Palm Springs, California - Day 5
Apr. 17th, 2013 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
figarofigaro1We rose at a leisurely hour and had breakfast and lounged by the pool. Between journaling and writing postcards, I seem to attract a lot of attention by using an actual pen and paper here. Thank goodness I am reading on an ereader, otherwise I would seem a veritable dinosaur!
We had a fantastic lunch at one of our very favorite Palm Springs establishments, Fisherman's Market & Grill. It's an unusual spot to be in the desert; it looks more like something from Cape Cod or Northern California. Anyway, we almost always eat the same stuff here every time: raw oysters and fish tacos. It's an amusing set-up: You check in at a hostess desk and they tell you what table number you're assigned to. Then you go through a line and order, telling them your table number. Then you go on a quest to find your table in one of various rooms and breezeways. Today they were very generous with the wine!
The food is fresh and unpretentious and utterly delicious. And, of course, the best hot sauce for fish tacos is Cholula, or as I lovingly call it, Cthulhu Sauce.
We spent the early afternoon at a different gay resort that's out of town. It's traditional for us to do this on Wednesdays since that is their half-price day-pass day. I will not link to it since it's NSFW and I probably shouldn't admit to going there anyway. Heh. We spent the late afternoon back at our hotel lounging, swimming, reading, and chatting.
Dinner was at Tinto, a short walk away from town through well-groomed flower-laden neighborhoods. The walk to and from was fragrant! We had to laugh because we asked about walking there and everyone said, "No!" Bruce scoped it out on one of his morning runs and said it was totally walkable.
Tinto is a Basque style restaurant, again something of a surprise to find in the desert of SoCal. It was far and away the best dinner we had this vacation. I brought home a marked-up menu so I could tell all the things we ate. I wasn't very good at remembering to take pictures (I usually am not so good at that when dining out. A lot of the food pix on here I snagged from Bruce's phone and/or Facebook feed.)
To start, we had jamon serrano, idiazabal cheese, marcona almonds, and fried padron peppers. Here's the only photo, and a lot of it is already eaten!
Then we moved on to some pintxos (think "tapas"). We had a duck montadito that was duck confit "sausage" wrapped in serrano ham. We had tuna tartare bocadillo (big eye tuna, pickled guindilla, chorizo aioli). We had a plate of pulpo that was as good as any we had in Barcelona (Spanish octopus, harissa, grilled lemon, crispy garbanzo). The white asparagus with black truffle, poached egg, bacon, and Parmesan cream was delicious. Bruce picked out some tasty wines to go with everything. We dined slowly and ordered in waves and it was a lovely evening.
The end of the meal was buñuelos (donuts, date jam, spiced honey, date-olive oil ice cream) and after that we had some delicious dessert sherry.
I highly recommend a visit to Tinto if you're ever in Palm Springs.
Overnight I woke up once and didn't know where I was. I wasn't scared, just confused. I had been dreaming of things at home, so maybe I was getting ready for the inevitable "vacation is over" event.
We had a fantastic lunch at one of our very favorite Palm Springs establishments, Fisherman's Market & Grill. It's an unusual spot to be in the desert; it looks more like something from Cape Cod or Northern California. Anyway, we almost always eat the same stuff here every time: raw oysters and fish tacos. It's an amusing set-up: You check in at a hostess desk and they tell you what table number you're assigned to. Then you go through a line and order, telling them your table number. Then you go on a quest to find your table in one of various rooms and breezeways. Today they were very generous with the wine!
The food is fresh and unpretentious and utterly delicious. And, of course, the best hot sauce for fish tacos is Cholula, or as I lovingly call it, Cthulhu Sauce.
We spent the early afternoon at a different gay resort that's out of town. It's traditional for us to do this on Wednesdays since that is their half-price day-pass day. I will not link to it since it's NSFW and I probably shouldn't admit to going there anyway. Heh. We spent the late afternoon back at our hotel lounging, swimming, reading, and chatting.
Dinner was at Tinto, a short walk away from town through well-groomed flower-laden neighborhoods. The walk to and from was fragrant! We had to laugh because we asked about walking there and everyone said, "No!" Bruce scoped it out on one of his morning runs and said it was totally walkable.
Tinto is a Basque style restaurant, again something of a surprise to find in the desert of SoCal. It was far and away the best dinner we had this vacation. I brought home a marked-up menu so I could tell all the things we ate. I wasn't very good at remembering to take pictures (I usually am not so good at that when dining out. A lot of the food pix on here I snagged from Bruce's phone and/or Facebook feed.)
To start, we had jamon serrano, idiazabal cheese, marcona almonds, and fried padron peppers. Here's the only photo, and a lot of it is already eaten!
Then we moved on to some pintxos (think "tapas"). We had a duck montadito that was duck confit "sausage" wrapped in serrano ham. We had tuna tartare bocadillo (big eye tuna, pickled guindilla, chorizo aioli). We had a plate of pulpo that was as good as any we had in Barcelona (Spanish octopus, harissa, grilled lemon, crispy garbanzo). The white asparagus with black truffle, poached egg, bacon, and Parmesan cream was delicious. Bruce picked out some tasty wines to go with everything. We dined slowly and ordered in waves and it was a lovely evening.
The end of the meal was buñuelos (donuts, date jam, spiced honey, date-olive oil ice cream) and after that we had some delicious dessert sherry.
I highly recommend a visit to Tinto if you're ever in Palm Springs.
Overnight I woke up once and didn't know where I was. I wasn't scared, just confused. I had been dreaming of things at home, so maybe I was getting ready for the inevitable "vacation is over" event.
