David Pitlyuk

To celebrate my brothers high school graduation this past weekend, a few family and friends went out to eat at Rat’s restaurant in Hamilton, NJ.  While the name is not the most appealing thing in the world, Rat’s is actually said to be one of the best restaurants in all of NJ.

The restaurant itself is very unique.  When my brother and I arrived, the front desk told us the rest of our party hadn’t been sat yet, they were “walking the grounds.”  Rat’s is located on a 35-acre area that is reminiscent of a European village.  The grounds are filled with a variety of sculptures scattered throughout.  On a day with good weather, it’s a very nice walk.

Anyone longing for a visit to a historic European village, but without the time or means to get there, may satisfy their craving with a visit to a new restaurant with the unlikely name of Rat’s. Rat’s is among the latest additions at the 35-acre newly redesigned Grounds For Sculpture. Designed to make visitors feel they have stepped into a village reminiscent of French impressionist Claude Monet’s beloved town of Giverny, the village is the culmination of a six-year dream of sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr.

Here’s a few pictures of the restaurant and the grounds…it reminded me of Disney World when I first drove in:

Rat’s is known for its extensive wine list.  In fact my aunt (who lives in London) ordered a bottle of wine (1990 Chateau Haut Brion) that was normally around $3,000/bottle in England, but around $250 (50% off) at Rat’s.  One of the things I really liked was that they had popovers for bread, something I experienced for the first time when dining at BLT Steak in Washington DC.  This is by far my favorite type of bread.

Here are some pictures of some of the food we ordered:

Roast leg of lamb with new potatoes, minted pea puree, roast baby Vidalia onions and jus

Pan roasted Barnegat scallops with wild mushrooms, crispy artichokes, polenta cakes and verjus reduction

Pairing of free range veal: braised breast and medallion with potato cake, roasted early onion stuffed with mushrooms, creamed spinach and sherry vinegar and foie gras sauce

Griggstown chicken cooked under a brick with sage flavored bread sauce, Spring vegetable ragout and natural jus

Pan roasted halibut with chanterelles, pommes fondant, wilted pea shoots and avgolemono

Double cut Berkshire pork chop with buttered fava beans, pioppini, creamy farro and strawberry ketchup

Molten chocolate cake

Cheesecake sundae

I personally had the pork chops and molton chocolate cake, both were excellent.  For an interesting dining experience, Rat’s is a great place to go.  It’s a very quiet and romantic setting, it would be a perfect place to take a date.

As I went last year, I’ll be going to Ocean City, MD Thursday-Sunday. A bunch of us always go the first weekend of June, which happens to be when the OC Car Show is. Since it’s a car show weekend, there are always pretty nice cars driving around everywhere you look. Which is perfect since Jason and I will be taking the Vipers down. In fact, as you read this right now, I’m currently in my Viper driving to Ocean City.

I may or may not have access to the internet while down there. If I do, I may update the blog with a couple fun posts, if not…well…we’ll have to wait until next week

For 2008, Washingtonian Magazine rated Citronelle the best restaurant in Washington DC. There are a lot of places to eat in a city as big as our capitol, so you can imagine what an honor it would be to get this rating. We had to go and see what all the hype was about, so a few of us headed into Georgetown for a night of French fine dining. One of the really cool things about Citronelle is that some of the food is made to look like one food, but made with another. I’ll get more into that when I go over what we go to show you what I mean.

We were originally going to get the promenade gourmande, which is a preset menu. We decided against it because if you do promenade gourmande, everybody on the table has to do it…and we wanted to have more of a selection. Here’s a selection of some of the stuff that we got throughout the night:

We all started off with a pre-appetizer (amuse bouche) to get the pallet ready. From left to right we have quayle egg, salmon, and a chicken lollipop:

For my appetizer I had the lobster “begula” pasta. This is one of the foods that are meant to look like something else. It’s mean to look like caviar, but in reality it’s actually pasta balls covered with ink squid, with lobster underneath. This was to die for.

