I was unfair in saying there are no decent wine stores in Fort Wayne. There is Wine Time in Jefferson Pointe. Although their selection is small, they have an excellent variety of wines from $10 to over $100. The proprietor, Jeff Armstrong, is friendly and knowledgeable, and doesn’t try to “sell”.

I stopped in tonight and bought a Prosecco for Valentine’s Day. The charge card machine was broken, but Jeff just wrote everything down and said, “I’ll call you if there’s a problem.” Now that’s good service.

The best restaurant in Cincinnati? The best restaurant in the U.S.?

I’m not really qualified to answer either of those questions, having eaten at very few Cincinnati restaurants, and very few of the top-ranked restaurants nationwide. But I have eaten at Charlie Trotters in Chicago, and Rockpool in Sydney, Australia, which are consistently at the top of lists and Pigall’s topped both of then.

We made reservations at Pigall’s a couple weeks in advance for a Saturday night and the only seatings available were at 5:30 and 8:45. Being country folk, 5:30 is our normal supper time, so that worked out well for us.

We arrived a little early, having navigated Cincinnati’s confusing street system with ease (a unique event in our weekend in Cincy). We waited in the tiny foyer bar and enjoyed a glass of the house champagne. Our table was ready before the champagne was done, and the bartender took our glasses and delivered them on a silver tray to the table.

From the foyer you can’t see the dining room, so it makes a vivid impression when you enter the room. The space manages to be muted and calming, intimate, yet soaring and airy and open. It was a hands down winner over Charlie Trotters and Rockpool.

The service was excellent, from the greeting when we arrived to the valet parking having the car waiting when we left. The service was warm, competent, and never overbearing. Charlie Trotter may have written the book, Lessons in Service from Charlie Trotter but Pigalls service was better and less contrived.

That’s all well and good, but if the food isn’t good, the rest doesn’t matter. The food was, like everything else, excellent. We had the 5 course prix fixe menu($130 each with matching wines) and it was perfect. The food was good, the matching wines were good. We had espresso afterwards and it was easily the best I’d ever had.

Expensive? Yes, with the extra champagne at the beginning and the coffee afterwards, our bill was around $360 with tip. Worth it? Every penny.

I wrote my first post, typed and typed and typed and edited carefully.  Being my first I was wanting to get it right.  I was finally happy with it, pressed the “Save” button, and boom  I was sitting at the login screen.    All that work lost.  Evidently Wordpress decided to end my session based on inactivity because all I had been doing was typing, not interacting with the server.

Why, why, why do people write software like that?  That’ll be a theme discussed in a later post.

Sigh, well, live and learn and press the “Save and Continue Editing” button often.  Or since it’s open source perhaps I’ll waste a couple hours of my life and dig through the source and see if I can fix it.

Which reminds me of the aphorism, “The only thing more expensive than commercial software is open source software.”   Maybe I’ll just go download CityDesk.