Category: Books

Duck duck duck cow

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We just spent a long weekend in Ottawa. It got built around a single concert, but we ended up packing in a wonderful few days.

Friday

What a beautiful drive. There was no traffic to speak of getting out of Toronto, and we had smooth sailing – not to mention some beautiful fall colors – the whole way. Google Maps suggested we take a different route into the city, so we got to drive up the Colonel By and explore a little on the way to meet Lindsay’s brother Patrick.

After a slight detour, we parked and met him at Black Squirrel Books. I left with one book (a novel by Kevin Patterson, whose book The Water In Between was important to me when I read it 25 years ago) while Lindsay left with…well, many. I had a cortado, too, which was served in the right glassware, but fell prey to the same pitfall that most coffee shops do: they made it too hot.

We left there and drove to our hotel, The Metcalfe. A new boutique hotel downtown, I’d never stayed there…except, once I stepped in, I realized I had stayed there. Sixteen years ago, when it was the Indigo. Anyway, it’s much nicer now.

We needed food, so we turned on our heels and went straight to Raphaël, which Patrick picked. We had no reservation but they plopped us at the bar. It was really delicious too:

  • Amuse bouche of some kind of fish consommé with ají limo tiger’s milk
  • Pulpo al Olivo: Pacific Octopus Carpaccio, Botija Olive Sauce, Chimichurri, Capers, Tapioca Crackers
  • Causa Vegetariana: Beets, Peas, Carrots, Avocado Mousse, Ají Amarillo Potato Terrine, Botija Olive Sauce, Ají Amarillo Aioli, Crispy Plantain
  • Tamalito De Pato: Sous Vide Duck Thigh, Mote Corn Tamal, Salsa Criolla, Ají Drizzle
  • Anticuchos: Ají Panca Flank Steak Skewers, Mini Potatoes,
  • Brussels Sprouts, Chimichurri, Rocoto Sauce
  • Dessert: petit fours of some kind of tiny cookie and Peruvian flan

It was all excellent. Nice Ontario-forward wine list too.

Afterward Lindsay and Patrick went to a concert at the NAC; I fell into a protest march up Elgin for a while before wandering back to the hotel and catching the end of the Jays game.

Saturday

Boy, did we have a lazy morning. The room was too big and comfy not to. Eventually I went out for coffee, but found that the local Morning Owl is closed on Saturdays, so I got coffees from the lobby cafe instead, and regretted it almost immediately.

Eventually we walked down Elgin to The Manx for brunch. I had fond memories of it when I used to visit in the…mid-to-late-90s, I guess? It hasn’t changed much, which I loved. I had the banana bread French toast; Lindsay had the eggs benny. We both had a Caesar and a beer.

We walked back along the canal on a perfect fall day, and relaxed in the room for a bit before walking back down Elgin for an early dinner with Patrick & Maeve at TOWN. It was fantastic:

  • Apps
    • house focaccia w/ whipped brown butter
    • butterbean, date and apple salad w/ arugula, toasted walnuts, dried cranberries, herbed goat feta, Greek yogurt dressing, wheatberry
    • glass of Rosehall Run Chardonnay for me, and a cocktail for Lindsay
  • Mains
    • Dan: cumin-honey glazed and grilled pork chop w/ confit carrot and roasted pepper purée, polenta batonettes, shishito peppers, chai pickled peach, charred corn salsa
    • Lindsay: house-made cavatelli w/ saffron, corn and miso cacio e pepe, cornbread pangrattato, pickled jalapeños, pecorino, chives, ½ tare glazed duck breast
    • two glasses of Saumur Cabernet Franc
  • Dessert
    • tiramisu
    • glasses of Frankovic Luna Blanca for Patrick and I

Then, the reason we were in Ottawa: to see a symphony playing music from Stardew Valley, aka Lindsay’s favourite game. I’ve heard her playing the game enough that I recognized some of the music, but wasn’t as in on the jokes as everyone else. But she loved it, and that’s what matters.

Sunday

Up quite a bit earlier, as we were meeting CBGB for brunch. I pre-gamed with cappuccinos from Ministry Of Coffee. Side note: early Sunday morning in downtown Ottawa is an unexpected mix of dead quiet and aggressively weird.

When they texted that they were en route we drove out to Hintonburg and met them at a Bridgehead nearby. After chatting and catching up we walked to Chesterfields. Lindsay had a jerk chicken benny; I had a classic breakfast. Mostly we were just there to catch up with friends, who I miss so much. After brunch we went for a group stroll, then said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel.

We weren’t there long, though – we had stacked some plans. We walked to Majors Hill Park to meet Patrick and Maeve again, on what had turned into a very sunny and warm late-October day. We had plans to spend it inside though, at the National Gallery of Canada. We NAGged it up for a few hours.

