Casa Mono

Food: delicious
Service: excellent
Atmosphere: urban bourgeoisie, mostly older couples and careful bites, necklaces and dresses, hushed clinkiness, champagne and wine snobbery (what a robbery) mixed with perfume.
Overall: go there for a good reason, need reservations.
Total cost: $110/2 (with no wine)

It’s a small place with bar seating on one side where you can watch the chefs prepare everything, and table seating on the other (where you can look at everyone’s pretty outfits).  We took the bar so we could watch the chefs. There’s no back kitchen; everything is done right in the open. The cooks stand mostly in one spot whereby they can swivel in place and reach everything. Ovens, burners, sauces, fridges, utensils, etc. It was a real treat to watch the process and to guess at what was going to be what as it materialized into fanciness.

My date was there for fois gras.

Controversy? Indeedly. There are times when I think PETA and similar groups can be misleading, taking up unnecessary battles against traditions that are far less harmful than they preach. The natural world is what it is– we don’t go around preventing wolves from ripping deer to shreds when they need to eat, so why is it so different for a human hunter using bullets?  But, there are also very obvious times when animal rights lobbyists are extremely important, and I do think fois gras is one of them.

As mentioned, my date was there specifically to have it. When I asked her if she knew what it was, she said: “I know, I know…, but you know what? It’s delicious!” That can be a fine place to leave a conversation, and that’s where I left it.

SEE PEOPLE!! I’M LEARNING! FINALLY!! LEARNING!! HAHAHAHAHAHA

But in my mind it continued.

You can say “I know I know” and do the thing anyway, but what you can’t do is pretend something away for the purpose of doing it guilt-free. Dudes, fois gras production is awful. It literally means “fat liver”, and involves getting duck livers to swell to multiple times the normal size and become so overworked and stressed that the liver itself turns to liquid fat (while still inside the duck!) You fully restrain and then force feed said duck. Force feeding here doesn’t mean you mush the ducks face into food, it means you grab it by the head and ram a metal rod down its throat and all the way into its stomach, packing food down, over and over and over. You know, tamping it, like you’re packing a pipe.

So you force feed an animal until its liver virtually explodes, and right before it actually does, you remove it and freeze it for restaurants (except in California).

So that’s what my date had.

Fois gross. It doesn’t even taste very good for fuck’s sake.  Is it worth the torture? Is it ever?

Anyway, here’s what it looks like at Casa Mono:

We also had sea urchin, which was very nice and oceany, and some skirt steak, fantastically sauced and onioned.

Overall the whole meal was great. As will always be the case, it’s not worth $100, and no one anywhere should be eating two weeks worth of groceries in one meal.

Busy day with this and that. I feel a little out of it, maybe the weather shift is the cause. No shorts. No flip flops. It was 57 on my walk in. At least fall is really here.

Enjoy your coffees on days like today, few things are better.