Norman Rockwell and Au Pied de Cochon

Last Thursday, Damien and I had a rare night out together -- sans baby -- to attend the opening of the Norman Rockwell exhibit at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Let me start by saying how impressed I was with the museum. Aside from the wonderful Norman Rockwell exhibit, they also have a more modern stuff upstairs featuring some Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and other contemporary artists. The space is really nice with lots of different types of rooms. If you are in the area, I definitely recommend checking the place out. It's very easy to see everything and the quality of the work was top-notch.

The Norman Rockwell exhibit is running through February 7th, 2010. All of the paintings are drawn from the Norman Rockwell exhibit in Massachusetts and what I liked most about it is seeing the evolution of his work. It was inspiring to see how much he honed his craft through the years and how he really started to layer is work with different themes and meanings.

It was a great date night!

Friday was another doozy of working my butt off, so Damien made dinner that night and he did a spectacular job. He made delicious pork chops that he served with some Zatarain's red beans and rice and some broccoli. Nice job!

Then on Saturday we spent a big part of the day shooting additional footage for my video. At the end of the day we found ourselves in South Beach so we stopped in at Au Pied De Cochon, a newly opened French restaurant to see what it was like since we've heard good things. It's open 24 hours a day apparently, and at 6pm, when we were there, it was pretty empty. So we decided to brave a visit with our sleeply little Baz in tow. They had a high chair for him and beautiful raw bar set up near our table so Baz behaved wonderfully -- minus a couple of loud screeches at certain points.

Wish I could say I was as happy with the food. I mean, maybe I was expecting too much, but when I saw that the steak frites would cost at least $41 (for the New York Strip) I decided to just get a hamburger. I know, I know. Ordering a hamburger at a French restaurant. But, I don't know when I order a burger to Balthazar in New York, it's delicious. They serve it on a great bun and it's expertly prepared. I guess I was thinking it would be the same here. Besides it was $25. It had to be pretty good.

I ordered the burger medium but when it came it was very rare -- and not that snobby, but "we're a fancy french restaurant and this is what we call medium" rare. It was really, really rare. So, I had no choice but to asked that they take it back. Well, in the kitchen they simply scrapped off the condiments I had put on it and charred the outside to get it to the usual medium pink inside. Not for nothing, but for $25 bucks, you'd think they would have asked if I wanted a new burger entirely so that the outside didn't taste like a burned mess. But, no, I just ate the freakin' thing. And it was on a plain old sesame seed bun like I could find at Publix. No fancy brioche bun like I had imagined.

Damien ordered the veal cheeks and they were tasty and fine. And the French onion soup au grain I had as an appetizer and the salad Damien ordered were fine too. But, the burger really got to me.

The next day, Damien and I left Baz with his grandparents for a couple of hours so I could shoot some of the last few shots for this video. And to make up for our overly expensive hamburger annoyance the night before, we stopped at Joe's Stone Crab take-away store and had ourselves some stone crabs and a lobster roll. Now we were talking.