Dinner At The Art Museum

From time to time Panorama, the excellent restaurant at the Saint Louis Art Museum, offers a prix fixe tasting menu with beverage pairings (not necessarily wine). Last night the theme was bubbles - prosecco, sparkling rose, champagne and fizzy moscato. Mrs. C and I were in attendance. Executive chef Ivy Magruder and wine consultant Mike Ward explained the offerings to the crowd, at least those who looked up from their phones. Yum.               

Dinner At The Art Museum

The St. Louis Art Museum has an excellent restaurant, Panorama, named, I suppose, for its sweeping view of the statue of Louis IX and Art Hill. The restaurant got terrible reviews when it first opened. The current executive chef, Ivy Magruder, has engineered a complete turn around.

We had not heard about this until a couple of days ago. The museum hardly publicizes it but one Friday a month, Panorama runs a multi-course, prix fixe tasting menu they call Art At The Table. Mrs. C hapened to find out about it and we attended last night's meal. It has a seafood theme. Very, very good. We booked for June on the spot.

That's Chef Magruder in the second picture. Bottom, the entrance to the George Caleb Bingham exhibit. It closes tomorrow. We're going this afternoon.

                         

The World's Fair Pavillion

This post could also be titled "Filler." I got nothing new. Too much work and extra things to do around the house that Mrs. C normally covers. Her recovery from her knee replacement is coming along well but it's still a slow, difficult process. 

So anyway, these are two panos of one of the two buildings left in Forest Park from the 1904 World's Fair, the other being the Art Museum. Hard to tell here since the pano technique and wide angle lens create distortion on the sides, but this is at the top of a rather grand hill. There are a lot of wedding receptions here. When I was in college, the Grateful Dead showed up on Sunday afternoons and played here for free a few times after regular theater shows. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . 

Today is one of the year's main photo ops in The Lou, the big Mardi Gras parade. Pix of crazy people on the march starting tomorrow.                            

Winter On Art Hill

I'm learning how to do Photoshop panoramas - take rows and columns of shots - at least four but there is no specific limit - and let the software  stitch them together to make a big whole. This is a six-shot pano, looking down across the wintery grass on Art Hill to the Grand Basin in Forest Park.

Mrs. C's recovery from her knee replacement is remarkable. The physical therapist had her up with a walker in the hall while I was there yesterday. She was remarkably stable and had little pain. Which gets to why I'm writing so few comments - family duties, office time to make up for when I'm at the hospital, and I gotta go shoot something. She will be home tomorrow. Things will straighten out.                               

It's Panoramic

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I went to Forest Park with my tripod last weekend to play around with panorama shots. You take a number of pictures while panning across the scene, being careful to overlap them a bit. Then Photoshop carefully stitches them together. Crop, a little touch-up and voilá. The scene here is Art Hill, the great, sweeping lawn below the museum. It’s been on the blog before, like here and here. For a sense of scale, note the tiny person at the near edge of the Grand Lagoon.

WHAT WAS A LAFF RIOT: a touring company of Chicago’s Second City improv comedy troupe was in town with the current production, Deface the Nation. Political razor blades flying in every direction.

TOMORROW: with luck, something from Saturday afternoon’s Great Forest Park Balloon Race.