where everybody knows your name

A couple of weeks ago, the husband and I had dinner at Catal Restaurant, which is not an uncommon occurrence, but we were celebrating a special occasion, so we were having a rare dinner there without any of our friends.

Our favorite server was there, and a couple of the managers and other servers we know were also there, so each of them came by at various times to say hello and chat, which was nice.

As usual, we had a lovely and yummy dinner. (The light levels were low, so my pictures kinda suck, but be assured that everything tasted much better than the pictures would lead you to believe.)

I started with a sashimi appetizer. Mmmm, cold dead fish.






For my entree, I had been craving short ribs, which I knew were on the current menu. But I'd also been craving their mac and cheese, which is on their kids menu. And it had been a long time since I'd had short ribs on the mac and cheese. Our server luckily obliged by putting in the special order request for me. Yep, more yumminess.






One odd thing had occurred during the course of dinner. One of the managers had come by to say hi, and she greeted us with "Happy Anniversary". How did she know that, we asked her? She said one of the servers had told her. We didn't know how the servers would know since we hadn't told them, and while our dining alone was rare, it certainly wasn't unheard of and was not necessarily an indication of a special occasion. We questioned both our server (who wouldn't tell us how he knew) and another server we knew who also came by to give us her good wishes, but we got nowhere with answers on how they knew, and we were baffled.

Finally, the husband figured it out. I had posted something on my Facebook page that morning, but no one at Catal is on my friends list, but the husband also remembered that I'd posted something on this blog that morning. We figured out that one of the servers we knew (who'd come by to give us her good wishes) must have seen my blog entry and saw that we had a reservation that night and put two and two together. I know that a couple of them know about the blog and website, but I'd only told this particular server about the blog because of a TV show I'd recommended to her. I was surprised that she'd come back after that to look at it at all.

We were then very happily surprised when a complimentary dessert was brought out to us.






I'd had two of the three items previously. The item on the left is the peanut butter and chocolate bar, which is really yummy. The item in the middle is the pear tart, which I didn't care for that much as it was too sweet for my taste. But the item on the right was the pumpkin cheesecake, which was incredible. It was a good blend of cheesecake and pumpkin, but more pumpkin than a lot of other places, and it was very moist. Most of the time, pumpkin cheesecake tends to be more cheesecake with a hint of pumpkin and tends to be very dense. That was definitely not the case here. It was more like pumpkin cheesecake mousse. Heavenly.


I had brought some recent-acquired special things for taste-testing, so that was fun too, as we got the servers, the managers, the General Manager and even our busboy involved. Yes, I know, it's like listening to a broken record, but it was another fantastic dinner at Catal.

Thanks, Suki, for telling them about our anniversary. And I see you out there reading this! ;) See you soon!