An Atkiner's Haven

Holy meat. I cannot recall the last time I've eaten so much meat at one time. But it was quite an experience. Last night was a friend's birthday at the Red Violin Brazilian Steakhouse down on the Danforth. Ever been to a steakhouse that's a buffet?

First we started off with the appetizers which included a salad bar and a selection of other kinds of finger-ish foods. Hero Cookie told Sherman and I to go light on the carbs and on the appetizers in general as he'd been through this dining experience before. Had he not been there to say that, MAN would I have gone to TOWN on those apps. All I could eat smoked salmon and dolmades?! That's a gourmet meal for me in itself!

Then during the digesting time between appetizer and main course, they brought out these little side dishes to accompany our meat: sauteed mushrooms, fresh-cut fries, grilled baby carrots, some rice, and fried bananas. Needless to say, we needed to order more of those sides VERY soon after they arrived. But finally, the main course...

Meat, meat, and more MEAT.

Around come these servers wielding huge skewers of meat and machetes, no less. At the beginning of our meal we were given these cards: one side of the card was green and the other side was red, and as long as our card was showing green on the table in front of us, these guys kept coming and offering us fresh cuts of meat, right onto our plates. Machetes inches from our faces, theses guys would slice/slide a hunk of meat off their skewer and hoist the cut onto our dish, oozing with juices and flavour. To top it all off at the end of the night (two and a half hours later) they served us roasted pineapple, seasoned with cinnamon.

YUM.

Overall, Hero Cookie claimed that this place wasn't the best churrascaria he'd ever had, but for me it was the ONLY churrascaria and it suited me just fine. :)
...

Of course, any night with Hero Cookie just wouldn't be a night if I didn't have a HC story to tell, so here it is.

Later that night, after stopping by a Tim Horton's on the way out to the middle of nowhere, HC called me out of the car to "come see this." What I climbed out to see was this HUGE alien bug thing crawling around under my car.

Kind of a mix between a beetle, a cockroach, and a frog (alien, remember), this thing was around the size of my palm and it was loping along with something of a limp. Just imagine a car rolling along slowly with one rear wheel that's bigger and a different shape compared to all the others--like in the episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes ahead and drives the car with a parking boot attached to the front wheel--that's how it looked like this thing was walking.

Although he wouldn't touch it directly, HC followed that thing (à la the skunk of the other night) and tormented it the best he could; he kicked sand and other debris at it, he spat spit on it, he spat hot coffee on it...whatever it took to get a reaction out of the thing. The only thing was, it didn't react. Though from the looks of it, it could fly, it didn't even spread its wings once. It actually didn't even pause in its tracks. It just keep hobbling along as though we weren't there and as though there weren't drops of coffee over its shell/wings/exoskeleton. In the end, it crawled back under the darkness of my car after taking a brief stroll in the light of the street lights of the parking lot. When we drove away, we couldn't see it in the parking space anymore and since we knew it didn't walk very fast, we assumed it'd made its mysterious flight away.

That or I ran over it with one of my tires. You know, whatever.