Brett's birthday dinner

I am clearly my family’s tech support guy. Yesterday, as well as helping download photographs from mobile phones and digital cameras, I gave lessons on how to work the (rather clever) GPS-based route-finder in the parents’ new car and had to connect all of my sisters home entertainment kit now that mum and dad have brought down her TV and Sky box

Not that I am complaining, you understand! My mum is great for helping out with house plants and has brought down a couple of her encyclopaedias (encylopaediae?) to help us cure one of our plants which has seemed unhappy over the last couple of weeks. My dad reliably washes the dishes after every meal and doesn’t even seem to mind! (Of course I then feel guilty for leaving it to the guests, but so far I am managing to live with the guilt…)

So anyway, last night the parents were out for dinner with Rosie, while Brett and I went out for dinner with a group of Chorus friends to celebrate his birthday. Brett had chosen the guest list; a mixture of guys we know well and ones we know less well, but whose company we have enjoyed in the past, and it worked well. Everyone seemed to get on and the conversation was free-flowing and gregarious.

We started off in a cocktail bar on St. Martin’s Lane (after belatedly discovering that the restaurant’s own Wine Bar is closed on a Saturday night. Huh??) and had convivial drinks there as people arrived.

I had chosen the restaurant (L’Estaminet, on Garrick Street, an established French restaurant) entirely based on reviews I’d seen on the web and they turned out to be a good indicator. The food was excellent (although Ping felt his duck was too greasy) but the service, while friendly and timely, was a little bit confused. (The head waiter, as he was taking our orders, noted them down on a little seating plan he had drawn. Despite having this plan though, the sub-waiters spent ten minutes shuffling cutlery around before we all had the correct utensils for our meals!) Fortunately this didn’t affect our enjoyment of the meal and was almost an entertaining sideshow.

I started with a warm duck and pate salad and followed that with chateaubriand, which was absolutely melt-in-the-mouth. The dessert trolley was a little plain, consisting of a choice of fruit tarts and fruit salads – but then the cuisine is advertised as traditional French. We had a lovely (if a little pricey) Bordeaux to wash it all down

We did sing ‘Happy Birthday’ for Brett (but quietly as it wasn’t that kind of a restaurant and we were certainly the loudest party there…)

There was talk of going out afterwards, but I think in the end everyone headed for home as we didn’t leave the restaurant until about 23:45. Jeremy F came with us on the train as far as Clapham Junction, happily snapping away as we went. (I think he is trying to replace Ping as our ‘official’ stalker.) Apart from a bit of a delay while the train staff removed some drunks from the train before it left Waterloo, the trip home was uneventful and we collapsed into bed sometime after midnight.

I keep saying that we ought to host more dinners, as we don’t really socialise enough, but after tonight I think maybe hosting in restaurants would work equally well as throwing parties at home.