Last night Shelby and I went to Pasta Pomodoro in Orange. It feels a little funny to me to get warm and fuzzy over going to a chain restaurant, but Pomodoro happened to be our favorite close-at-hand 'decent' restaurant in San Jose, so it's nice to have one near our new home. (And hey, it's a small chain.) Plus, they serve one of my favorite pasta dishes, Ravioli de Zucca -- the ravioli are stuffed with squash, rather than meat or somesuch, so they have an unusual (in a good way!) sweet taste.
Before Pasta Pomodoro, we stopped at the Wine Exchange, which is just down the street. The Wine Exchange is like a national treasure right in our neighborhood; Shelby's dad says that it's one of the best wine stores in Southern California, and he would know! It's a larger store than anything I've experienced; walking in, it reminds me of the wine section of one of the large department stores in Germany (like, say, the Alsterhaus in Hamburg, or the KaDeWe in Berlin) -- only even larger, with better selection, and (sorry, Alsterhaus) climate control.
We were running low on 'drink this anytime' wines (versus our expanding stock of 'I'm saving this for at least a moderately special occasion' wine), so we wandered around and picked out a half-case of $15-and-under wines. We drank our first bottle last night -- a $9.99 2002 Vinum 'Pets' Petite Syrah. With a label like this, an on-the-bottle promise that part of our purchase would be donated to animal shelters, and a "90" for the previous year's vintage from Wine Spectator, how could we resist?
Posted by Kevin at January 5, 2005 10:00 AM