Dreams & Conference – Day 5, Portofino at last
“Have you been to the Italian place?”, I keep hearing from the other conference attendees. I once tried to look for Portofino but the confusing arrows led me to the livelihood of El Patio instead. Another time I managed to find the door, which was locked, and two hotel workers tried to tell me in lightning fast Spanish that behind those glass panels was indeed Portofino and that I should just pull them open, or at least that’s what I gathered. The simple truth is they don’t open for lunch.
Undeterred, I returned to those doors to get my last Dreams dinner that evening. The place was dark, my heart sank thinking of unborn pictures with blurry details, when I ran into three other conference attendees from CINVESTAV and the National University of Mexico. It became the most memorable dinner I had the entire trip.
The menu came in two versions, English for me and Spanish for my new acquaintances, both with long fancy Italian names and description in the according language. I was hungry for some vegetables, so after Abril translated to me the waiter’s explanation of a few words on the list, the appetizer was an easy pick: a small endive and arugula salad dressed in a fruity vinaigrette, accompanied by four paper-thin slices of sweetened pear that tasted most like chewy brown sugar.
It boiled down to two choices for entrée: linguine with quail or beef with foie gras. I asked the waiter for advice and he chose the beef in less than one hundredth of a second. The filet mignon, itself topping a mash potato bed, was topped with mushroom sauce and a sliver of foie gras the size of my pinky’s top digit. Everything was soft, lustrous, soothing, and melting into one another. You bet I cleaned the plate.
Dessert, too, was nothing short of an allurement. More precisely, it was a lava cake nostalgia, harmoniously paired with a lime sorbet and coyly tarted up by a sliced strawberry. Under the magenta candle light and our reflections from the glass ceiling, three Mexicans and a Vietnamese talked the night away about the American education system, the economy, the train from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta, about esquites, tamarind, and mango. It was the first time I’d felt like a foreigner at a dinner table, not being able to understand the others’ conversation in their mother tongue. But strangely, I also felt very much included in this courteous town, among these courteous people.
More Puerto Vallarta:
Dreams & Conference – Day 1, dinner at Oceana
Dreams & Conference – Day 2, World Cafe and El Patio
Dreams & Conference – Day 3, Seaside Grill and Room service
Crepa y Esquites
Real informative and wonderful anatomical structure of subject matter, now that’s user genial (:.
1I like the efforts you have put in this, thanks for all the great blog posts.
2Regards for this post, I am a big big fan of this site would like to go along updated.
3As I website possessor I conceive the written content here is very wonderful, regards for your efforts.
4great post, very informative. I wonder why the other experts of this sector do not notice this. You must continue your writing. I’m sure, you have a great readers’ base already!
5Thanks so much for publishing such interesting article. I love your blog. Many thanks for letting me share my thoughts on your article. I would love to see more interesting posts from you soon.
6I would like to thank you for providing this great information. I absolutely love your web page. Many thanks for giving me the opportunity to comment on your web page. I look forward to more informative publications from you in the near future.
7An impressive share, I just given this onto a colleague who was doing a little analysis on this. And he in fact bought me breakfast because I found it for him.. smile. So let me reword that: Thnx for the treat! But yeah Thnkx for spending the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love reading more on this topic. If possible, as you become expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more details? It is highly helpful for me. Big thumb up for this blog post!
8My developer is trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on various websites for about a year and am worried about switching to another platform. I have heard fantastic things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can import all my wordpress content into it? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
9Can I just say what a relief to find someone who actually knows what theyre talking about on the internet. You definitely know how to bring an issue to light and make it important. More people need to read this and understand this side of the story. I cant believe youre not more popular because you definitely have the gift.
10I have not checked in here for some time as I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are great quality so I guess I’ll add you back to my everyday bloglist. You deserve it my friend 🙂
11I very glad to find this website on bing, just what I was searching for : D as well saved to favorites.
12Wow! This blog looks exactly like my old one! It’s on a completely different topic but it has pretty much the same page layout and design. Superb choice of colors!
13