Looking for ideas on how to bring in 2008? Below are a few parties hosted by some of my favorite local restaurants that will be creating special menus for the holiday. From dry-aged rib eye steak with potato-garlic gratin and chanterelle mushrooms to all-you-can-eat sushi, you are sure to find a destination to satisfy both your appetite for great food and a good time.
Skyline at Esquire Grill
On the 14th floor of the Esquire Building, Skyline will be Sacramento’s highest New Year’s Eve party. Brought to you by TrevorPresents and Paragary Restaurant Group, the evening will begin with a four-course menu created by award-winning chef Kurt Spataro. After dinner, make your way up to the 14th floor, which has been transformed into an exclusive nightclub for just one night. You can dance the night away surrounded by the beautiful night lights of Sacramento and, of course, enjoy a champagne toast at midnight.
Time: Dinner: 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Dancing: 9 p.m. – 2 a.m.
Location: Dinner – Esquire Grill, 1213 K Street
Dancing – 14th floor of the Esquire Building, 1213 K Street
Price: $125 per person will get you dinner and entry into the party on the 14th floor. If you want to go for just the dinner or just the party, tickets are $75 per person.
For more information, call 448-8900 or click here
Eye Candy at Taro’s By Mikuni
Taro’s By Mikuni is offering all-you-can-eat sushi from 10 p.m. to midnight with a complimentary shot glass for a sake toast at midnight. There will also be a raffle for:
• Free Sushi for one year (Value $780)
• Flat Screen TV (Value $500)
• Snowboard (Value $500)
Time: 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.
Location: Taro’s By Mikuni, 1735 Arden Way
Price: $60 per person
For more information call, (916) 576-2641 x30 or click here
Restaurant 55°
In celebration of the past and the future, Restaurant 55° is inviting you to join them for an evening of great food, wine and friends. In addition to its regular menu, Chef Luc will prepare a special tasting menu for the evening, which can be paired with wines hand-selected by wine director Kassidy Harris.
Time: Seatings between 5 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Location: Restaurant 55°, 555 Capitol Mall
Price: $85 per person; $120 per person (with wine pairing) or $100 per person for a table of four (includes tasting menu and one bottle of champagne for the table)
For more information, call 916.553.4100 or click here
Stardust at Spataro
Stardust is an elegant New Year’s Eve celebration at Spataro Ristorante where you can enjoy an exquisite four-course menu created by chef Kurt Spataro, named best chef by Sacramento Magazine. You can also listen to the smooth sounds of Lee Diamond, singing all your favorite Sinatra and Dean Martin hits. Enjoy an after-dinner cigar and cognac in the Cigar Lounge. Then, dance the night away to music spun by DJ Stephen Katz and enjoy a champagne toast at midnight!
Time: Dinner 6 p.m. – 10 p.m. and dancing begins at 10 p.m.
Location: 1415 L Street
Price: $75 per person
For more info, call (916) 440-8888 or click here
Archives for 2007
2nd Day of Christmas: Non-Traditional Traditions
For the past 10 days, you’ve read a lot about the SacFoodies’ family holiday food traditions. Well, you won’t be getting that from me. Sadly, I don’t have one. No gingerbread house marathons. No spiced cider while caroling through the neighborhood. Not even a secret family cookie recipe.
You see, it’s Christmas Eve, and while many families will be roasting a goose or slicing up a standing rib roast, my family will be ordering take out. In true “A Christmas Story” style, we will be feasting on Sweet and Sour Pork, Szechwan Prawns and other delicacies from my husband’s hometown Chinese joint in Vacaville, the infamous Yen King. Then, we’re hopping in the car to make a lunch reservation with my mom on Christmas Day near Carmel. To cap off the holiday, we’re on to another restaurant to meet my dad. I probably won’t even see an actual kitchen for three days, and I thought that’s where all the Christmas magic happens!
Nothing we’ve ever done for Christmas has been traditional. We occasionally visit family, sometimes we hit up a movie or we’ve even crashed one SacFoodies’ traditional Christmas feast with her family (thanks Kris!). My family doesn’t even get a Christmas tree anymore. My mom just puts lights on the fichus plant and puts our presents around it. It’s actually a surprising large fichus plant, so it works, but it’s not going to win any decorating contests.
I guess my point is (and I think I have one), perhaps this whole restaurant hopping, non-Christmas tree, non-tradition thing is actually a tradition after all. So whatever your holiday tradition (or non-tradition) is, make it merry. Have a happy holiday!
Instead of asking Santa for a gift, I dressed up like one (December 1979)
3rd Day of Christmas: Lobster-Eating Lessons
As New Year’s eve approaches, expectations abound, pressures mount and kids yearn to stay up until midnight. For Bob and me, ringing in the New Year in style means staying home, building a cozy fire and sharing a delicious feast with great friends.
