Last night I went to Picholine, a swanky French restaurant up by the Metropolitan Opera. It’s one of those old-timey, Central Park West deals where the clientele are either on their way to the opera or they’re just out for a Tuesday dinner because it’s a “neighborhood” place. Which makes me laugh. Picholine is very close to Tavern on the Green.

Anyway, my friend Fiona had a gift card she got for filling out a survey, and though it was for a substantial amount, we knew we’d only be able to sit at the tables near the bar and get cheese and wine. And even then, we’d have to each put in an extra $20. Which was fine; it was an ideal way to be extravagant without actually spending much.

What made it truly awesome though was that, upon our arrival, Fiona realized she knew the fromager. He worked at Picholine’s sister restaurant, Artisanal, when she took her book club out for a meal. Fiona and the fromager (an ideal movie title) had bonded over cheese and wine—so much so that Fiona wrote him a thank you note later. And he remembered! So he personally selected 6 cheeses for us and suggested two wines each. We were in heaven.

But when we were getting ready to leave, out came a tasting sample of this weird (but delicious) sorbet/foam, then a chocolate molten torte with dulce de leche ice cream and earl grey marshmallow cream, and two glasses of port (which I’ve discovered, since France, I quite like). So after all this very personal attention at a fancy restaurant, you can imagine how excited we were to pay with a gift card. I half expected them to say it was a fake. But it worked, and we left a good tip. Especially when we realized the fromager was there for one night only. It was a special night.

Wait, this was a genuine blog post. Do such things exist? Weird.

Let me begin by saying that opening a wine bottle by using a screwdriver to push the cork in (instead of pulling it out) is not a good idea. But it will work.

The other night, Beth and I were set on opening a bottle of Cabernet to drink with dinner, but when we went to open it, we remembered that we broke the corkscrew the night before. It was the most horrific epiphany ever. But with the wondrous knowledge the internet has to offer, we were able to find a few solutions to our corkscrew problem:

First method: use a screw driver to insert a screw into the cork, then use the back of a hammer to eke the cork out.
Problem: we didn’t have a screw. And a nail didn’t sufficiently grab onto the cork.

Second method: somehow push the cork into the bottle (which doesn’t necessitate piercing it).
Problem: the only item sturdy enough to accomplish this was our screwdriver. I managed to push the cork in, but wine splashed out.
Not a problem: the table cloth happened to be the exact color of the red wine.
Oh wait, problem again: the screwdriver attachment/head fell off and into the bottle, firmly secured in the cork.

So in the end, we drank a bottle of red with our steak and warm chickpea salad. But, we dirtied a table cloth, bent several nails, and broke a perfectly good screwdriver. So depending on how badly you need to get crunked, it may not be worth the trouble. (That’s a trick though; readers of this blog always need to be crunked.)