After that we spilled down Sussex to the market and found a table at Beyond The Pale. P+M ate lunch; we snacked on duck drummies and beers and many bottles of water. After sitting and laughing for quite a while we parted ways; Lindsay and I walked back to the hotel, stopping along the way at Little Victories for some fuel to get through the evening.

A teeny rest in the hotel room later and we were ready for our dinner at Arlo, which ended up being fantastic.

  • Starters:
    • Tomatoes + rosamarina w/ fresh coriander, capers
    • Scallop tartare w/ black garlic, kohlrabi, cilantro, mushroom vinegar
    • Dan drank: Crémant de Loire (Les Athletes du Vin “Gardien des Bulles” NV) and Garganega (La Biancara “Masieri Bianco” ’23)
    • Lindsay drank: House Martini (gin, apple eau de vie, dry vermouth, manzanilla sherry) and a Gruner Veltliner that isn’t on their online menu so I can’t remember what it was
  • Main:
    • Porcini Crusted Ribeye For Two w/ frites, marrow, chimichurri-stuffed portobello, arugula
    • a bottle of Sangiovese (Pacina Donesco Toscana Rosso 2020)
  • Dessert:
    • Lemon Posset
    • A glass of not-quite-Tokaji Hungarian Furmint for me

The steak was cooked perfectly, tip to tail. The scallop tartare might have been one of the best things I ate all year. The wines were all delicious. The vibe was loud at first, but pretty great. In a weekend full of outstanding meals, this might have taken the prize.

Monday

Clearly we used up a lot of our driving luck on Friday. After packing and scarfing down some room service breakfast we drove back to Toronto, and the rain started almost immediately. Several times it escalated to the point where we could barely see the car in front of us, which made for some pretty tense driving. Luckily it cleared up around Gananoque, and we had clear weather all the way into Toronto. We arrived home to find a very happy cat.

All in all: pretty awesome weekend. Perfect weather. Time spent with family and old friends. Incredible food. Memorable experiences. Good birthday trip all around!

Fun things I’ve done in the last couple weeks

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment
  • Went to an extensive Ontario cab franc tasting at Chez Nous. Like, 40-odd different bottles. It would have felt overwhelming if it hadn’t been a dream come true for a CF nerd like me. It also afforded me a chance to ask Ricky + Olivia about their soon-to-open restaurant.
  • Drank some very yummy older wine.
  • Saw Mitski on Superbowl Sunday, her second show in three nights at Massey Hall. Her setlist was heavily weighted to her new album, but there were plenty from previous albums as well. I assumed there would be few if any changes from the previous night’s setlist (there were none, in fact) so I knew I wouldn’t hear “Best American Girl” or “My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars” (I think the chorus from that one is going to keep it out of rotation for a while) but I did get an excellent rendition of “Washing Machine Heart” to close out the night. Emilie Hanskap in The Star does a more eloquent job of describing the concert than I could; suffice it to say it was a pretty landmark show.
  • Finished Doctors and Distillers (goodreads), a book I’ve been slowly reading for months. A really fascinating look at the history of spirits, cocktails, wine, and so on, and how they were used medicinally throughout the ages. I learned a lot, and wanted a lot of cocktails. (Also, I now know the etymology of the word cocktail.)
  • Had dinner & drinks at our friends Shannon & Warren’s place last night. Warren made excellent Detroit-style pizza, and we drank some good wine (probably slightly too much of it) and were sent home with surplus tiramisu.

I had coffee with that book HALF AN HOUR AGO

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While we were on vacation in NS I finished a book: Heat 2 (amazon). Non an imaginative title, but certainly a book I was excited about, given how much I loved Heat (imdb | rotten tomatoes). It split into two time periods, a la Godfather 2: both an early/origin story for Neil, and the immediate aftermath, and some years following, of the lone surviving character(s) from Heat. I can’t say it was a great work of fiction, but goddamn if it wasn’t satisfying to revisit that world.

I’m also pretty psyched at the rumours they’re already thinking about the movie. Adam Driver as a young Neil McCauley? Stop it. Stop it right now.

The winter that won’t end

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I know, I know, it’s Canada and it’s still March. I have no right to expect warm weather, or even decent weather. But usually by the time Spring has officially sprung things have started to turn to the brighter & warmer. This year, though — nyet. Rainy, grey, cold.

Back in February, when I was lamenting this particular winter, I detailed how I was pushing myself to get up and out of the house. “Lord knows, I can’t keep drowning myself in TV,” I said. But then I proceeded to drown myself in TV.

