Fancy expensive dinner equals

...small portions of food on giant plates. You all know what I'm talking about, right... well, if I had been by myself I would have taken pictures. I'll give you an example. One of the courses was a tomato "salad". This meant a huge plate on which sat about five different kinds of tomatoes. Not the full tomato, of course, but a stack made up of a slice of a normal red tomato, a smaller slice of a yellow tomato, a smaller slice of some other type of tomato, etc, until the very top, which was a full grape tomato. Wow, filling. All the courses were accompanied by "local" wines ... unfortunately I am uncultured and have not yet developed a liking for wine. There was also some sort of tortellini (just one) filled with beef, sitting on top of some sort of vegetable, and over the entire plate was poured some veal consomme. Sigh.

I think the oddest part of the dinner was that of the five courses, for four of them I had to use the same glass for wine. I know next to nothing about wine, but I would have thought at least they could have given us different glasses for white and red wines. But no. In fact at one point I suppose my wine consumption was a little behind, so the waitress asked me to drink what was left in my wine so she could put a new wine in my glass. Not, in my opinion, the best customer service.

Anyway, the conference was good, and the hotel room was surprisingly nice, so that I almost didn't mind paying the $120. ALMOST.