Miami Eats Numero Dos: The Blue Door Cobb Salad

FLASHBACK

Life doesn't get any better than sitting on the patio of the Blue Door Restaurant enjoying one of the worlds best Cobb Salads. I don't if it is sitting at the perfect table (of which all the tables are perfect), peering into the wonderland that is the Delano back lawn, having the South Beach ocean breeze waft the grey smoke from your Marlboro Light into infinity, or being surrounded by all the gaudy fabulousness that only comes from nouveau riche tourists and "businessmen" with expense accounts, but things are good.

Like all men about to begin a journey into a great abyss, in my case a 5 day journey into the bowels of middle America, I felt the need to have a last meal. The Cobb Salad was what I chose. What it exactly fed (my growing self awareness that I was leaving, my established and growing sense of self grandeur that came from living for 3 years in Miami, or my empty stomach) I'm not sure but it hit the spot.

The bacon was smoky, the shrimp pink, the avocado smooth, the lettuce and tomatoes crisp, it was more than a meal, it was like my life in South Beach beautiful arranged on a plate. I felt as if I was in the protagonist in Like Water for Chocolate, ingesting my memories, my emotions. It was at the very same table that I had my first meal after breaking up with most amazing bf, met the cute waiter that gave me my very first Christmas sex (and it was a gift that kept on giving, or coming? or both?), met the up and coming maitre d' with the perfect shoes, and spent the friend's birthday that I still don't completely remember.

I was at the place that when I first arrived, made me realize that I had moved somewhere that was bigger than me, that would cause me to realize and express a happiness that I now so easily feign when being photographed. In other words it was bliss.