Today has been in the pipeline for months. Well, technically speaking, its been in development since the dawn of time. My meaning was I had been planning today's events since a while back.
The tricky thing about a sister that has everything is you can't buy her anything for her 21st birthday. So I decided to take her out for a day of food, culture and shopping.
We started off the day at Bar Indigo, where the ricotta pancakes and caramelised banana french toast was simply amazing. Better than amazing. AWESOME! And even better still, we had time to visit the many boutique paper stores that litter Double Bay. One of them even had a job opening for a graphic designer. I shall be submitting my resume soon.
Our next stop was a trip to David Jones. After finding out that Louise wasn't in the mood for shopping, my budget had suddenly been halved. Quartered even. I was expecting to spend buckets of cash in Double Bay followed by a truck load in David Jones. Louise however found it impossible to shop for. We did enjoy some nice coconut yoghurt from the David Jones food hall, and Louise had this yummy scrummy strawberry tartlet.
Thankfully, I got to stretch my credit card's muscles in the homewares section. Spying a Scanpan pasta pot was all it took. Ah! Sensible spending.
For lunch, we diverted to the Observatory Hotel for their legendary High Tea at 2:30pm. It was indeed the stuff of legends. Not only had they considered to take out all the chocolate treats, but they had substituted them with replacements and made sure my vegetarian needs were taken care of, right down to the gelatine. Flawless service in my opinion. High service for the High Teas [of which, I selected Lemongrass while Louise selected Camomile].
We made our way to Darling Harbour (after a funny American rode a 12 foot tall unicycle in Circular Quay) where I had booked tickets to see Prince of Persia in IMAX thanks to the overcast weather cancelling my previously booked evening activity. It was a close shave though. Our dinner reservations were at 8:30pm, and the movie finished at like 8:20pm.
Dinner was served to us at the Sydney Opera House Restaurant; Guillaume at Bennelong. Turned out however to be the worst part of the day. Arriving in the nick of time thanks to a quick taxi from Darling Harbour, our entrées were pretty shit. Louise's meat came out raw (which was apparently what the menu said, only in foreign restaurant food speak) and my winter vegetables turned out to be beetroots and peas with tomato in an extremely ugly cold scattered assortment.
After truthfully voicing my opinion to our waiter, I found he became anxious about the rest of the order. The service was pretty ordinary for a rated restaurant. We never had the same person deliver food to our table and no one knew who had ordered what. They brought out a complimentary seafood taster and I was like did anyone actually pass around the memo I sent in ahead of time about the vegetarian people?
We had different people take our orders for different courses and instead of making us feel welcome, they would stare at us waiting for us to speak. Whats wrong with a nice icebreaker? A friendly welcome to the table? A jovial comment about the weather to get us talking before recommending the specials (of which there weren't any).
Thankfully, the mains were really nice. Not worth the exorbitant prices charged, but real yummy like. Dessert was also acceptable. Especially when 12 mini macaroons came out with my coffee.
And surprise surprise. Guess who made it to Coles for the cookies he had been craving all day?
Fruit of the Moment: Christmas
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