Blue Bottle Cafe and The Best Thing I've Ever Eaten

There is only one restaurant I know of worthy of such a triumphantly 90s soundtrack, and that's the Blue Bottle Cafe BYOB on Broad Street in Hopewell. Platonic Life Partner and I chose to have our belated Christmas dinner there two days ago, and it bordered on a religious experience.

The ambiance and service at Blue Bottle are both perfect, in my opinion. While it's much more hectic than your typical "fine dining" atmosphere, I find it kind of charming and much less stuffy/awkward than if you were sitting in some silent, stoic room feeling like everyone is watching you chow down and listening to you curse. The decor is really pretty -- all about the blue bottle theme -- and the lighting is really nice; not too dark but definitely not bright. The waitstaff is very friendly and attentive, but not annoyingly so, and they don't hover around your table trying to wipe your ass like they do at some other fancy restaurants. And speaking of ass-wiping, the one-seater bathroom is well-decorated, clean, and pretty-smelling, so bonus points for that.

I've eaten at Blue Bottle four or five times, and every time has been utterly amazing, but this last visit really blew my mind.

I always start with the Blue Bottle Salad as my appetizer, partially because I need to eat lettuce with dinner or I feel weird, but mostly because it's the best salad I've ever had in my life. The dressing is some kind of peppery vinaigrette (maybe Champagne?), and the salad is mixed greens with toasted hazelnuts, huge slices of Manchego cheese and halved red grapes. Awesome. Went great with the Indaba Sav Blanc we brought.

For our entrees, we broke our usual habit and actually ordered the same exact thing: Tri-tip of Wagyu beef with sauteed mushrooms, a mustardy-tasting sauce, and a puree of lobster and celery root.

I think I might have to take a second to collect myself.

Okay.

I don't really know what the hell Wagyu beef is, but the owner described it as "American Kobe," so I guess it must be made out of chubby cows who get regular massages from Americans or something. Whatever it is, those cows did not die in vain because they taste fucking incredible, and so did the perfectly tangy and salty dark sauce, and so did the perfectly browned mushrooms. The lobster and celery root puree was the ideal complement; it was super rich and kind of sweet, so I was mushing everything together like a five-year-old because it all tasted so good in combination. I ate every molecule of food on my plate, and then I scraped up PLP's puree/gravy sludge, because manners are pretty irrelevant when you're in the middle of eating The Best Thing You've Ever Had.

Thank god PLP thought to bring a white and a red, because the Indaba Pinotage he picked out was possibly the perfect wine for this perfect-ass meal; like the pureed awesomeness, the Pinotage was also really rich and kind of sweet, whereas the Sav Blanc kind of tasted like water when it tried to stand up to the amazingly fattening and expensive food I was in the process of housing. Not that that stopped me from killing the bottle.

Of course we had to get dessert, because one of the owners is a pastry chef so the quality doesn't stop at the end of dinner. I went with the Grand Marnier Cheesecake with chocolate wafer crust, and PLP got a modest little scoop of Bent Spoon Earl Grey ice cream. What a pussy. He did eat some of my cheesecake though, and we agreed that it ruled.

I actually meant to ask what kind of coffee they use because I'm guessing it's Small World (they're all about the local stuff) but I'm not sure which roast; in any case, the shit is delicious and totally French-pressed.

Whole meal gets A+++, like we're talking 102 average, extra credit, honor roll, the works. If you ever want to get in my pants, you know where to take me.