Visitor Weekend! Part 3: BB's birthday dinner

To celebrate a big milestone birthday for BB, we had reservations at Jake's Famous Crawfish. Despite the snacks and drinks at Henry's, we were game to go to Jake's because it's a Portland institution! This is the original McCormick and Schmick's restaurant and has been around since 1892.

The dinner was fantastic, from beginning til end. Good food, good friends -- that's really all it comes down to. But I'll go into the details anyway. :)

The restaurant specializes in fresh seafood, so they print out a new menu daily. When we got our menus, printed at the top was a Happy Birthday welcome message! Isn't that a nice touch? The wine list was pretty ho-hum, so we ended up getting mixed drinks that ranged from tasty to interesting (mine was a made up of guava nectar, alcohol and ground cloves...too weird of a mix to be called good.) We also scored an awesome private booth by the window.

The highlight of the night was, hands down, the raw oysters. YUMMY briny goodness. For fun, we started with a half dozen oysters mix from the Pacific NW. These were such tasty, tasty things that we had to get another half-dozen. Mmmm. The whole restaurant probably heard us Mmmm-ing. These were fantastic and creamy and made your mouth feel lush. Really, I could go on and on.

We all could've easily had more oysters, but decided instead to order other dishes to make it a more well-rounded meal. My halibut was wonderfully prepared if a little bit boring. M's seared ahi was not only beautifully presented, it had a nice peppery edge to it. BB had extra oysters, plus a soup and salad.

And for dessert: a chocolate cake slice for the birthday girl. Happy birthday, BB! We've celebrated 19 of them together already, and I know there are many, many more in the future. I hope you enjoyed the weekend!