Day 5: The Intercontinental Hotel

My friend and I escaped the hustle and bustle of San Francisco to spend a night at the luxurious Intercontinetal Hotel in Monterey. We are two people who love hotels. We don't care so much about the sites. We love the opportunity to take a bubble bath, the fluffy bathrobes and slippers, the large screen cable television, the small bottles of skincare products...we love it all. We ate in the hotel. We drank in the hotel. We didn't think about yoga in the hotel. Overall it was an excellent day.

EAT:
When I go out to eat, I like to order items that I can't make at home. Sometimes I choose things that would require too many ingredients or equipment that I don't have. Sometimes I choose things that aren't particularly difficult to make but are incredibly time-consuming. Or sometimes I choose things that should be simple but I have managed to repeatedly fail at making.

So as I skimmed the menu at the C restaurant and lounge at the Intercontinental (trying very hard to ignore the fact that someone thought it was clever to bold all of the letter Cs in the menu), my eyes naturally fell on the diver scallops.

Anyone who has ever had my scallops (and I'd like to take this time to apologize again) knows exactly what failure tastes like. Scallops are absorbent little suckers, so one of my biggest mistakes was to be overzealous with the lemon, creating an entree that forced all of my dinner guests' lips to pucker. Another issue is that scallops have that ambiguous white color which gives little clue to whether you have undercooked them or overcooked them (both of which I have done on separate occasions...and, well honestly, sometimes on the same occasion).

These scallops were delightful. Propped up like islands in a bowl of mushroom and leek stew, they were flavorful, cooked in the middle, and lacking that rubbery texture that comes when they are overdone.

The dessert was equally good. My dinner partner and I shared their upscale version of a banana split. The bananas were wrapped in a shell of crystallized sugar, and instead of your ordinary ice cream flavors, the chef swapped in gelato: pistachio, chocolate and a vanilla with a raspberry sauce. The weakest link was the chocolate gelato, which was far too rich for the dish. Otherwise, it was pleasurable ending to the meal.

DRINK:
I drank something called Absolut Pearadise while sitting by a fire on the hotel's deck listening to the ocean lap up against the beach. 'Nough said.

YOGA:
Couldn't bring myself to practice yoga. Got a (hotel) massage instead.