About a month ago I made reservations for Melinda and me to have dinner tonight at Maximilien, considered one of the top French restaurants in Seattle. I’m on their email mailing list and they sent out a message indicating that tonight they’d be celebrating their 14th anniversary and all entrees would be priced at $14 (some are regularly as high as $40). I placed the reservation and then told Melinda. We were both excited all day.

Part of what makes Maximilien so nice is its location. It’s right in the center of the Pike Place Market with tables that overlook Puget Sound. So we had our dinner tonight while watching the ferries come and go. It was quite lovely.

In terms of what I had imagined tonight’s dinner would be like, it didn’t quite measure up. I guess I was thinking this would be a lot like going back to France. Don’t get me wrong. The food was excellent (I had duck, for Pete’s sake, AND chocolate mousse). The Bordeaux wine hit just the right spot. But the first language of our server was Spanish, he told us, and the people in the restaurant, well, they just weren’t… French. The conversations we overheard were in, well, English (including one man saying he’d never vote for a woman or a person from Texas for president).

Clearly, I set my standards too high. Indeed, the company was first-rate but we repeatedly lamented how much we wished the Boudeaus or Bertails were with us.

All in all, it was another night that highlighted how much we appreciate having had an entire year of living in France. Wow, what a gift.