Porteño

On Wednesday night I went to Porteño for the first time.

It’s sort of like The Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld. Porteño won’t seat your party until you’re all there, and if you’re late, they’ll cancel your booking. Getting eight adults from all over Sydney to the restaurant in Sydney’s torrential rain was an exercise of epic proportion and I showed up ridiculously early and looking like a drowned rat, so I went and hid in a seedy bar with some cheap bourbon.

When we eventually all made it to Porteño, any kind of stress anyone might have had about schlepping around Sydney and ruining  their best Jessica Simpson shoes disappeared as soon as the tequila-based cocktails arrived. I am not a food buff by any measure, so I’m not going to try and do the food justice, only to say I was happy to let Matt and Jamie do most of the ordering of the food and wine and each dish was amazing.

That I loved the Polenta a la Tabla wasn’t a huge surprise, but I have to say, I never expected to lust after a brussels sprouts dish, but their Repollitos de Brusela Frito is amazing.

I’m kinda keen to go back, maybe with the parental unit.

Afterwards we went upstairs to Gardel’s Bar where almost everyone else indulged in tequila and I sat thinking about how if I was wrong about brussels sprouts, maybe I’m wrong about everything else too, also, I can see almost all the way down my shirt, is it possible there is some lost brussels sprouts down there?

Australia Day was spent mooching away from the humidity, by which I mean Jeff played Skyrim and I played Scribblenauts.

Our conversations go a little like this:

Him: Argh! I am going to cut you dragon. I am going to cut you!
Me: Hmmm. I’ve run out of farm animals to use. Oh come on, you have to be kidding me! A Komodo Dragon is a legitimate farm animal!
Him: Lydia! Get out of my way! Carry my things! Why are you carrying too many of my things! I will poison you with Dwarven arrow poison!
Me: Oh gross. I just used a blow torch on a rat and it turned into a shish kebab and the chef ate it.

This weekend Jeff and pretty much every other male I know are in Tamworth for a buck’s weekend to coincide with the Country Music Festival which I think is a great idea, I always loved being in Tamworth around festival time. We’ll never hear about it though, they’re all on a Twitter/Facebook etc blackout (though just quietly, someone broke embargo and sent me a message that said: Already proven my manliness on this trip by knowing the lyrics to ‘I Should Be So Lucky’).

I’m on-call most of the weekend, but I have a hot lady date with Mush to drink gin and vodka and watch the third Paradise Lost documentary on Saturday and I am looking forward to it mushly (see what I did there? I took an incorrectly spelt word and made it even worse by making it a play on Mush’s name!) because we know how to party hard!

Hope everyone has a most rad weekend!