I went to Palo Alto’s Tamarine today for their early bird dinner. Ok, they didn’t really have an early bird special per se, but there was no crowd which is always good when you have two uber-SV-guys at one table in PA. (The "OMG! ARE YOU BLAH BLAH WHO MADE BLAH BLAH?!" is annoying after awhile.)
Anyfoo, this Tamarine place is a Vietnamese fusion place and food was served family style. If you don’t know what family style is, then you must have grown up in an orphanage or your parent(s) were drug addicts and never was home to care for you. So for all those better-off-without-parents people, family style is when you have a larger plate of food bought to the table, and is then shared between your family or friends. A classic made famous by HBO/Sopranos food that is served family style is spaghetti and meatballs.
What I realized about family style is that it is usually not for the faint of heart. It’s either eat or starve environment and particularly so for a fancy pants place like Tamarine where the plates of food were only big enough to serve one person (that’s why we had to order appetizers AND 4 entries AND dessert). So j and I came really hungry, we only had a toasted bagel for breakfast today, and A was nice enough to tell our waiter to place our appetizer orders in ASAP. We "all" talked and talked about SV-tech stuff for a bit, then our spring rolls and calamari came. j’s voice in the convo petered out then, and when asked he was quiet he muffled "… can’t talk eating.". He ate a share and a half of the small plate of yummy calamari! LUCKILY the other plate was a pu pu platter who had 2 units of each specimen so j couldn’t over step his ration.
I thought to myself, man he’s hungry!
Then our entrees came and I have say they were disappointingly small OR maybe that was the hunger talking. The conversation went from who’s working with who behind the scenes of which SV startup to talking about how A & M’s cat was Don Catleone of the Mountain View sect. Maybe M and me were giving off some negative vibes about techie love but I think it’s because one of the 2 of our SV stars dropped off to stake his claim on the bass! then the beef rolls! then the lamb chops! I didn’t even see him coming! Everyone was being graceful and sharing and my man was thinking solely about filling the tank up faster than the FIFO could let out (he went to el bano twice).
I’m not ashamed or angry at him, I just realize that family style + fancy small dish/tapas means that if you snooze you lose! Everything else aside it was a great meal and j & i will definitely make some more opentable reserverations there. This is definitely a compliment from two NYC food snobs!
