Valentine's Day with the CIA

How, you may ask, did our Valentine's Day celebration affect national security?  Well, only if eating too much French food is a crime.  The CIA I'm referring to is the Culinary Institute of America.  The main campus is located in Hyde Park, NY...about an hour and a half drive from Albany toward The City.  The CIA is the place where chefs like Anthony Bourdain, Cat Cora, and several of the Top Chef winners acquired their culinary skills.  As part of the training, the Institute has several restaurants that are run mostly by the students.  Since moving to Albany, I had heard from a number of people that the French restaurant at the Hyde Park campus was by far the best and so I have had Escoffier on my list of Places to Eat in/around Albany for quite some time now.  The trick was getting a reservation.

Along with all of the raves, I had also heard that you needed to make reservations to dine at Escoffier months in advance.  Around November I began thinking about how I could get The Haags into hog heaven.  Just for the heck of it I went to the CIA's online reservation site and looked to see if there were any reservations still available around Valentine's Day thinking that it would be a great surprise for Ian if I took charge of our Valentine's Day plans but preparing myself to be shot down by the world wide web.  Imagine my surprise when I realized that not only was Escoffier still accepting reservations for the Saturday night before Valentine's Day, but that my only option wasn't to dine at either 5:30 or 10:00. So I jumped on the opportunity for a one-of-a-kind fine dining experience with my husband at 8 pm the Saturday before Valentine's Day.  As I began the reservation process I realized the CIA required a credit card deposit for the reservation and I knew I wouldn't be able to get this charge on the credit card statement past Ian without causing him to raise an eyebrow.  This called for some covert ops...

I called special agent/brother Ryan and asked to borrow his credit card number to cover the reservation deposit.  He was in.  Then when I saw him on our visit to NC in early December I slipped him cash to pay him back without leaving a paper trail.  Then came the hard part....keeping a secret from Ian for 2 months and secretly hoping that he wasn't also planning the same thing.  The week before Valentine's Day I told him that I had planned something for us to do.  He was surprised and went along with it.  That Friday I put the address for the CIA in the GPS and saved it.  The next day I told him to be ready to go by 6:15 in something "business casual."  All dressed up we got in the car and Ian started driving to an unknown destination.  I turned the GPS away from his view so he wouldn't see that our ETA was an hour and a half away.  We were finally almost there, starving and weary, and I had begun to wonder if this was such a great idea after all.  Then it happened...we passed a Dairy Queen!  You see, since we moved to Albany we've been tormented by commercials for DQ and all of its glorious blizzardness and the closest DQ is 25 miles away.  It turns out the next closest DQ is 60 miles away in Hyde Park.  All 4 of our eyes lit up and we vowed to stop for blizzards on the way back home.  Even if it meant I had to pass on the CIA creme brulee. 

The next hour and a half was pure gustatory bliss.  We dined on foie gras, sweetbreads, roasted sea bass and beef medallion.  You could see into the huge kitchen from our table and watch the students and teachers prepare our meals.  The students did a wonderful job on the culinary aspect of the dining experience.  The service, however, left a lot to be desired.  I guess I didn't realize that our waiter(s) would be sweaty-faced, nerve-wracked students who were probably resentful of the fact that they were on serving rotation instead of in the kitchen.  We waited a long while before our order was taken, water refills were non-existent for the first 15 minutes, one kid couldn't seem to get the 2 forks to stay in his hand while attempting to serve us bread using traditional French service, and our gnocchi in truffle oil didn't make it to the table with the rest of our dinner.  Still, the food was delicious and the apologies and oversight of the exceptionally well trained maitre d' made up for the other faux pas.  The maitre d' was a bit concerned that we did not order dessert as he feared they had "run us off."  We assured him that was not the case but thought it would be less than high class to tell him that we intended to get our dessert at Dairy Queen instead. 

Ian and I would have skipped out of the CIA if it weren't for our extended bellies.  DQ would be the perfect end to a lovely evening.  As we approached the place where we left that DQ behind...eyes peeled for the big red and white sign... our spirits began to sink little by little.  We couldn't find it.  We kept thinking that it must be just a little further down the road than we remembered it.  So, we kept driving until we realized that we were back on the rural highway well on our way back to Albany.  All we could figure was that it must have been closed and the sign dark when we drove by.  I rationalized my disappointment by telling myself that I saved the calories and (added) gastric distress that would have accompanied a mint Oreo blizzard.  And I comforted myself with a package of gummy bears I bought at a gas station that we stopped at to get gas.  Maybe I'll plan a surprise trip to Dairy Queen for next Valentine's Day.