A RockWall Bistro outing.

At NA Confidential just yesterday, the talk was of weight loss (A dieter's lament: For all the meals I ate before), and so tonight the Curmudgeons set off to reward my success in shedding pounds, and my wife Diana’s in completing an inaugural semester in graduate school, and we did so by – how else? – eating a fine meal.

Our choice of table was the RockWall Bistro in Floyds Knobs, and quite the meal it was, beginning with fried oysters, continuing through a sampler platter of fresh tasting seafood (hers), a drunken quarter of a Cornish hen marinated in wine with roasted potatoes and asparagus (mine), and finishing with beignets dusted with confectioner’s powdered sugar and dredged in chocolate and black coffee.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, but give me a break: It was the first big meal for me in almost two months, and without such occasional breaks in the lowered food intake routine, life simply wouldn’t be very much fun, would it?

Speaking of liquid bread, RockWall used to serve NABC draft beer, but that was several bar managers ago. The tap selection isn’t bad at all: Guinness, Bass, Belhaven Scottish and as a “seasonal” choice, Bell’s Two Hearted. Although there’s mass-market swill in bottles, the list also includes Pilsner Urquell, Sierra Nevada, Rogue Dead Guy and Upland Dragonfly IPA.

Considering the composition of the meal I had and the chef's use of red wine in preparing it, perhaps the ideal beer would have been Chimay Grand Reserve … better yet, Abbaye des Rocs Grand Cru. However, since I’d already had a half-pint shift beer of Schlenkerla Urbock, a glass of red wine sufficed to ease the hen’s passage.

Just so you know, all this extravagant caloric grandeur was accompanied by an 18 km bicycle ride earlier in the day and a two-mile evening walk.

There were two too many espressos during a convivial morning’s cigar smoke with friends, but that’s another story.