a meal to remember.

Last night, Rob and I went out for a fantastic dinner at a Fancy White-Tablecloth Place. (Actually, the tables were dressed in lovely terra-cotta French Provençal linens.) Jean-Robert at Pigall's is probably Cincinnati's top restaurant -- its name a combination of the top chef and one of the city's finest old establishments. Back in the 1960s, Cincinnati somehow produced three of the 10 exclusive Mobil Five-Star restaurants in the country, and Pigall's was one of them.

It was an amazing meal and a terrific evening.

We started with cocktails at the lounge next door, then moved into the dining room. The space was gorgeous -- an inviting, long, low-ceilinged space with interesting decor and the above-mentioned linens. From the moment we sat down, the service was perfection -- proper and professional but warm and unpretentious.

And the food. OMG, the food.

We opted for the three-course menu, though the five-stepper beckoned. As a couple of fairly accomplished home cooks, we're always awed when a restaurant takes things that we prepare at home -- in this case, roast chicken and roast sea bass -- and turns them into something we could never possibly accomplish in our own kitchen.

We started with a lovely amuse bouche -- three of them, actually: a warm potato soup, a duck-confit salad and a phyllo purse of sauteed red cabbage and cream cheese.

First courses were, for me, a composed crabmeat/avocado/cucumber salad with a perfect scoop of cider-vinegar sorbet; for Rob, gorgeous duck ravioli with an intensely flavored duck/wine sauce. They were as different as can be, but both were just perfect.

Second courses: for me, the roast sea bass, which sat atop a bed of roasted fennel, sauteed shiitake mushrooms (which gave a creamy, earthy quality), orange segments and blue potatoes, and which was doused in a gorgeous orange butter sauce. I was amazed by the little garnish on top of the fish -- I thought it was shredded carrot, but one bite produced this intense, velvety flavor of candied orange peel. Rob had the roast chicken, which was topped with a wine sauce and sat alongside a sort of potato/cheese/mushroom croquette.

Dessert, as if we needed it, was for me a cheese assortment and for Rob an amazing dark-chocolate molten cake that was elevated to sublime with a scoop of pumpkin ice cream. The first and last entries in my mild-to-strong cheese plate were both Basque sheeps-milk cheeses that tasted similar but impossibly different.

All the way home, we talked about the individual flavors and tastes like we'd dissect the scenes of a complex movie. Every single dish was built from a pantry-full of ingredients, and you could taste each and every one of them individually. You could tell that all the elements had been prepared separately, seasoned minimally, and composed like instruments in an orchestra.

It wasn't a cheap night out, but it wasn't a bank-breaker, either. And it (obviously) left quite an impression. We'll most definitely go back.