A letter from America - or "Food Drink and Music"

Well, I am back from two weeks in America and have some thoughts to share. We experienced a few "first's" and some "best of's". I also spotted had a couple of interesting insights (well I thought they were interesting - you can judge for yourself).

Let's start with the "best of's". These I think all related to food. Dealing with mine first, I had most definitely the best beef burger in my life at Bahama Breeze on International Drive. As usual, with American portions it was large, and we were talking as a family. I was three bites into my wood grilled Angus burger before I realised that I did not recall eating or chewing anything. So more aware I took a fourth bite and found that the burger just melted in my mouth - it needed no chewing. Now I di have my burgers rare so that helps, but even so, I have never had one like this before. Trust me, I then savoured every bite left in it. It is hard to liken it to anything, but the best I can do is relate it to when you place a lump of butter on your tongue and close your mouth. The butter melts and you get a spectrum of taste and texture sensations. Well, it was like that.
In fact, it was exceptional and when we visited another restaurant in the chain later in the holiday, I was scared to order it again as I doubted it could match up - instead I had very good shrimps on linguine.

The second "best of" was when we visited an italian restaurant that had featured on Gordon Ramsay's USA Kitchen Nightmares. This one was called Anna Vincenzo's in Boca Raton. We were unsure whether to go, but did so out of curiosity and were not comforted when we arrived at 9 to find barely a half a dozen other diners. All of the other diners left within 10 minutes of us arriving, leaving just three of us and a distinct feeling that we were keeping them from closing; though they did say they were open until 10. To be fair this is (very) low season for that area and that explains, at least in part, the poor patronage. We decided to stay and ordered three dishes. The pick was the Quattro Fromaggio pizza that my wife ordered. She can be a hard customer to please, but reckons that, having had similar plates many times before in different places, this was by far the best she had ever tasted and even complemented the chef.

The last one I will report was the best tuna melt ever according to my daughter. She had this at the Boca Breakfast Club. She also claimed that Quattro Frommaggio pizza she had at Il Bellagio in West Palm Beach was the best ever, but I decided just to let it run and not try and differentiate between the two.

As to firsts, well the "Cloister Deluxe" room that we had at the Boca Resort and Club, a Waldorf Astoria/Hilton establishment now, was the first room that A) my wife was totally delighted in from the start and B) would happily go back to. This was a pucker establishment that we almost had to ourselves with it being off season and at all at a very reasonable rate. It had an attached beach club that we looked at, but decided that we preferred the slightly more traditional environment of the original hotel. It was so nice to have a choice of (and not fight for) loungers or sun shades at any time of the day, to have Key lime cooler on tap, literally for most of the day, and to have many interesting places in the resort to wander around and relax in. I do wonder what it is like at peak season if even a fraction of it 20,000 membership turned up, but for us in July it was idyllic.

On the day, we left my wife commented how nice it was not to have even seen let alone been close to the usual holiday melee of blow up dinghy's, fishing rods and loud fashion. We do not usually holiday at cheap resorts, but it is hard to get away from the rampant commercialism these days; somehow Boca Raton seems to have managed it. In part it may be to do with the fact it was pretty much purpose built, starting almost 100 years ago. Another factor is the "money" that lives there, which does not need the commercial aspects and indeed probably seeks to avoid them. I suspect this is changing as this was Bernie Madoff territory, and many people have lost a lot of money. There was considerable talk around of downsizing, many top end restaurants are suffering, and indeed the resort has dropped its joining fee from $40,000 to $20,000! Who knows what it will look like in a couple of years, but right now it works for us?

Another first, and back to food again, is that in the full fourteen days we were there every evening meal was a good one. We only repeated two chain restaurants, but different locations in each instance. This all helped to make a good holiday.

Now I promised some things I found interesting. The main one was related to beer and seems to be a field where the US is following our trend, rather than the other way around. A few years ago all you seemed to be able to find, other than small, local micro distilleries were the extremely cold, very fizzy, bland and almost indistinguishable beers from Coors, Millers, Anheuser-Busch and the like. However, as with the UK when CAMRA led a campaign away from the mega brewery anonymous beers of the 70's, it seems that America is finding its taste buds and its sense of humour. The latter element seems to go with the territory and relates to the naming of brews - I guess we blame the marketing suits for that, eh?

Well, this year we found a lot of Blue Moon on tap, in the bottle and in cans. This is brewed with coriander and orange and served with a garnish of an orange slice. It is a wheat beer very passable as a summer tipple. We also found "Shock Top", "White Rascal" and something called "Monk in the Trunk", though I did not get to sample this last one. Many of these are wheat beers, but all had some character and flavour; the other mass beers seemed far less prominent.

The last item for this post comes from a geeky aspect. My vacation reading was "NeuroLinguistic Programming for Dummies". I will leave you to decide which part of that title is most apt for me, but suffice it to say there were some aspects I found interesting and will most likely blog on soon. The bit that struck me related to using music as a mood alternating state. On one level this is self evident, and I use music thus when I work and when I drive. The bit that stuck was a reference to Baroque music being very good, though I confess at "what" did not stick. That is until the flight home. Usually I am very good at sleeping on overnight flights and this time I sat down, plugged in my iPod and pulled up an album of classical, mainly baroque pieces. The odd thing was, that although I could relax, I could not sleep. More than that I was very aware of my mind self navigating and coming up with some interesting ideas and linkages that I had not been seeking, but just seemed to flow. This probably lasted 90 - 120 minutes before I gave up trying to sleep. I was truly surprised that I could not sleep at that point, but also that I did not sleep for the rest of the flight either.
I have since gone back to the book and seen that Baroque music is considered good for creating an alpha state; clear calm and relaxed. It evidently worked for me, but I will remember not to use that music as an aid to sleeping on airplanes in the future.

Well the annual holiday is over for another year, but in the history of vacations this was a good one! 

PS: I learnt a new word: docent. We were shown around the Flagler museum by one. This beautiful house is known as the White House of the South and is worth a visit.  A docent is a person who is a knowledgeable guide, esp. one who conducts visitors through a museum and delivers a commentary on the exhibitions.