Dinner and Dessert with Ho

On Friday I skipped Pilates Sculpt to attend a birthday dinner for our friend Ho, who arranged a dinner for himself at Cesar, a tapas restaurant, in Oakland. We all arrived by 7:25 for the 7:30 dinner, with the exception of Ho, who called and said, "Uh, I underestimated the traffic and I'm still in Fremont." We got seated anyway at a table for seven in the private side room. Not to be discouraged by Ho's absense, we ordered all three of the large plates on the menu (the menu said to allow 20 minutes to prepare these dishes), as well as several other smaller plates. Ho didn't arrive till closer to 8:00, by which time we'd already received all three of our large plates and finished several of the small plates. (Hey, man, you snooze, you lose.) Dinner was pretty good, service was fine, and prices were not too bad. Online reviews have been mixed, but we had a good experience. The private room and the relatively short wait (20 minutes for a large party) were definite pluses.

Afterwards we walked down the street to Fentons and got some ice cream. Shweetie and I each ordered their smallest size, "petite" scoops, which at any other establishment would likely be considered generous double scoops. Mine was in a cup so it was harder to tell how much ice cream was in there, but Shweetie ordered his in a sugar cone, so you could tell that there were two solid scoops above the cone. In fact, his cone was piled so high the worker also gave him a "small" cup because he was worried the ice cream would fall off the cone. I, like the last time I went there, ended up throwing half of my ice cream away because it was just way too much. Shweetie and I would share if we didn't have such different tastes in ice cream. Ho, Sunshine, Jamu, CJ, and Hammer came over after dinner since we were all just standing on the sidewalk after finishing our ice cream, and it made sense to come here since we only live 10 minutes away. Luckily the house was still somewhat neat after having the Hawks over for dinner the previous weekend. Phew!