You are having dinner at the best restaurant you can imagine. Do not concern yourself with over-eating, or other restrictions. We want to know what you like best. What will you have for:

Jack’s Answers

We’re pretty typical.  During the standard large family dinner outing, we will make for the bar or lounge and have a round while we wait for our table.  Other times, we are seated immediately and enjoy a drink while chatting and perusing the menu.  More often than not, I’ll order an Irish whiskey, neat.  Jameson and Paddy’s are preferred; I’m not crazy about Bushmill’s.  

I’ve never met an hors d’oeuvre I didn’t like; however, there are some I like much more than others.  As the entree I generally order is beef, I find that seafood makes an excellent complement.  Therefore my first choice will be coconut shrimp with an orange marmalade-based dipping sauce.  A good alternative might be fried calamari or crab cakes.  I should also point out that when I read “appetizer”, the first thing that came to mind was the Aussie cheese fries served at the Outback Steakhouse chain.  Consistently named the worst restaurant dish in America by various consumer advocacy and health publications, a single order of these fries delivers almost 3,000 calories.  Given the “Do not concern yourself with over-eating, or other restrictions” bit, I was almost tempted to choose these.

Again, I am operating under the condition that this mythical meal will somehow not result in the further clogging of my arteries, and that I will manage to offset the damage the food does to my body with a few hours of strenuous physical activity, likely involving sex with Jill and any other sexy female bloggers who’d like to help prolong my life and optimize my physical health by climbing aboard and going for a ride.  Thus, I will choose New England clam chowder, as I’m a fan of cream-based soups, and of the numerous varieties of clam chowder New England is the only one I enjoy.  As a backup choice I’d order corn chowder, as it’s got all the warm, creamy goodness of clam chowder, though sadly none of the clams.

Ah yes, salad.  Here’s where we get healthy.  Here’s where we undo all the damage I’ve done to my body with the two previous courses.  Since anything served in a salad bowl is bound to be good for you, I’ll take a garden salad, please.  Easy on the lettuce, though you can pile on whatever seasonal vegetables you like.  Then cover the whole thing in extra-chunky blue cheese dressing.

My first choice would be a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.  I’m not a wine snob by any means, though I do enjoy drinking it, and whenever convenient or conducive to a good meal, I try to pair wine with food for maximum effect.  Should Cabernet Sauvignon be unavailable, I’d probably go with Merlot, made from a versatile grape that is wholly undeserving of its bad reputation.

I’ll have the filet mignon topped with blue cheese crust.  I’d like that medium to medium-rare.  I’ll pair it with a Maine lobster tail.  If beef is unavailable – say, for instance, that we’ve crossed into an alternate reality in which the raising of cattle for food is against the law – I’ll have the calamari steak, grilled or breaded and lightly fried; or perhaps a salmon fillet.  

I’ll go with a loaded baked potato, the perfect accompaniment to a good steak if there ever was one.  Additionally I’ll go with creamed spinach as, in my old age, I’ve come to appreciate this simple and delicious dish, and associate it with high-end steakhouses.  If we’re in that crazy alternate universe where steakhouses have been replaced by fish markets and I’ve just ordered the calamari steak, then switch my baked potato for garlic mashed potatoes, but keep the creamed spinach.

My favorite dessert is ice cream.  I can eat it any day of the week – or better still, every day of the week – whether it’s summertime or the dead of winter.  I like ice cream the way Cookie Monster likes cookies.  I’ll eat it plain or with toppings, in a bowl or on a cone.  In fact, I wish I had some ice cream right now.  However, for all of my insistence that ice cream is where it’s at, I don’t see myself sitting through a several-course meal at “the best restaurant [I] can imagine” and then ordering ice cream.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially if the restaurant features ice cream on the menu.  It’s just that, under the circumstances, I’m likely to order something denser, along the lines of cheesecake or carrot cake.  If I’m looking for something lighter, I might go with some manner of cheese and fruit platter.

I enjoy a glass of barrel-aged port or brandy after a sumptuous meal.  If I’m having brandy I would prefer Armagnac or Cognac, as those are the brandies with which I’m most familiar.  However, as I write this I find myself craving a nice orange Muscat, a variety of dessert wine popular in California.  I imagine that it would nicely complement the aforementioned cheesecake.

These questions are difficult.  I tend not to care about famous people sufficiently to go out of my way to have contact with them.  I can’t relate to celebrities, and the truth is, when I think “sex appeal”, I’m either thinking of someone I know personally, or one of the many sexy online friends with whom we’ve come into contact through blogging and tweeting.  The truth is, I can’t think of very many famous people who turn me on enough to name.  Certainly not any contemporary famous people.  But if I had to choose someone sexy to invite to dinner, make eyes at across the table, and hopefully fuck when all is said and done, I’m thinking it’s going to be Cindy Crawford circa 1992.  Hey, if I can bring someone back from the dead for the purposes of this dinner, I should be able to return a living person to the age of my choice.

