September 27, 2018 Lunch – Inn at National Village Museum. Dinner – La Papile.

September 27, 2018 Lunch – Inn at National Village Museum. Dinner – La Papile.

We slept in a bit today.  I had granola, yogurt, milk, and cherry preserves for breakfast.

At 10:30 we went by Metro to Aviator Plaza and walked into Bucharest’s large King Michael 1 Park until we arrived at the south entrance to the National Village Museum, where Romania has collected historic buildings from many parts of Romania demonstrating each region’s historic architectural style.  The age of buildings ranged across the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century.

We walked for about an hour until we came to an old inn that was a modern restaurant and decided to sit and eat lunch.

It was cool and the wind was blowing, so we immediately ordered cups of hot red wine.  I added honey to mine to sweeten it a bit and dispel its bitterness.

Suzette ordered a Caprese salad and I ordered one of the daily specials, Lamb Pastrami, which is salt and air cured lamb strips served with polenta.  Neither of our dishes was particularly good.  No one had thought to rinse some of the salt off the lamb pastrami nor did the chef make a sauce for the pastrami as the chef at the winery had on the 19th.

The tomatoes in Suzette’s Caprese salad were not ripe and instead of fresh basil the chef shuck dried basil flakes on the salad and instead of fresh mozzarella, the chef used slices of firm mozzarella like you would find on a sandwich.  All in all a pretty bad meal in beautiful historic setting made more palatable with two local Ciuc beers, but worth the $26.00 price.

After lunch we made our way to the main entrance where we hailed an Uber and returned to the apartment a bit after 3:00.

I took a 30 minute nap and then a bit before 4:00 we walked to the Wine Pro wine shop run by a sommelier where we met Aaron and Monica and talked to the owner for about an hour.  We then went to another wine Bar named 1000 and drank wine and talked to the owner and tried his wines.  His wines were really good, especially the Shiraz.

They served us sausages and cheese with the wine.  We paid $100.00 for the tasting.

We discussed and decided upon seafood, so Monica directed us to La Papile, which features fresh fish. As we walked to La Papile we saw a beautiful sunset. After we arrived at La Papile,  Aaron left for a 9:00 meeting, Monica stayed and split a dozen large fresh oysters from Brittany.  Each of Suzette and Monica ordered a bowl of cream of mushroom soup and I ordered a bowl of seafood soup, although I was not very hungry.

The fish soup was really good with lots of fish, mussels, a shrimp, and some octopus in a thick tomato based broth.

Suzette had a glass of wine. The bill was 317 lei or about $80.00.  The oysters were $5.00 each, but beautiful.  I would highly rate La Papile as a place to get really fresh seafood.

After dinner at around 9:30 we returned to the apartment and did some laundry and watched the Kavenaugh hearings and drank glasses of fetescea Alba white wine.

Bon Appetit