Paul Haahr’s Blog

We celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary last night with dinner at Ame. It was our first visit and we did it up: we shared a tasting menu, several other dishes, and a flight of wine and sake. That was right as a way to explore the restaurant, but I look forward to going back and just having the hamachi tataki and, especially, the black cod. If you’ve never had marinated black cod, it’s just a sublime dish, and this is a perfect rendition of it: soft and warm and lucious, with no one part overpowering the others. (To think that this is the same fish as the sable we got from the deli when I was growing up; also delicious, but very different.)

The dining experience is a bit of a contrast: the look is fashionable and stark, but the service was casual, friendly, well-informed, and helpful, offering tastes of this and that as we went along. I think some softer edges in the design would have fit the restaurant better. We’ve been to Terra, Ame’s older sibling, a couple of times. Ame’s food is at least as good and doesn’t require a two hour drive. I wonder if the more modern design of Ame was meant as a contrast to the rustic, homey Terra? In any case, we’re definitely going back.

We saw Children of Men tonight. It is unrelentingly bleak and one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. The handheld, jerky cinematography starts off distracting and then became essential to the storytelling. Terrific performances from everyone, especially Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, and Michael Caine.

(I’ve read most of P. D. James’s novels, but I hadn’t read this one; I’ve heard the movie diverged quite a bit from it. After Oryx and Crake, I wasn’t ready for another near future world without children. Now I’m probably going to give it a try, probably as an audiobook.)

What a beautiful, brutal film.