One Day at the Manisses

Often times, traveling tends to center around food.

Days are often spent idling along in limbo between meals. Because of this, going to a place with cuisine connections often make that place all the more enjoyable.

So as we rode along through the mist and choppy water off Rhode Island on our way out to Block Island I knew we would eat one or two pretty good meals.

After all, I was traveling with the little sister of a chef at one of the finer restaurants on the Island.

While I did not know it yet, the Manisses - a lodging and dining staple - was one of, if not the only, place still open in October that offered fine dining.

The fresh seafood and monstrous fish and chips were good, but expertly prepared dishes of imaginative varieties would be few and far between.

Brian Hartman, the brother of my beautiful travel companion, is the sous chef at the Manisses, and the day after he cooked us up an unbelievably delicious rosemary and bacon meatloaf with mashed potatoes in the kitchen of his girlfriend's home, Brian invited us into his restaurant for a little dinner party.

There were six of us friends and family of the chef, and with an almost deadly quiet dining room, Brian had been preparing.

As our server took a cocktail order, we had no idea that the four course blur of hedonistic ingestion that would follow would mirror an entire day - all in one sitting.

We started with a waffle under braised pork and topped with a poached quail egg.

Mimosas were served alongside the "breakfast."

After that, a course of caprese brioche was brought out - of which the variety has been lost in the sweet ginger-infused Bombay Sapphire and tonics that separated courses for me.

The "lunch" pairing of Pinot Grigio didn't help my memory, but it helped my taste buds, that much I can recall.

For our respective "dinners" we each chose an entree from the menu.

My venison was cooked to perfection.

For desert, served along with a round of espresso martinis - or Flatliners - a dessert boat with dingy in tow was placed along the length of the table with samplings of sweet confections from the frozen to the chocolatey.

While we were expected to go with our all-too-generous chef to one of Block Island's two dozen watering holes after dinner - the six of us retired home, comatose and drunk, to dream of heavenly tastes swimming across out tongues.

- AC