had a very nice time. Great people! Tasty food. Okay wine. And it was a great excuse to leave work really early on a Thursday.

But no one got gored. No one got trampled. There were no young, athletic Spaniards flinging themselves about. No blood spilled. Not even wine spilled.

It lacked drama.


* I apologize that I can not provide a link to the restaurant's web-site. I couldn't find it. I hate that. I know it was just a few years ago that if you wanted to find a restaurant you hauled out the yellow pages but I've gotten so spoiled to all things webby and finding exactly what I want regarding restaurant information. Just last night we had the following conversation:

Hubby: We have all these phone books. I thought I might get rid of a few.

Me: Get rid of them all.

We're probably the last people to do so. And how do you get off the distribution list for future phone book deliveries? Do tell! But, meanwhile, back to our story...