Serpico and Dazed and Confused

Francisco and I finally made it out for our postponed anniversary dinner. We went to Serpico, a new-ish restaurant downtown, named for the chef. The cuisine was super fancy and creative with an Asian twist.

I mean, the super fanciness was a bit over-the-top at times. For instance, the lovely (but not so much to our tastes) soup above came out sans broth. The waiter then poured the broth over the artistic arrangement of vegetables and then added four drops of "house-made mustard oil." I almost laughed.

They are very earnest. And it's ironic that while the waitstaff are all hipsters or at least are dressed up exactly like some over-the-top hipsters, most hipsters can't really afford this restaurant.

Our ability to order was sadly a bit restrained by the fact that I can't eat raw food at the moment--there are a lot of raw foods on the menu that people rave about on yelp. Francisco really liked the deep fried duck leg (although he wished that there were more), and I really loved the corn ravioli (it was sweet and perfect), and we both loved the beef short ribs and broccoli (the short ribs came without the actual ribs, which really made me happy). And some things, like the beautiful soup and the wax beans and squid salad or the hash brown potatoes served with the meat were just ok. Which is to say, for a fancy restaurant, I thought it was slightly spotty, although every dish was imaginative and interesting and almost all of them were some combination I've never had before. For dessert, for instance, we had goat cheese sorbet, served on top of rhubarb pieces, mint pieces, pistachio pieces, and a crumble. Craziness, but good.

After dinner, we did one of my favorite, quintessentially summer activities: an outdoor movie. We went up to a park in Northern Liberties to see Dazed and Confused. In Northern Liberties you can, appropriately, see the movie with a little second-hand pot scent drifting by.

Dazed and Confused is the anti-Friday Night Lights: it's set in Austin, but football is not the world for these kids, it's just something to do while they're stuck in high school, perhaps something that will help them get laid. The film shows just shows a brief time in the lives of these teenagers--an afternoon and night-long party--the last day of school and the hazing and celebrations that follow it.

(As a side note: I'm very impressed with myself at 35 weeks pregnant for making it through an outdoor movie just sitting on a blanket on the ground.)

Dazed and Confused was pretty good--it was entertaining and intriguing at the beginning, but might have tapered off a bit at the end--just like staying at a party till dawn often does (that or the hard ground just got to me). The music and energy were great. (I think I'm just not that into high school movies since I barely went to high school and didn't really have the high school experience in the way that movies portray it. I guess I came of age much later in graduate school, and there isn't a coming-of-age-in-grad-school genre.)

Dazed and Confused is directed by Richard Linklater, who did Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. And I guess he has a new one out--Boyhood--which it seems we're going to go see as part of the great effort to do all the things that we like to do before the baby comes and we never go outside again.