[Author's Note: I just want to let you know that it was excruciatingly painful for me to write this restaurant review.  I'm going down the shore this weekend for a long weekend and have spent the last few days getting my beach body together, running like a maniac and subsisting on nothing but water, vitamins, honey nut cheerios and chicken apple sausage - and maybe some gatorade after a run because I'm afraid I've lost too many electrolytes (whatever the hell they are) and may have a seizure.  I'm just telling you this so you know how much I suffer for my art; I actually bit a chunk out of my telephone somewhere around the tenth paragraph.]

[Also, this is the May dinner because we ate it in May, even though I'm posting this in June.  Just wanted to clarify.] 

Last week, Nicole and I had our monthly dinner at Artisanal.  This was Nicole’s pick. 

Prior to going to the restaurant and based on my limited knowledge of French, I understood the word artisanal to me "expensive cheese that you’ve never heard of."  However, after eating at the restaurant, I understand artisanal to also mean "When I die, if I’ve been a good person, this is what eternity will be like," or, more colloquially, "do you mind if I eat this fork? there’s some cheese still stuck to it." 

This is the tenth dinner that Nicole and I have gone on during our eating tour of NYC, so it’s getting impossible to properly rank the restaurants.  However, I tell you this in earnestness: we may have a winner. 

I’ve have written before about my efforts to rail against fancy-pants cheeses.  Each and every time Nicole and I have gone out for our monthly dinner and ordered a cheese plate, I have used the same (incredibly tiresome) line: "I like my cheese like I like my women: simple, white and fake."  I say this because it’s true.  Though I have shed many of the po’ boy ways that I picked up in the slums of South Philly growing up, I have heretofore refused to join the legions of cheese snobs that know the difference between gruyere and gorgonzola and can pronounce Sable du Boulonnais without sounding like they’re having a seizure.  Also, I like easy-to-please white women with dyed hair and fake boobs.  What?

At Artisanal Nicole and I started with a basket of gougeres.  I had no idea how to pronounce grougeres, nor did I know what it is, but Nicole had heard it was delicious.  Gougeres, to my delight, are little warm puff pastries, similar to a cream puff, sans the cream inside.  Also, the pastry crust has a delicious cheese taste to it; think a light and fancy cheese nip.  I could have eaten conservatively three dozen of these, and Nicole and I nearly came to blows over the last one.  She would have won, but she graciously let me have it.  This is why she’s the best dinner date ever. 

We also got a cheese plate with three cheeses.  I can’t recall their names, but one was creamy and I enjoyed it very much; one was a little sharp, which is not normally my taste but I liked it nonetheless; and the third was very strong and tasted like my belly button in August after a game of touch football and/or helping a friend move.  Naturally, this was my favorite.

[Seriously, there could be a game show called "Cheese or Nasty" that asks blindfolded contestants if they're smelling cheese or something nasty, like toenails, belly button, ass, or Grandfather.  If you lose, you have to eat the Nasty.  Or kiss the grandfather.  Whatever.  I'll work on this.]  

The highlight of the meal came next, when Nicole and I ordered the Artisanal Blend fondue.  I had never had fondue before, as I believed it to be the exclusive bailiwick of the French and homosexuals, two groups I am not very familiar with (HALF LIE).  I mean, I understood the nature of the fondue – bowl of hot cheese into which you dip food – but when in my life would I have ever had a fondue?  Certainly not growing up, as fondue was far too cultured for me (remember, I didn’t see a horse for the first time until I was 19, and even then I thought it was a really big dog); my buddies and I didn’t have "fondue night" in college; and post-college, most of my dates with women have ended before the fondue portion of the meal, when I would ask "So how would you rate your bird-handling abilities?  I’d guess a 7 out of 10.  You don’t seem like the type who’s afraid of penis, but only has a rudimentary understanding of how to work it.  Yeah, a 7 – I can see it in your eyes."

The fondue was just what I thought – a big hot pot of cheese.  The fondue came with bread for dipping, but Nicole and I also got veggies (those went over to her side of the table, thank you very much), apples, and kielbasa (!).     

I don’t know if I had a momentary lapse of reason, but as the fondue was being placed on our table, I did not expect it to be very good.  Maybe it was the flame underneath that was making me sweaty, maybe it was the little jabbing forks that made me feel like a giant, or maybe I was just drunk (also, could have been all three).  But looking at the fondue, I was unimpressed.  It’s just cheese, I thought.

