Dinner at the Dushanbe Teahouse and plans for Penzeys...
Hmmm, I'll bet more than one of you think there is a disconnect in the title of this post.
First, dinner at Dushanbe. On Tuesday, my good friend Mimi from San Francisco, who was spending a few days in Vail with a friend, called to ask if Max and I could meet them for dinner. They drove to Rocky Mountain Park and were returning to Vail through Boulder. Of course we would meet them. Boulder has good restaurants and a good variety but I wanted something not like any of the restaurants we had been to together in SF. After consulting with Max, our decision was the Tea House.
The Tea House is a hand carved, hand painted Persian architectural masterpiece that was sent, as a gift, to Boulder in pieces in 1987 from our sister city Dushanbe, Tajikistan (formerly in the Soviet Union). In Boulder's s-l-o-w and scholarly way, we took ten years to study the issue of WHERE TO PUT IT! And, in fairness, to gather the money needed to acquire the land and erect it. For that decade, the pieces were stored in a warehouse. Finally in 1998 it opened in a downtown location across from City Park. Several craftsmen from Dushanbe came to work with builders here to assemble the pieces correctly. In return Boulder gave Dushanbe a Cyber Cafe, primarily solar powered and equipped with 18 computers. It opened last year, with the restaurant and connections to backup city electricity scheduled to open this year. It is a contemporary building that was scaled back when site and construction problems arose. Still it is heavily used by students and other residents of Dushanbe.
That's a picture from my phone, but for more, and better interior and exterior shots of this amazing building please take a few seconds and look at this: Tea House
Now that you've seen the building, on to dinner. The restaurant has had several management companies and different menus since it opened, some good food, some not so good. It is currently very good. Here's what we ate.
Max had Creole Grilled Ribeye-Cajun blackened ribeye with Southern sweet potato & red bean-andouille stew.
Mimi and I ordered Persian Khoresh-e Fesenjan, a stewed half-chicken in savory spices, roses, sundried apricots,
dried cherries & fresh herbs, white rice. While it said stewed,the skin of the chicken was brown and crisp. It really was a half of a small chicken, with the boned leg quarter under the boned breast quarter.
Mimi's friend ordered Oyster Mushroom Polenta, sundried tomatoes, spinach, wild mushrooms, basil cream sauce. It also had the optional grilled chicken breast on top.
All of the food was delish and the only missing elements were Eileen and Helene who met Mimi and me for a day of food and fun when I visited SF. Yes, that would have made dinner perfect if they had been here to share.
And that great dinner led me to think about last Friday when Karen, Charles, Dlynn and Max and I met for breakfast, and Dlynn and I talked about meeting soon to go to Penzey's in Arvada, a northwest Denver suburb. I thought about what fun it would be to go to Penzey's and have lunch at the Teahouse. As I was looking up the Arvada Penzey's address (which I have not been to even though it opened over a year ago) to see how much more driving to have lunch in Boulder would add to the day for Dlynn, I was stunned to see that Penzey's has opened in Boulder, a few blocks from the Teahouse. It opend about three weeks ago. Even though we get the Denver paper and not the Boulder paper, I must have been living under a rock with no wifi, beause I do follow Boulder business news.
So now you get the connection; I'm hoping to meet Dlynn, have lunch at the teahouse and go to Penzey's in BOULDER.
I'll call and send you an email Dlynn, in case you don't see this.
And for more info on the restaurant itself Teahouse Info and Menu. The restaurant site has additional information on the history and photos of the teahouse. The menus are under the "teahouse" link at the top of the page. And yes, they also sell an amazing variety of teas, prepacked and in bulk.
Lee
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