When I first moved to San Francisco, I started attending the San Francisco production of the Nutcracker. I started with box seats (seated in front and back of each other - not even together) and then slowly worked my way up to seats in the center box, front row last year. For an encore, this year I decided to buy the whole box and bring a group of friends. I gave two tickets to Kristine (flew in from Chicago) who in turn invited her friend Anna. Andrea gave two tickets to Angie who in turn invited Oliver. I invited Jan from the apartment and Phil from work.

Earlier in the week, the weather did not appear as though it would cooperate. A very big rain storm with strong winds was going to hit the bay area on our nutcracker day, but we ended up being very fortunate because the rain died and it remained dry during the whole time. I was too late to get reservations anywhere in the theater district, but I knew Zuni didn't take reservations before 5:30 or so so we planned to show up at 4:30 and to request a table for 8 at 5pm. It all worked out pretty well and we were seated at about 5:15pm. We had started off with cocktails at the bar and once we were seated, we started in to our Kumamoto Oysters (our favorite) and some gorgonzola cheese. We had the restaurant chill our bottle of S. Anderson Rose sparkling wine (corkage was $20 for sparkling) that we picked up while wine tasting last weekend in Napa. Their wine flutes still had some residual bleach in them (singed my sinuses with them) so they replaced them with regular wine glasses. They were still on their lunch menu, which made our choices simple. I started with the anchovies and the seared yellowfin tuna (a popular choice - 6 of us had the tuna) and Andrea had the Caesar salad (big!) and the burger with portobello mushrooms and gruyere cheese on focaccia and shoestring potatoes. I brought along a 1.5L bottle of 1998 Beringer Knight's Valley that I received from the wine club (was only charged the $15 corkage for the large bottle) which was a decent enough wine (although not a particularly good match for the yellowfin).

We were on a tight time schedule so we skipped dessert and dashed off to the ballet.