Celebrating our birthdays

Our birthday dessert © Sybille Yates

As many of our friends know, Sybille and I have birthdays that are just two days, but several years 🙂  apart. 24^th February for Sybille – 26^th February for me. Our usual plan is to have a joint celebration on the intervening day, which is what we successfully managed to do last Wednesday. However, sometimes the liturgical calendar conspires against us. The last time our birthdays respectively fell on a Tuesday and a Thursday, as they did this year, was in 2009. Then the intervening day was Ash Wednesday 🙁

Whilst attending the Christmas Party at the British Embassy last December, we met Paul and Michaela, a British/Czech couple who have a business with the interesting name of ‘The Happy Monkey s.r.o.’ Their company run a butchers shop, another butchers shop combined with a bar – Maso a kobliha / Meat and doughnuts, together with an upmarket dégustation restaurant entitled Sansho. As a special treat to mark our birthdays, we booked a table at Sansho for the evening of Wednesday 25^th February.

Sybille’s cocktail © Ricky Yates

When we arrived at 18.30, surprisingly we were the only customers. However, that soon changed as more people arrived. Apparently most evenings, if you want a table at Sansho, you need to book in advance.

Knowing it was our joint birthdays, Paul kindly presented us with aperitifs – this interesting green cocktail for Sybille and a glass of Prosecco for me. The courses that followed are better illustrated by Sybille’s photographs rather than by my wordy descriptions.

First course © Sybille Yates

Second course © Sybille Yates

Third course © Sybille Yates

Fourth course – we did have one each 🙂 © Sybille Yates

Fifth course © Sybille Yates

Main course © Sybille Yates

We washed all of this down with a very quaffable rosé wine.

Our dessert, as can be seen in the photograph at the beginning of this post, came complete with two candles. We did blow them out before consuming!

The total cost was around five times what we would normally pay in one of our local bar-restaurants for an evening meal with wine. But the quality of the food, the ambience of the location, and the high standard of service, more than justified the expense.

Suitably dressed © Ricky Yates

For this special occasion, Sybille honoured her promise to me when we made our booking, and wore a dress. In return, I wore my suit with a shirt and tie. But I’m afraid I don’t have a photograph to post as Sybille always wants to be behind the camera, rather than in front of it. So instead, here is a photograph from nearly three years ago with Sybille in the same dress and me wearing the same suit and tie, though with a different shirt.