Stephanie got the escargot, which had a great presentation:

Andrew’s appetizer was another one of those look-a-like foods. He had the “egg symphony”, which was four different plates meant to look like a variety of eggs, but were something else. For example on the bottom left it was actually slices of mozzerela with cheddar on top of it:

For my entree I had the lamb:

CD and Marcel had the chateaubriand, the presentation was absolutely amazing:

For dessert I had the chocolate soufflet:

Andrew had the breakfast sampler dessert…another look-a-like food:

Rather than explain everything, here’s a little video explaining:

Here’s a shot of all of us afterwards, I’m the guy in the font between the two girls:

Citronelle isn’t for the faint of hard. Dinner for the 6 of us including 2 bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne was about $1,600. It was quite an experience in fine french cuisine. There was an obvious amount of effort spent in the presentation, and it showed. If you are looking for a very nice dinner, you can’t go wrong with Citronelle.

Citronelle
3000 M St. NW
Washington, DC
Georgetown
T: (202)625-2150
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Kid Friendly: No
Cuisines: French, Modern
Price Range: Very Expensive

Sunday was my 26th birthday, and I threw a bit of a party on Saturday at my house to celebrate. What I realized is that I took a couple videos before everybody got there, and took barely any pictures…when I was planning to record the whole night. I’m pretty sure the alcohol had an affect on that But hey, it was my birthday, and I think it’s a valid excuse right?

I had about 50-60 people show up at the house, we had 2 kegs, a backup 30 pack, a fully stocked bar, and a big Gatorade jug of margaritas. All of it was gone by this morning! We also had a beer pong tournament with 3 separate tables and 15 teams with a $150 pot to the winner. The beer pong tournament didn’t get started until about 12am, so when I was taking some of the video we only had one table setup. My team won the 1st round, but we got knocked out in the 2nd round. My buddies Mike and Chris ended up winning, they are really good, and usually win tournaments.

On Sunday morning, a bunch of us headed over to Friday’s for lunch…trying to get rid of our hangovers. We all hung out for a bit, and then after doing some cleaning, headed over to Sakura Steakhouse with a friend for a birthday hibachi dinner.

The house is pretty dirty, we’ve got a maid coming tomorrow to clean it up, and then we’ll be getting the carpets steam cleaned. Between the alcohol and cleaning the house, cost of the party was about $700 or so. But it was well worth it, and I had a blast. Thanks to everybody who showed up!

Here’s a little video compilation of more of the beginning of the night:

I’ve been to a good amount of higher end well known steakhouses in the past, but Morton’s was probably the most common one that I had not been. Morton’s is a pretty famous high-end steakhouse, with a ton of locations through the US, and even a few internationally in places like China. I want to say there are at least 7 between my house and Baltimore, which is only a little over an hour away from me!

So I called up a friend, and we headed down to the Tyson’s Corner location. From what I’ve been told, the best comparison is Ruths Chris Steakhouse as they both originate from Chicago. Here’s a few pictures of some of the food:

For an appetizer, my friend and I split shrimp alexander and the bacon wrapped scallops. I’ve actually had a friend cook the shrimp alexander based on a Morton’s cookbook, and I thought his came out better. Regardless, they were still very good here! I had a filet mignon as my entree.

My friend had the ribeye as his entree, and you can see the same appetizers on the left.

For dessert I had the key lime pie. I’m a big key lime pie fan, so if I happen to be at a restaurant and they have it, I have to order a slice. The key lime pie at Morton’s was very good.

My buddy had the hot chocolate cake, which looked excellent, and just oozed out chocolate.

Overall the dinner was great, we had salads, appetizers, sides, entrees, deserts, a couple drinks, and cappuccinos, and the dinner ended up being around $175. Although everything was great, if I had to choose between Morton’s and Ruths Chris, I think I would choose Ruths Chris. You can’t really go wrong with Morton’s though

I just ordered a mothers day gift for my mom, and I think it’s one of the best things you can get out there in terms of perfect for the parents type of gift. What exactly is it you may ask? A Kodak EasyShare WiFi digital picture frame. What makes this so great? For people that don’t live at home with the parents, you can simply upload pictures to a Kodak photo gallery, and they show up on the picture frame. How awesome is that!?

