Mother Earth
We almost never go out for dinner these days, and when we do it’s usually when Laura is on a sleepover with a friend. Lillian comes along, of course, but she pretty much sleeps through it. So going out on the town with kids is not something we’re used to. That may change this year. Last Friday my old friend Omar invited us to this dinner-and-music place run by some Bolivian friends of his, and he invited our other friends Cathy and Breck and Elena. Cathy is Bolivian by birth herself and I guess she’s been going to this place for some time, to charge up her batteries with that old-time Andean music and some salteñas. The salteñas, which are very much like the empanadas that we used to have when we were kids in Peru, turned out to be as good as Cathy said, or a little better. We also had a couple of hybrid Bolivian-Californian chicken dishes that rocked, as long as you’re tolerating me being a restaurant critic. (I’m the guy, you will remember, who wanted to move to London for the cuisine.)
Lillian slept through the first hour or so, but it was getting pretty noisy around 11 and she woke up to see what was going on. I picked her up so she could look around, and then one of the musicians came dancing out from the kitchen in a gigantic circular feather headdress. It had to be six feet across at the top; it was a miracle that he could go anywhere with it in that tiny space. He danced around the room playing his sikus pipes for about five minutes, and Lillian did not take her eyes off him for a second. This was the high point of the night for me, and possibly for Lillian. Laura and Elena ended up having a blast, late hours be damned. Laura had been to the swimming pool and the zoo and a play date with a school friend that day, so we wouldn’t have been surprised if exhaustion had caught up with her, but she danced as merrily as anyone and didn’t drop off until after 11. Later on Omar and I sat in with one of the house musicians and played some of the old stuff we used to do in college. The whole thing was just good for the spirits. I think we’re going to do some more of that.