Degusthaustion!

Last night Ange took me out for a belated birthday dinner. She took me to Circa at the Prince, one of Melbourne's top restaurants. It is actually just down the road from where I live, but I had never been there. The decor is lovely and they have a large number of wait staff on hand to give you constant (but not intrusive) service. We decided to have the 8 course degustation menu which took us 4 hours to get through! Hence our renaming the concept to encompass the exhaustion involved in the process. The food was glorious: Ange had the normal degustation menu and I had the vegetarian version. That was fun as I didn't really know what each course was, so I was experiencing all these tastes and textures often without knowing what they were. I did find the menu on the website this morning though and discovered some of the mystery flavours!

We decided just to order a bottle of wine rather than have the degustation wine list as well. The couple sitting next to us had the whole degustation extravaganza which involved a specially matched glass of wine or liquor with every course. I think I would have passed out after about the fourth glass, and not been able to make it to the end of the courses!

It was actually lovely to sit still for 4 hours and have the chance to talk for that long. In our lives these days we don't often sit still that long, let alone in an environment where there's nothing to do except talk - no television, other people to entertain, etc. We both enjoyed it, although we were exhausted and in danger of slipping into food coma by the end of the night!