Can We Eat Now?

I was a little surprised when Dave Bittner told me that HoCo Tourism liked the idea of having Paul and I promote HoCo Restaurant Weeks. It is nice to know that some HoCo locos think enough of our podcast to want to be associated with it in some manner.

That was pretty cool.

The best part for me was getting to spend time with Erik Rochard and Joe Barbera, the proprietors of the two establishments we visited. Erik personifies the spirit of joie de vivre. As the chef was preparing the dishes for the shoot, Erik grabbed a bottle of wine and some glasses. The fact that it was 11:00 AM on a Tuesday did not even merit consideration. We talked about food, life and business and shared a few laughs while his staff kept bringing out food and laying it down in front of us. I felt like Bacchus.

Unfortunately we couldn't touch the food until after the shoot. It wouldn't look good after all to zoom in on a veal chop with a bite taken out of it.

With Joe we got the behind the scene tour of his new restaurant, the highlight being the walk in wine cooler that houses both bottles and kegs of wine. Though they are called kegs, the containers are actually stainless steel cylinders. The wine on tap system is made possible by state of the art equipment that insures that the last glass of wine from a keg is as fresh as the first. The wine we sampled was excellent, if that's any measure of anything.

Anyway, we had a good time. I’m not real crazy about how I came across sometimes but hopefully we’ll get another chance to do something fun like this again. If that happens I’ll try to do better.

Thanks to Amanda Hof from HoCo Tourism , Erik Rochard, Joe Barbera, Paul Skalny and Dave Bittner. That was a lot of  fun.

Can we eat now?