Tonight a very generous friend treated us to a meal at a tapas joint called "The Harvest Vine." Being the worldly fellow I am, my first comment was, "So . . . what are tapas?" Of course, until recently, I thought "Hugo Boss" referred to one of the enemies to be defeated in Sonic the Hedgehog, so this is not very surprising. Delightfully, it turned out to mean "tiny plates of stuff," so that if you hated something, you just had to wait a couple minutes for it to be whisked away and replaced with something else. Which I did when we were presented with some sort of whitefish gruel cruelly jammed into roasted red peppers, all sitting ghoulishly on some sort of blood-paste. No thanks.

Everything else was, happily, fucking great, seriously great. We also charged through two bottles of excellent 1994 rioja, which didn't hurt our mood either, not even when an extremely pregnant woman at the next table got the vapors and had to be rushed out of there in an alarming hurry after a quick hot-cloth rubdown by the staff. She probably had the whitefish and peppers.

We started out with some paper-thin slices of cured pork loin, which was wonderful, despite the haunting awfulness of the word "loin." I think it's been spoiled by too many romance novels; whenever I encounter the word now, I inevitably imagine that I am eating hunks of Fabio's crotch. Then we dug into some otherworldly cheeses, two courtesy of sheep's milk and one of cow; I comforted myself with the idea that while we ate ritzy, mold-shot delicacies, somewhere baby farm animals went hungry. It's a wonder I can get out of bed in the morning.

Then came the deluge. Golden beets--again, surgically sliced--coated in a garlic vinaigrette and sprinkled with kosher salt. Lucifer's manicured toenails! They were incredibly good; knee-buckling in that mouthgasmic way where you sort of shit your mental pants. Green beans in some tomatoey hummina blummina sauce were almost as good, and then we scratched ourselves like luxuriating apes as more DELICIOUS DEAD PIG was served up to our maws--garlic pork sausage in some sort of fuck-you sauce. Ridiculous.

Because my imposing 150-lb. frame needed a rest, I skipped out on the aforementioned whitefish goo, and waited all of five minutes for the impossibly good scallops to come out. Perfectly prepared, they tasted like Artemis' nipples, provided you ignored the sort of rough-fucked caramelized onions they came served on. Up yours, onions! And finally, gorgeous duck breast slices (replete with bits of fat, of course) made an appearance, wearing a fetching reduction made from port, meat juices (read: blood), and possibly centaur musk. Jesus God.

Finally, the ladies opted for desserts, while I continued to swill the toe-curling wine and moaned softly into my collar. The ladies butchered the chocolate torte with wine-soaked cherries as well as the assortment of cookies with chocolate ganache, and our waitress, apparently either mistaking us for the Japanese Shogunate or simply appreciative of our culinary ranginess, poured us each a complimentary glass of really good port.

Tomorrow we'll probably have frozen pizza. I could just cry.