I slipped into Chicago on the down-low, to see my very closest of friends and have a little distraction from This Time Last Year. It hit the spot.

My friends took me to Moto, and despite my having the menu right in front of me, I’m a little confused as to what I actually ate.  I know we had the “gtm” (grand tasting menu?), but we also had some of the  stuff off the “ten.”

Y’all, it was a 4+ hour meal. Please forgive my lack of laser-accurate memory.

First we got an heirloom tomato salad (which I ate, even though tomatoes can cause me True Troubles, because it was delicious) and a flat flat crispy grilled cheese sandwich with the menu printed on it. Neat! One of the best dishes.

My menu says “margarita ceviche,” but the “ten” menu says “snow man,” and I definitely remember a tiny bowl with a snow man made of foam and black sesame-seed eyes and seaweed salad underneath. I’m sure the foam had a flavor. Mostly I remember that the snow man was cute and then got melted by something before we ate it.

CO2 grapefruit: don’t remember what this was, but it was good. Edit: pan-seared fish with a vanilla sauce, tobiko, and grapefruit slices. I thought it would be terrible (fish with vanilla?) but it was really delicious.

Bubble tea: my favorite dish – cold ginger/lemongrass broth with scallop “bubbles”

40MZ pheasant: yummy, don’t remember

Clam bake: butter-poached lobster, scallops, corn. The waitress poured the melted candle over top – it was more butter. This was really delicious and beautiful.

Yellow snow: don’t remember this Edit: My friend reports that this was something with curry flavor in it, which I vaguely recall

Nuac man: I didn’t get this course because it had soy in it, but I tasted the pork belly, and it was great, but salty (excess salt was a recurring theme)

Baseball snacks: looked cute on the plate: an edible little cracker jack “prize” packet (supposed to taste of cherry, actually tasted of cardboard) on top of popcorn powder, with deep-fried quail. Not very interesting.

Astronaut tartare: beautiful cold, delicate, delicious raw tuna

Cuban cigar: there is a picture of this in their gallery, top row, second from the right. BBQ pork taco, wrapped in a crispy collard leaf, with ground black sesame seeds. It tasted really good but looked completely horrifying.

Forest roll: looked like a piece of sushi, actually made with rabbit, mushroom, and risotto with a swirl of pickled radish and a dot of dried peas. Very yummy.

Reuben lasagna: not sure what made it “lasagna,” as it was a piece of rye bread with pastrami underneath, Swiss cheese, and Thousand Island dressing on the plate. Nary a scrap of sauerkraut in sight. Yummy, boring. Edit: Apparently there was pasta in there somewhere.

Shabu shabuccino: I also did not have this one because it was filled with soy, but it was a dark, veal-based mushroom soup in a coffee cup with a cream pitcher that had a potato(?) soup in it to pour into the “coffee.” Looked cute but was loaded with salt, and when one of my friends said so, the waiter told her she was doing it wrong. Despite, you know, her having done what he told her to do. More about this later.

Mexican cannoli (my menu for grm says “crepes that are cheese,” but we definitely had this): looked like a cannoli but was actually a flauta. Looked and tasted hideous.

Frites, frozen and fried: fried sweet potatoes topped with sweet potato sorbet. The sorbet was good, the rest of the dish boring.

Green curry lime: what looked like a lime slice but was composed of lime pulp, curry flavor, and other assorted yumminess. Very pretty and delicious.

Banana split: super cute presentation: banana-flavored ice cream in a bowl with three pipettes of sauce, chocolate, caramel, and strawberry. Sadly, I hate bananas, so I just squirted the caramel sauce into my mouth. Fun, though.

Acme bombs: chocolate encasing “graham cracker essence” with a marshmallow “wick” that was lit and we ate it when the flame went out. Really cute presentation that tasted only of the chocolate.

Chocolate truffles: don’t remember this

Neroli float: this was a flask with neroli soda in the bottom and freeze-dried something on top. The freeze-dried something was very good and the soda completely revolting.

So it was an interesting meal, for sure, and a good adventure. The dishes that were good tended to be very good indeed, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who loved the things I did not.

But there was no way this should’ve been a 4-hour meal. If the waitstaff had, say, paid attention to us and snapped things along, it would’ve been 3 hours maximum. A table next to us came in 45 min after we did, had the same menu, and left an hour before us.

And I’m sorry. When a patron says they don’t like something – particularly when they say it in a very polite way – you do NOT tell them they “did it wrong.” If it had been my name on the receipt, I’d be writing a letter to the chef.

Every other person I know has an Etsy shop, but did you know that it is also possible to BUY items on Etsy?

It’s true! I have made many happy purchases! For example:

This is my yarn swift from The Knit Store. Dad had promised to make me one as soon as he felt better, so I determined (once I gave up on the idea of making my own [Dingo’s response to that idea: “Doesn’t salt water warp wood?”]) that I would definitely buy a handmade one. This was super inexpensive, and it’s just what I needed. I like it so much I bought one for my friend Gwyn. She got a big one, though.

Buttons! Made of birch twigs! From Button Boy, whose entire shop I want to buy, even though I do not need that many buttons.

Text blocks! Because I have a book project in mind and I am really lazy like that. From afainbooks, who can help you be a lazy bookbinder too.

I went to craftpudding to buy a rubber stamp with a ball of yarn on it, and I also got this tiny bowl because it is completely adorable in every way.

This awesome shirt. When I wore it to brunch one day, my friend Meg.2 said, “I’ve never seen an item of clothing so you!” I LOVE it. And many of the other items at idea2lifestyle.

Etsy: not just fun for sellers!

I’ve spent the past 7 seasons of Project Runway defending the judges to Dingo and the idea that high fashion is not necessarily about wearability, that it can be about extreme ideas that can be softened down to wearability.

But this year? Forget it. Do they want exciting or boring? Do they want clothes that follow the rules of the challenge or that expand on the challenge? They don’t seem to be able to make up their minds about anything other than their desire to make snarky comments.

Thank goodness for On the Road with Austin and Santino. I enjoy that show for the same reason I liked Top Chef Masters: they’re so NICE. They show up in podunk towns with an attitude that they’re going to spread beauty and have a good time, and they do. It’s just the right tonic to follow mean old Michael Kors.

It’s coming up on a difficult time of year. A bunch of hard anniversaries, all in a row.

For much of my adult life, summer was a more public time, when I was out in the world, soaking up companionship. And then I would go underground like Persephone for the winter, to stock up on quiet, to write, to think.

This summer I haven’t wanted to be public. I’ve wanted a walled-in garden, with a gate that opens by invitation only.

I don’t want to lay grief out on the ground for people to see.