I am only now able to write about the amazing dinner I had last Thursday at the home of Basque chef and Nuba partner Ernesto Gomez.

This was less a sit-down affair than a roaming culinary jam session involving Ernesto and some of the chefs he schooled with in Galicia, all of whom, upon graduation, dispersed to various cities and opened restaurants of their own.

The evening featured experiments in clam, mussel, crab, sable fish and octopus, with the Manhattan-style chowder stealing the show. I have never eaten like this before.

Also on the bill was Victor, Ernesto’s partner in Nuba, who arrived on the heels of Ernesto’s Waldorf partner, Tom Anselmi. I have been seeing a lot of Tom the past month, helping as I have with the Waldorf’s (re)opening night program (October 30), but this was my first visit with Victor, who regaled us with stories of a jazz club he ran in Windsor, Ontario in the mid-1970s and, perhaps as a testament to its success, the year he spent in the Grand Cayman Islands.

I say I am only now able to write about (or is it around?) my dinner at Ernesto’s, not because the food took me out of myself (though it was, as I said, amazing), but because of internet problems, which I am happy to report have been fixed.

Is it me, or is the occasional suspension of home internet like an illness? Because I sure haven’t felt myself these past couple days. A long hard fall from those delicious seafood dishes.