Jesus?  Okay, kidding.  There’s no way I could narrow my answer down to just one person.  Upton Sinclair.  W.E.B. Du Bois.  John F. Kennedy.  Bill Clinton.  Judy Blume.  Barack Obama.  John Waters.  Jane Addams.  William Jennings Bryan.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Gary Gygax.  Rachel Kramer Bussel.  Frank Sinatra.  Dean Martin.  Sammy Davis, Jr.  Margaret Sanger.  Dr. Ruth Westheimer.  Dr. Joycelyn Elders.  Kurt Schmoke.  Ernest Hemingway.  Jon Stewart.  Mohandas Gandhi.  Martin Luther King, Jr.  Forrest J. Ackerman.  Andrew Carnegie.  Richard Dawkins.  Jim Morrison.  Dan Savage.  Stan Lee.  Roger Corman.  Bill Hicks.  Asia Carrera.  Jack Kerouac.  Christopher Hitchens.  Raymond Carver.  I could probably compose a blog post listing nothing but the various individuals I admire and with whom I’d enjoy conversing over a meal.

Why would I invite to dinner someone I detest?  What sort of purpose would this serve?  Am I supposed to refrain from washing my hands between going to the bathroom and prepping their meal?  Is it so I can feed them before I take them out to my game preserve and give them a head start before donning a pith helmet and hunting them like a common animal?  I’m not certain why this sub-question involves a person I detest as opposed to, say, a person I admire.  While I suppose that a person that I admire could have been a suitable answer to the previous sub-question, just because I admire someone doesn’t necessarily make them great at conversation.  You know what?  I’m going to go with Hitler.  Why?  Because why the fuck not?  Is there anyone more universally despised throughout the course of human history?  I would opine that there is not.  At the moment, Hitler has the perhaps unique distinction of being so widely hated by such an overwhelming margin of humanity that the people who don’t consider him a mass murdering piece of shit are considered crackpots by the rest of society.  A major plus about inviting Hitler to dinner is that rather than actually serving him a meal I could kill him, thereby disastrously affecting the course of human history.   (I imagine that I’d have to go back in time to, say, the 1920s in order to make this happen; I couldn’t somehow bring Hitler into contemporary times, because then it’s too late.)

A bagel, lightly toasted, with cream cheese; and bacon that’s not too crispy.  Additionally, I’ll have a glass of orange juice.  Some pulp is okay, but I don’t want the kind with lots of pulp.

I would order either a grilled artichoke with mayo or garlic aioli, or coconut shrimp.  It really depends on the time of year.  During the summer months I am more likely to go for the artichoke as it is a lighter dish, whereas if I am eating at Elway’s in Denver it’s going to be the coconut shrimp every time.  [Editor’s note:  Elway’s menu currently lists this item as $16 for three shrimp.  I hope you’re saving your pennies, my dear.]

Soup has really never been my thing.  It always makes me too hot, and usually fills me up so much that I can’t enjoy my entree.  in the past, if I was eating soup at a restaurant, it was usually a taste of Jack’s and then back to my salad.  But recently I discovered tomato bisque.  It’s my new favorite soup.  Tomato bisque is creamy and delicious, and if made correctly it tastes like Heaven must taste.  In fact, I enjoy it so much that lately I’ve begun to order it as an entree.

If the restaurant can prepare the blue cheese pecan chopped salad that I sometimes order when we go to Outback Steakhouse, I’d get that.  It’s such a wonderful combination of flavors and textures and is probably my favorite salad at the moment.  If the restaurant cannot prepare that salad, I think I’ll just have a Caesar.  (But they should be able to prepare it, shouldn’t they?  It’s supposed to be the best restaurant I can imagine.)

Keep the Syrah coming, please.  I’ve got a nice buzz going, and I would really like to maintain it as long as possible.

I’ll have the crème brûlée, but not just any crème brûlée.  The custard has to be mixed with rich, melty chocolate on the bottom, and there has to be crispy caramelized bananas on top.  While out to lunch for Mother’s Day, the restaurant we were at treated us to just such a crème brûlée for dessert.  Now I don’t think I can go back to regular crème brûlée.

The only thing that could possibly make me give up my Syrah glass is an Irish coffee.  After a delicious meal, I love sitting at the table with my siblings, cousins, parents, aunts, and uncles (and of course Jack), enjoying the tastes of the coffee and the whiskey together, as well as the conversation and the sense of closeness to my family.

This one’s easy:  Harrison Ford.  Doesn’t matter whether he’s playing Han Solo at age thirty-five or Indiana Jones at age sixty-six, he’ll always be one of my longest-running celebrity crushes.