Zoomed up 880 to Oakland this evening to have dinner with Steve, Wendy, Chris and Celeste. We ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant with the unlikely name of Le Cheval on Clay Street. (OK, I know, it’s the French colonial influence – but it still seems odd.) Just inside the door is a large bronze horse and a sign bearing the admonition noted above. The food was wonderful, from the firepot soup and the green mussels to the banana flambé desert. (Fire featured prominently, come to think of it.) And the wine list was varied, satisfying, and modestly priced. (Steve and I couldn’t resist the Solaris Pinot Noir, for obvious reasons.) Highly recommended.
Before we ate, there was much trading of goodies. I’d recently completed Stephen Baxter’s novel Evolution (B+ for science, B- for narrative, C for character development) and I traded it to Steve for Franklin Foer’s How soccer explains the world. (Of course it does!) The “confusion” refers to an item that Chris had picked up for me: a royal blue, long-sleeved polo shirt proudly bearing the name of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in gold script. (There was also a Graduate Theological Union t-shirt for Merry.) So let’s see, I wonder when Carson Kressley would recommend that a hard-core atheist should wear a Divinity School shirt?
A thoroughly enjoyable evening, to be repeated at the next opportunity. (Perhaps the end of September?) There was talk of sushi in Berkeley….