Well.

Fifteen minutes later, after I had eaten all of the cheese-covered kielbasa, most of the cheese-drenched apples, and even (gasp!) some of the cheese-saturated vegetables, I was standing next to the table, the scalding hot pot of fondue - now empty, save for some cheese still clung to its sides – above my head, threatening to smash the ceramic pot to the ground so that I could suck the cheese off its broken shards.  Nicole was crying.  The waiter has crying.  I was crying.  It was a mess.

Ok, so that didn’t exactly happen.  But to say the very least, I have a new addition to my list of "Things I’m Going to Do When I Get Rich": eat a fondue with every meal and, if possible, try to incorporate it into sexual escapades.  I mean, wow.  I know this may sound like the dumbest thing I’ve ever written, but who knew that kielbasa covered in an intricate mix of melted cheese could be so delicious?

(You know, that definitely is the dumbest thing I’ve ever written.  Sorry about that.)      

But it didn’t stop there.  For our main courses, Nicole and I got the asparagus risotto with wild mushrooms and pecorino and the prime hangar steak frites (guess who got which?).  We also added a side of macaroni and cheese and the spinach gratin with parmesan.

Grades across the board: A (risotto), A (steak), A+ (mac and cheese), A+ (spinach gratin).  I felt like a punch drunk fighter as we worked our way through the entrees; the fondue had put me on the ropes, but these – particularly the sides – were landing haymakers, blow after blow, making me dizzy, faint, fat.  It got to the point that I was so full that when I’d put a scoop of spinach into my mouth, it would lamely fall from my open mouth onto the table, as there was simply no room left in my body for food.  But it was so good that I had to keep eating.  

(I’m starting to feel dizzy just writing about this.)

Finally, for dessert (fyi: I have a separate stomach for desserts), we got the warm chocolate soufflé cake with peanut butter sorbet and chocolate sauce and the strawberry panna cotta with rhubarb soup.  Um, yeah.  The first dessert has nine of my favorite 15 words in the English language in its title (the remainder: boobs, cockass, heinie, Elvis Costello, and heinie again) and despite not knowing what "panna cotta" or "rhubarb" was, I became intimately - possibly biblically - familiar with both in a matter of seconds.  I was so moved by the chocolate cake that I unbuttoned most of my shirt, took some of the cake in my hand, and smeared it all over my chest.  I don’t know why.   I didn’t know what else to do.  And I had to do something.  That pretty much brought the meal to an end.     

You know how when you’ve just started dating someone and you know it’s real because from the first time you saw her, you got that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you would do anything - anything - to bone her?  And then, finally, when you two do have sex, it’s incredible, complete with equal parts hair pulling/biting and a violins/a candlelight reading of "She Walks In Beauty"?  And then after you’re done that first time, you do it again and again, because if you don’t keeping doing it, your passions are so unbridled that you may actually commit a murder?  

Well, this meal was kinda like that.  Though there wasn’t as much anticipation as the metaphor above, I knew this place had a reputation for cheese that intrigued me.  The fondue rocked my balls off.  The steak rocked my balls off.  The mac and cheese and spinach rocked my balls off.  The desserts rocked my balls off.  Rocked.  Balls.  Off.  Everywhere. 

Hear me now: I can not recommend this place highly enough.  I didn’t even get into the wine, which was delicious (a very large, impressive and not-so-expensive wine list, by the way).  This is an ideal date spot: it’s not that pricey, fondues are fun, the food is delicious, the service was great and completely unpretentious, the atmosphere is alive but not annoyingly so.  My only complaint is that it’s a little too bright in there – darkness, with alcohol, are my greatest allies when on dates.  I want to go back so bad that I think I may start walking up to women in bars and saying, "Look, you don’t know me, but do you want to have dinner at Artisanal next week?  I don’t have any STDs - not that that should matter – and I’ll pay.  What do you say?  I mean, it’s free fondue!" 

So that’s it.  I’m not going to try to artfully end this, because I am spent.  I don’t know if I feel more like I’ve just had sex or I’ve just been beaten up, but I do know one thing: I am going to go suck on a piece of cheese.  If not, there may be a homicide.  As important as my beach body is, sometimes you have to take one for the team.