La Kid and I took Mr UD out to dinner last night for a belated Father’s Day (we were in Utah on the day itself).

It was one of those strange outings during which absolutely everything goes absolutely smoothly.

We drove down Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda on a beautiful mild summer evening with full sun and no humidity. Traffic moved well. We cracked ourselves up quoting lines from Borat.

Walentynka (our bright red car) purred into a parking spot right off Wisconsin and La Kid hopped out, her hand overflowing with quarters for the meter.

She wore a light blue summer frock. Her very blond hair was pulled back by a white headband. She looked like Grace Kelly with glasses.

Mr UD wore one of his Father’s Day presents – a beige Polo shirt. He gave off a gated community aura.

I’d never been in a Ruth’s Chris Steak House before, but I chose it because Mr UD is a raw steak man. The place is effusively friendly and very beautiful. It has dark wood and heavy crimson drapes, like the Harvard Club. Unlike the Harvard Club, though, it’s very light inside. The Harvard Club is dark, like a massage parlor.

Our server was crisp and bubbly and attentive and spoke at serious length about the meat. Mr UD enjoyed this.

When he left, though, we felt adrift, all of us flipping though the big heavy menu full of history and meat lore and complex ordering strategies. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted a pomegranate martini.

As the server served my drink — loud crashing of ice as he shook it and shook it before pouring it into a triangular glass with lemoned sugar on its brim — he helped us make sense of the menu. Mr UD settled on a rib-eye with the tonnage of a cargo ship, while La Kid and I chose delicate petite filets.

It was a Thursday night, and the place was full. I’d figured this as a business lunch spot, all the denizens of ‘thesda’s skyscrapers pulling in at around one; but it did a hell of a dinner business too.

So our steaks were high and fluffy just like the bread pudding La Kid and I shared for dessert… Pretty much everything in the room looked like steak with sauce running off of it, or maybe that was just how it seemed to me, under the influence of so much steak… But look at this photo of their bread pudding, taken from the restaurant’s website. (Click on the image.)

After dinner we took a walk in the little park behind the restaurant and everyone was extremely happy in every conceivable respect.

Just one of those rare totally smooth outings.

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HOLD THE PRESSES!

Mr UD points out two rough, not smooth, moments last night:

1.) The server swept by at one point and complimented me on having ordered the salad with blue cheese. “BUT you had ordered the salad without blue cheese.”

2) Although Mr UD ordered cappuccino, “he brought me espresso.”