Luckily, there remain plenty of TV shows of superlative quality. I finished both seasons of Slow Horses, the first season of The Last Of Us, and the second season of Only Murders In The Building. I’m in the midst of watching the latest seasons of The Bad Batch, The Mandalorian, Yellowjackets, Party Down, and You. The final season of Succession starts tomorrow, and we haven’t even started the new season of Ted Lasso yet.

And in a purchase that combines two of my other favourite media (movies, books) I recently picked up Heat 2 (amazon) which apparently covers both the period immediately after the movie Heat concludes, and some origin story behind the movie’s characters. I’m pretty excited to read it.

Is there a second edition?

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While going through my books to see which one I’d like to read next, I happened across something I bought years ago, but never cracked: The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. Here’s the blurb:

A cultural history of the last forty years, The Age of American Unreason focuses on the convergence of social forces—usually treated as separate entities—that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; and the triumph of video over print culture. Sparing neither the right nor the left, Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced a universe of “junk thought” that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.

Sounds interesting, but here’s the problem: it came out in February 2009, when we were still naively optimistic about the internet and George W. Bush was the dumbest, worst president we could imagine. Reading it now, in a Trump/truther/QAnon-riddled world, I imagine it will seem more quaint than informative.

Dune

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When I made my list of favourite movies of 2021, Dune (imdb | rotten tomatoes) made the cut. I mentioned that I’d never read any of the books, even though my dad loved them. I decided to change that, and bought — and read — a copy of Dune (goodreads) in February. It was pretty good too — a dense little sci-fi switch-em-up amidst nonfiction.

I also grabbed the second and third books in the series — Dune Messiah and Children Of Dune — for later. Maybe they’ll be a palate cleanser when I finish The Lynching (goodreads) in a week or so.

Wine Girl

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Book #3 down, and I’m not even out of January. The latest was Victoria James‘ Wine Girl (goodreads) which was a very compelling but tough read. I thought it would be more about wine; it ended up being more about her very difficult childhood and experiences — both brutal and educational — in the restaurant industry.

As for what’s next, I’ve decided to switch it up a bit and finally read Dune, which my dad was a huge fan of. I watched the (new) movie with him while I was home at Christmas, and it made me want to delve into the real thing. Given the length and density I reckon this will slow my rate somewhat, but that’s okay.

The second symphony

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Near the beginning of the pandemic I backed a new kickstarter project by someone I’ve followed on Twitter for quite a while named Matt Brown. I used to listen to mamo, a podcast he co-hosted. I know he lives in Toronto, maybe even roughly the same area as me. I know we’ve traded tweets a few times. I know he works for TIFF. He’s in that sphere of people I feel like I know, but we wouldn’t recognize each other on the street. Or he wouldn’t recognize me, certainly.

Anyway, he launched a kickstarter to self-publish a collection of essays about Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie I very very much liked. I backed it, and the book arrived in the fall of 2020. Because I’ve been sucking so hard at reading I left it in my living room, not in the study with the rest of the books, a victim of my best intentions to read it “next” despite my throughput being zero.

But this year, with my love of reading feeling renewed — I’ve now finished two books in three weeks, as many as I’ve read in the past two years combined — I’ve read Brown’s book The Cinema Of Survival this week and really liked it. You can read reviews and buy it here, or buy it non-Amazonly here.

[A side note: I’ve never really embraced Goodreads, but it made me think of an earlier book-sharing site which Amazon bought and folded into Goodreads called Shelfari. I don’t know why it popped back into my head, but it did.]

.:.

Cover photo from the kickstarter page

Cover photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Berks!

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After several years of reading few books, if any, I’m making an effort to get back to it instead of spending endless hours reading only feeds & tweets.

Since wine seems to be my current obsession, I’m leveraging that to keep up my momentum. I’m currently reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace (link), and have a few more — Godforsaken Grapes by Jason Wilson (link), Wine Girl by Victoria James (link), and Wine & War by Don Kladstrup (link) — lined up. I might even break open Wine Folly (link) for reference a few times, as I’ve also signed up for WSET level 2 and plan to go for level 3 after that.

Or maybe I’ll alternate wine books with others…I have plenty of non-fiction, and a few fiction, in the backlog of books sitting patiently in boxes in the study while we think about how we want to redesign it.

This isn’t some I-must-improve-during-COVID thing, mind you. I don’t buy into that. I just forgot how much I miss reading books, and am figuring out that the perpetual social scroll isn’t always the most helpful activity. Plus, Lindsay’s voracious appetite for books lately has inspired me (and, probably, shamed me just a bit) so I’m easing into it, tentatively aiming for a book a month this year. Wish me luck.

.:.

Cover photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash