From the Canlis web site photo tour.
Tim left for Costa Rica today and will be gone a week. My birthday is in 2 days and this will be the first time in 9 years that we have not spent it together. The way that the flights worked out, with his free ticket, and the timing for when Adam could join him in CR for a week of surf and sun just happened to be very limited, so I told him it was ok (even though I was super bummed after he left this morning and it took 4 shots of espresso to pull out of it), if he took me to Canlis for my birthday first.
I’ve been to Canlis once before with colleagues and we sat in the lounge by the piano player and drank scotch. This restaurant is like my version of Being John Malkovich. Inside my head, it is Canlis. So much so that Tim kept looking at me oddly with raised eyebrows and I realized that I, who can never name a single song on the radio, knew every single song the pianist was playing (Les Miserables to Moon River) and I own both the Frank Sinatra and Edith Piaf albums they played during his breaks. It was uncanny, a veritable Utopia of the senses. Sitting in this lovely, mid-century restaurant, architecture straight out of North by Northwest, absorbing the twinkling lights from the view of Lake Union, luxuriating with a fine scotch, and bathing in the waves of beautiful music was the most content I have been in years
The food was delightful, a word I used of the course of the evening no less that 30 times, and the service was absolutely impeccable. I had the celery apple soup amuse bouche, the oysters, Muscovy duck, and chocolate covered chocolate with my scotch and nothing was less than sybaritic perfection.
And sitting there, a palpable melancholy washed over me and I sniffed my Talisker with a swelled throat. And I missed Doug Bradley. And I missed the Bigfork Inn. We had just left the best Salsa lesson of my life (more on that later), but I wanted to be swing dancing to Mack the Knife again. It was the scotch, the smell of wood trim, the elderly men dressed nattily in suit and ties. It smelled and sounded like my adolescence – the good parts. Maybe that was a part of what the funk was this morning, too, but in the most content corners of my life, I become a little homesick.