Paul and I had an outstanding dinner with three other couples this evening at a fabulous local restaurant, Martini's. Much of the interior was salvaged from an old church that was torn down a few years ago, and designed by a friend of ours. He created the corner booth we shared tonight, a hexagonal seat made from fitting sliced-up oak church pews together, and shielded from the rest of the room by dyed silk hung over the old, ornately carved organ baffles. If a church has to come down, and its decorations sold off, far better that its non-religious parts be put to beautiful use in a place like this. The dinner was delicious, the company was excellent, and we drank waaaaay too much wine.
Also, there's a brand-new Thai restaurant in town. I can't speak for the food's authenticity, but everything we sampled was delicious and the vegetables were amazingly fresh, especially considering this is April in Michigan. I had a green curry with shrimp, and the shrimp were enormous (put your thumb and forefinger together; they wouldn't pass through the hole), flavorful and plentiful. They also had my favorite kind of appetizer: summer rolls with a perfectly balanced, house-made peanut-chili-vinegar sauce. I miss Dalat in Ypsi so much; I lived around the corner from them for about four years. In hot weather I used to eat a big stack of those summer rolls for dinner, and I'm looking forward to doing the same this summer.
Yay food.