Cafe Boulud and The Case of the Cranky Birthday Girl

When I took stock of my schedule last week, I was pleased to note that the first installation of my new blog “Almost Cultured” would coincide with a truly refined and urbane experience: dinner at Café Boulud.

My husband and I were in possession of a $100 gift certificate to Café Boulud, and—since Monday was my birthday—we had a good reason to cash it in. The gift certificate was a wedding present from Nick’s Uncle Tim, the man who also officiated the ceremony. Uncle Tim is one of those rare individuals who are both spiritual and sarcastic, and was thus the perfect person for the job. The wedding present we got from him and his husband was a reflection of how fun they are: lunch for two at Café Boulud with actor Peter Sarsgaard. It was something they had bid on at a charity auction, with Peter Sarsgaard donating his time to whatever the cause.

A year passed before my husband and I got around to emailing Peter Sarsgaard’s assistant, who told us that she had changed jobs long ago. A few months later, we got in touch with a second assistant who told us that Peter’s schedule was now too full to honor such an old commitment. The auction refunded the money, but we still got to keep the $100 Café Boulud gift card. (Secretly, I was pleased. I think Peter Sarsgaard is a fantastic actor, but what would I say to him? He doesn’t seem the type to want to dish on bad celebrity behavior.)

Another year passed before we got around to making the reservation: August 27th at 7 PM: the night of my 33rd birthday.

Here is a little background on Café Boulud: Chef Daniel Boulud is easily one of the most celebrated in the world. His premier restaurant, Daniel, is one of only ten in the country with a 3-star Michelin rating, the highest possible rank (there are a total of 106 restaurants in the world with three Michelin stars, the large majority of which are in Japan and France). Café Boulud is Daniel’s less-celebrated kid brother, but it’s still impressive (think Lynn vs. Vanessa Redgrave). It is also Michelin-rated, though it has one star as opposed to three.

I spent the week before my birthday crafting the first “Almost Cultured” in my head: a witty breakdown of each Boulud dish, Top-Chef style; a riff on wine-pairing; a rallying defense of the vegetarian’s right to enjoy the world’s best restaurants (I refuse to let the fact that my husband and I don’t eat meat limit our cultural experiences).

On Monday, I got a birthday manicure and pedicure—bright red nails to match what would be bright red lipstick and a 1940s-inspired look, which I was also crafting in my head. At 5 PM, my husband called me from work. It makes more sense for me to meet you there, he said. This was a bit of gloomy foreshadowing: Who wants to take a subway from Brooklyn to a romantic Upper East Side restaurant in a 1940s-inspired look all alone?

The real problem, however, was that I hadn’t yet found the gift certificate. I looked though desk drawers and dresser drawers, boxes of postcards and stacks of old mortgage statements, take-out menus and ticket stubs. At 5:30, I called my husband back and told him the news. “Also, I’m very cranky,” I said. He rushed right home.

By the time my husband walked in the door, I was sprawled on the couch, irritated with everything. He took the reigns and made an emergency executive decision: we would go out to eat in our own neighborhood. I put on the dress that I wear to work nearly every day, and we walked over to Frankie’s 457, an Italian restaurant that we’d been meaning to try. Neither of us liked the meal, but we both liked the wine. On the way home we stopped at the dessert-and-pork-bun shop Momofuku Milk Bar, where I got “birthday cake truffles,” a lovely way of saying “spheres of cookie dough the size of golf balls.”

I am happy to report that they were delicious.