Because it's perfectly reasonable to have a bottle of cava before dinner, right?

Day three of our Restaurant Week experience was spent at the Affinia Hotel.  More specifically, it was spent at the C-House restaurant located in the Affinia Hotel.  A Friday night, I was feeling a bit frisky, so I stopped on the way home from work at my favorite wine shop for a bottle of cava.  Cava is Spain's answer to France's champagne.  In The Wine Bible (my newest purchase in my effort to educate myself about wine), Karen MacNeil explains that a nineteenth century wine salesman by the name of Don Jose Raventos, inspired by a visit to Champagne, began creating his version of the bubbly using imported equipment.  A rousing success (naturally!), it was later named cava, which MacNeil translates as Catalan for cave or cellar.

Now that you know the history, you can appreciate it like I do.  Who am I kidding, the best way to appreciate is to drink it.  Which brings me back to that Friday night, before our reservation at C-House.  We appreciated nearly a whole bottle before we left for dinner.  In that time of appreciation, we nearly decided it was a good idea to buy tickets to Sasquatch, Seattle's music festival.  2010 was deemed to be the year of music!  We knew we were saving some money aside so that we could go to Lollapalooza this year.  But what would it be like if we  went to a music festival in Seattle, arguably a ground-breaking region for new and undiscovered music.  Fortunately, reservations called before we clicked "Add to Cart" and we left home.  Music can wait, right?

Funny enough, we almost decided to scrap our plans for C-House.  After a second and third perusal, we were worried that the menu offerings were slightly sparse and that we might not care for our dinner.  After an evening of luxury at C-House, we were so grateful that we gave the place another chance.  A Winter Manhattan to start may have changed my opinion about whiskey and another glass of cava with my meal made me positively giddy about my whole roasted trout.  My young man opted for the beer pairing menu, of course, and enjoyed three courses of beautifully presented food alongside various Bell's Brewery beers.  Yet another costly evening, but worth every penny, C-House was probably one of the better dining experiences I have had in a very long time.  And that's not the cava talking, I swear.

And as for the Sasquatch Music Festival?  We decided that probably wasn't the greatest financial decision.  But who knows, a bottle of cava may appear in my house again and rash decisions might be made.  But for now, we'll stick to our $10 tickets to go see the Canadian band You Say Party! We Say Die!  (The Empty Bottle is only a few blocks away and we don't need to find a hook-up for our RV.  Nice.)