Birthday Lunch at the Raymond

All these years, we've been driving passed The Raymond, and said to ourselves "we gotta eat at this place someday. It looked sooo...curious. Is it a house? Is it a restaurant?" That day came! On MA's birthday last month, I decided to surprise her by taking her there for lunch. Originally, it was supposed to be for dinner. But a quick scan thru the menu shows that the dinner entree selections were very limited. I got the feeling that this is one of those froufrou gourmet restaurants. You know, the kind that charges you $30 for an entree, and the only thing on the plate is the same size as a scoop of ice cream. But the lunch menu, on the other hand, had quite a bit more of a selection.

Anyway...so we went there for lunch on MA's birthday. Here's an interesting tidbit... The Raymond was a grand hotel built in the late 1800s...can't remember what year exactly. The hotel burnt down in the early 1900s, rebuilt, prospered, and was finally razed during the Depression back in the 1930's, and the only thing left standing was the caretaker's cabin. The Raymond Restaurant is that cabin. Ok, back to the lunch. We started with Crab Cakes. According to MA, it had some serious crab meat, not the rubber-like imitation stuff. For the entrees...I had the Pan Seared Australian Barramundi, and MA opted for Lobster Omelet. (Gosh darn it...I fogot to take picture.) I found the lunch price and portions were more to my liking. And I must say, our lunch turned out to be pretty good. But that wasn't the most interesting thing at the Raymond. It was the conversation that we overheard. Couldn't help it actually, they were so loud.

There was this group of people sitting across the room from us. We could hear them as though they were at the next table. We didn't recognized them from anywhere, but they did stand out among the Pasadena crowd. As their conversation went on, we realized who they were. It turns out that the guy that did most of the talking was some kind of filmmaker. You might have seen his footage on Youtube or CNN...he was the one that shot the surfing footage by the collapsing glacier in Alaska. As the conversation went on, it appears that he was in a meeting with a business advisor. He was told that he was loosing out on tons of money, since he gave some verbal ok to someone to use the surfing footage without a licensing fee. And then they start tossing ideas of making other movies...yadayadayada. It's more interesting when you're there to listen in actually.

We didn't stick around for the end. We'll definitely come back for lunch again some day. We might even do dinner if there's more than 4 items on the menu.