Let's Talk Turkey Tuesday

For my birthday we tried two new restaurants.

First up, La Condesa for brunch.

I'm sure you gathered yesterday that the key word for my birthday is awesome. And La Condesa was awesome.

Christian and I both had the huevos chilangos because house-made wild boar chorizo with poached egg, arugula, quinoa croquette and avocado salsa sounded too darn good to pass up. If you live in Austin, go. Eat this. This Saturday. If there are two of you, just order one, though, because this thing is huge. The only thing I wish was different is that they would just sprinkle the arugula on top at the end so it would maintain the crispness and flavor. As it is now, it's in the middle of everything else and you don't really get to enjoy the wonderful fresh peppery arugulaness enough.

For my birthday dinner, we went to Parkside. This dinner was heartbreaking. Everything we ate - the garlic shrimp with smoked paprika (much spicier than you think it's going to be), the marrow bones, the pork jowls with polenta, the brussel sprouts and the fries - was awesome.

But, there was a little miscommunication in the kitchen about when everything was supposed to come out and we got the pork jowl entree at the same time as the huge marrow bone appetizer. A word of warning: trying to eat that much meat product in a very short amount of time so your food doesn't get cold (even though it's not your fault there's all this food on the table at one time) isn't a good idea. At all. It made us a little sick. So, we couldn't even finish the marrow bones, which was incredibly sad because marrow makes me happy. And, we didn't have dessert, also incredibly sad because I love dessert and they are supposed to make awesome sweet stuff.

Our waitress and the manager were very nice about the whole thing and took the marrow off our bill and gave us a gift card. We'll go back and give it another shot.

Image via the La Condesa website.