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.

I was watching TV when I happened to see a commercial for limited edition mint crisp M&M’s. It’s apparently a promotion in conjunction with the new Indiana Jones movie. I have to admit, I have a bit of a sweet tooth, and I’m a HUGE fan of mint-flavored candy. The commercial worked on me, and I immediately had a craving. I had to go to the store anyway, so I ended up going to Target, Wal Mart, Exxon, and Bloom (grocery store) which were all in the same shopping center…none of them had it there.

That was about three weeks ago, and every time I’m at a store that would carry M&M’s, I look to see if they have them. No dice. So finally I went over to M&M’s website, and contacted them asking where I could possibly buy these. I get this canned response back:

In response to your email regarding M&M’S MINT CRISP LIMITED EDITION.

Thanks for contacting us about M&M’S MINT CRISP LIMITED EDITION.

Because we are reviewing our marketing strategy, this product is unavailable at this time. Your comments will be shared with our Marketing Staff.

The product cannot be purchased via the Internet nor directly from us.

Have a great day!

Your Friends at Mars Snackfood US

First of all, what kind of response is this? Does Mars have robots working for them?

Second of all, it’s surprising to see such money being wasted. Thousands of dollars spent showing and producing commercials (on top of whatever other marketing was used that I haven’t seen), just to pull the product right at the time when the Indiana Jones movie comes out? While I trust that the marketing dollars backing these billion dollar companies can make better decisions than I can, I’m curious to know the real reasoning (or at least a more detailed explanation) behind why I can’t find these on shelves. Mint crisp M&Ms are still on the website (but then again, I’ve never seen Wildly Cherry either). Next time they should just send me a check for 50% of what they spent on the commercials, and I won’t complain

For now I guess I’ll just have to trust the review of one lucky person that was able to get a pack:

I however, Ms. No Like Mint, really enjoyed them.

It was kinda like, eat one, eat another, how about a few at a time, trust me they are quite addictive.

I hope they will be kept on the market after the movie is done. I think they would make a great after dinner candy or just because.

I guess for now my only option is to buy them on eBay, they seem to be going anywhere from $4-$20/bag. Unless Mars is reading this and wants to send me one

If you’re a mint fan, and tried them, what did you think? If you happen to see them in a store, post a comment and give the details!

Update: A friend of mine has since found a bag of the good stuff at her local Giant grocery store.  She luckily read my post and got me one as well.  After trying them, I’m not as impressed as I thought I’d be, but they are pretty good.  I’d love to have a non crisp version though.

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!

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time working on the new design for this blog (Which I hope to launch as soon as next week!). One of the parts I was working on was a “promote” feature, where I could choose to put some sort of social media promotional button on the top headline of a post in order to better promote people “voting” for a post. I was planning on using your standard Digg badge that we’ve seen everywhere, but then I really thought about something that bothered me about Digg.

I’ve had posts that generate a good amount of Digg’s, but they happen over time. Digg works more like a popular “news” site in the fact that content has to be Dugg enough times within usually 24 hours or less to make it on the front page. That why I really like StumbleUpon.

It can literally take just one stumble to get content to generate some good traffic. Then say two months later, somebody else randomly stumbles your post…traffic can generate again. It’s not always just a one-time surge, it usually lasts a few days, and then can continue to bring traffic over time. For this reason, I decided to give it a shot and promote StumbleUpon over Digg for this section (for now). I wanted to use an SU badge, but there wasn’t really anything out there…so I made one:

It follows the same design as the Digg badge so that people recognize it and are more willing to click it. Feel free to use this on your site if you’d like. I will probably do a couple of sizing variations, while I’ll update on this post in the future.

If you have seen or made a StumbleUpon badge, feel free to let me know so I can link to it from here.

Also, feel free to add me as a friend on StumbleUpon, you can find my profile here. I sometimes forget to stumble things, but I generally try to if I really like something I see on the net.

Oh, and make sure to Stumble this post

While the title of this post may seem like this would be some sort of paid review, I am actually writing about a company from personal experience. I love to speak out about companies that I have good experiences with, because I want others to do the same.

Many of us are business owners, or people that are thinking about starting a business. Many times cash is a hurdle, and many times getting somewhere between $10,000-$100,000 is enough to overcome that hurdle. Or say you want to buy a car, dealing with your bank or a company like Capital One Auto Finance can be a huge hassle, especially if you’re not buying from a dealership, as there is a lot of back and forth.

When I was buying my Dodge Viper, I was also selling my Corvette at the same time. Since I wanted to pay cash for the Viper, I also wanted to make sure I had a safety net of money in case it would take me longer than I thought with my Corvette. I started to look for a loan option with a low APR, and came across a company by the name of First Again. The concept behind this loan company is awesome, and here’s why:

• You can only get approved for a loan if you have excellent credit
• Since they only accept people with excellent credit, it enables you to get way lower rates. I got at least 3% lower than what I could find for a used car from an actual person.
• It doesn’t matter what you use the loan for. You can use it to finance your business, buy a car, pay your credit card bills, do home improvements, etc. They call it an AnythingBill.
• Your loan comes in the form of cash. You don’t have to get a check to write out to a particular person or play any sort of waiting games.
• If you apply for a loan, and get approved, they transfer money to you right away. I literally applied for a $10,000 loan, got approved, and the next day I had $10,000 extra in my bank account. This was a huge selling point for me.
• There are no fees for paying the loan off early. I ended up selling my Corvette two weeks after getting the loan…I simply paid off the total loan right away, ended up paying that first months interest, and that was that. It was quite cheap for the peace of mind that I took the loan out for.

This was by far the best loan experience I’ve ever had, and I can easily personally recommend First Again for your next loan.

If you have any other companies that you recommend, post a comment and let me know (let me know why as well)…or if you’ve used First Again, let me know your thoughts.

For earth day, part of the effort that the company I work for did was to make a bunch of the closest parking spots in the garage reserved for hybrid vehicles. As a joke, I thought it’d be funny to take the extreme opposite car and park it in one of the spots. I only parked it for a couple hours, and within 30 minutes I already got a parking violation. After I moved my car, the spot was open for the rest of the day as I guess there were no other hybrids in the garage…so no harm no foul