Tomato, Tomahto: It's all food to us.

Girl meets steak

This is how we rationalized it:

1. Dad was staying at the Hotel Shan & Evgenia and didn't have to spring for two nights in a Seattle hotel.
2. I just got a job. How often do I get a job? Celebration must ensue.

It was the only way we could justify the Metropolitan Grill, a Seattle standby that's reportedly one of the best steakhouses in the country. Photographs of famous people, mostly sports figures, decorate the walls of the foyer. Even at 5:45 p.m., the place was packed with business guys in suits, trendy twentysomethings and their trendy boyfriends, and at least one father-daughter duo in search of meat and potatoes.

It took me a few minutes to get past the price tag on my filet mignon. At one point, I actually whimpered, "I think it's sinful to pay that much for a piece of meat." Not quite $10 million celebrity-wedding sinful, but still. So I made up for it by eating the whole thing: filet mignon cooked medium well, doused with herb jus and showered with cracked black pepper (Dad gave it an eight out of ten; since it was my first ever and I had no basis for comparison, I give it an eleven); garlic mashed potatoes topped with snipped chives; clam chowder with sherry cream and a swirl of Tabasco (Alison wasn't joking -- this is the best chowder I've had in Seattle or maybe anywhere); and a sloe gin fizz that had a remarkable effect despite the volume of food I'd just inhaled.

When the smoke cleared, half of Dad's potatoes and a sizable chunk of his halibut (stuffed with Dungeness crab, tomatoes, corn, and morels and lounging on a bed of asparagus spears) remained on his plate. I had done all but lick mine clean. The busboy raised his eyebrows. "I was hungry," I said defensively. "Wow," he replied, "we don't see that happen every day."

For about twenty seconds, I felt like a complete oinker.

Then I decided I was kind of proud.

(This picture is in no way related to steak, but isn't it pretty?)

posted by shan at 8:47 PM;