With family on the East Coast, trips to Boston are frequent, as are the opportunities to enjoy fresh lobster, steamers, clams and the like. To our great surprise, as we were planning the menu for last year’s New Year’s Eve dinner, we realized that the Truckee Albertson’s was featuring fresh New England lobster. We couldn’t pass it up, and, wow, what a treat!
As New Year’s eve approached, we gathered up the seafood crackers, chilled the champagne, pulled out the lobster pot, made sure we had plenty of butter and got ready to celebrate.
To ring in 2007, we were lucky enough to be joined by our friends Frank and Cynthia and their two girls, Alexia and Isabella, as well as Cynthia’s cousin from Peru, Vivi. The kids were just young enough that we were able to feed them an early dinner, read stories and tuck them snug into bed before we sat down to enjoy our feast. Well, Alexia, the four-year-old party animal at heart, didn’t quite fall for the bedtime thing and realized she was missing out on a good time so we had several visits from her during our lobster feast.
The evening was a first for Cynthia and Vivi, who’d never before eaten an entire lobster. The ever-patient coach, Bob took great joy in educating our guests on the best way to eat a lobster. Step-by-step, he taught them how to enjoy this large shellfish that was sitting on their plates staring back up at them:
Step One: Twist off claws and attached knuckles, crack both claws and knuckles, remove the claw meat.
Step Two: Twist the tail off of the body, pick off each tail flipper and squeeze/pinch the meat out.
Step Three: Insert a fork into the tail opening and the entire piece of tail meat should pop out.
Step Four: Pick off each leg and squeeze the meat out with your teeth.
Step Five: Insert the head into your mouth and suck to get the last remaining meat.
Not sure if it was the champagne, her trust in Bob, or if she just got caught up in the moment, but Cynthia fell for it, to our great amusement, and she made the move to stick the lobster head into her mouth. Of course, we stopped her just in time, and to this day, we still have great laughs over the dinner.
This year, Bob’s kids will join us for New Year’s eve. Native New Englanders, they’re sure to enjoy the fun as we teach our friends Julie and Mauricio along with their daughter Mary, how to eat lobster. As we’re enjoying the last few hours of 2007, I’m sure the kids are going to devour their lobsters, anxiously waiting for their dad to walk our guests through the lobster eating steps to see if someone falls for step five again this year.
4th Day of Christmas: Steaks on the BBQ
During the holiday season it seems like everyone has some sort of tradition that they follow every year. I ask, why not spice it up a bit? Why not try something that you wouldn’t normally do during the cold of winter?
Every year on the weekend before Christmas my friends and I like to take a little camping trip. Some years it’s in the snow (yes it’s very, very cold), or we head to the ocean, where it is also very cold. No matter where we decide to take ourselves, there is one thing that is a must have for us – STEAKS! My personal favorite is a juicy sirloin. You can’t forget the zest to go with it either… whether it’s garlic powder, garlic salt, pepper or whatever else we decide to get our hands on. But, the most important ingredient in our steak fest is good old BBQ sauce.
Besides a small barbecue to cook the steaks and the seasoning, there is one more thing needed to make this not so average Christmas trip complete. Can you take guess what that is? I’ll give you a hint: we are all guys in our early twenties. You guessed it, beer. My personal favorite is Corona with a couple limes.
So my suggestion to everyone is to try something new that you wouldn’t normally consider doing during the holidays. It doesn’t have to be a camping trip in the snow with nothing but steaks to eat for every meal, but try to spice up your holiday a little bit. Of course, most would agree the important thing is to be with the people you care about during the holidays, even if you have to sit extra close to each other and drink four extra beers just to keep warm. In my opinion, all that just makes the vacation a little more fun and interesting.
9th Day of Christmas: Why not deck your cookies with bows of holly?
One of my favorite Christmas traditions is our cookie decorating party. A few weeks before Christmas a group of family and friends get together to decorate cut-out cookies that are baked the night before. It’s mainly an activity for the kids who have as much fun decorating as they do eating their creations.
But when the adults get involved, it is a different story. We have judging and prizes because with our family if we can turn anything into a competition, we will. One of my favorite memories is the year that the winner was the ugliest cookie. This cookie was one in which my mother just slathered on all the leftover frosting. To quote one of her favorite sayings “can’t let that go to waste.” My father was the judge that year, and needless to say, he had a great sense of humor. However, some of the other cookie decorators did not seem to appreciate his sense of humor and wanted a recall. Did I mention that we are a competitive family?
In the past few years we have gotten more elaborate in our decorating techniques. What started as just four colors of frosting and red & green sugar sprinkles has evolved into eight colors of frosting, frosting tubes, mini candies and every other type of decoration you can imagine. Last year we even had a cookie decorated with a lottery ticket (to bribe the judge). But the most creative is when my nieces decided to decorate my nephew. What a great sport Tyler was – that is not a rash on his face but red sugar sprinkles.
A good time is always had by all and everyone gets to leave with a container of cookies.
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