With my brother going to college next year and me living a few states away, this will be a great way to send our mom our latest pictures without her having to do anything. She simply plugs it in, connects it to the network and it’s good to go. It even has an MP3 player and built in speakers so we can also include video!

I can’t see how any other mothers day present can top this! I scoured around the net for the best deal, and ended up purchasing at Buy.com. I paid $138 with free shipping. I got $10 off for using Google Checkout for the first time.

What did you get your mom? I just hope she doesn’t read this post!

Last Saturday a couple friends and I attended the monster truck show (Monster Jam) at the 1st Mariner Arena in Baltimore. I had never been to a monster truck show before, and the fact that I’m being into cars, I thought it’d be a fun thing to do. My first impression when I walked in…the place was tiny…how are they going to drive these huge trucks around in here? 1st Mariner Arena is way too small for this sort of even in my opinion, the trucks had to slam on their brakes after jumping over a few cars. This was nothing like I had seen on TV.

The trucks are all pretty awesome, running with open headers, they are super loud. They also tried to have a little WWE style fun by having 3 races on quads, Baltimore vs. New York. Of course being in Baltimore, they was a crowd favorite, and when NY lost there was a big fight…it was pretty comical. Other than that, I thought it was pretty fun…but probably not something I’d do again unless it was at a huge place where they are jumping through semi’s and flipping the trucks. I’m glad I was able to check this off the things to do in my life list though.

Here’s a few pics of the event, sorry for the bad quality:

My business partner for Tri Megatech drives a Subaru STI when he’s not managing or setting up a network. He sent me a video this morning which I thought was worthy of sharing with you guys…they take a Subaru STI out snowboarding…you just have to watch and see:

This should have been an ad for the Super Bowl, I wanted to go out and buy an STI after seeing it. Eric took his STI snowboarding with us last a couple weekends ago, here’s his with the snowboard rack:

Here’s a video I did back in college featuring a buddy’s WRX tearing it up through the snow:

Last weekend I went to 7 Springs resort in PA for a few days of snowboarding with 14 of my friends. Since there were so many of us, we got a 2 bedroom condo, a 4 bedroom townhouse, and a keg to stay at. Here we are on the first day, the resort is huge but you can see the main lodge:

Here I am on the top of one of the mountains, you can see more of the resort at the bottom of the hill:

What’s a snowboarding post without a little action shot?

After each long day of boarding we hit up the bars in the hotel, here’s a few of us at from Saturday night:

This is my third or fourth time to 7 Springs, it’s always a great time and only a few hours drive. Next year I’d like to try snowboarding somewhere on the west coast though, I think I’m too used to icy conditions.

All around the net I’ve seen my favorite bloggers post their happy new years posts, and I thought I’d do the same.

Let The Festivities Begin

For New Years Eve, we headed over to Glen Burnie, MD for a party that our friend Butch was having. When I was back in college in Baltimore I used to live in a duplex type townhome with two best friends. The house attached to ours was what became 3 good friends of ours (One of them, Eric, is now my business partner for Tri Megatech). Almost every Saturday we used to throw dual house keg parties. Butch’s party had a lot of those people that we hadn’t seen in a long time, so it was like a big reunion. The party had about 40-50 people, 3 kegs, food, and a midnight champagne toast.

Here’s a few of the girls from the party:

Here’s me with a few of the girls:

Here’s the host of the party, Butch:

My buddy Mike and I ran the beer pong table towards the end of the night, never losing a game. Check out the below video, and you’ll see my excitement about that at the end:

What I Want To Change In 2008

There are quite a few things I want to do in 2008:

• I will eat much better and cook for myself more.
• I will workout more and get in better shape, especially by this Summer
• I will clean up my current businesses. By this I mean I will sell/get rid of what I feel I don’t want to continue or spend more time on so I can put more concentration on what I want to grow.
• I will launch a new site that I’ve been thinking about for about 6 months now
• I will help grow Tri Megatech by at least 200% of gross revenue from 2007
• I will generate at least $5,000 in revenue from Carbon Fiber Gear
• I will launch the new design for this blog

What are your goals, and what will you be doing to accomplish them?