On Saturday night in Tahoe a handful of us went out to dinner to celebrate Dino's 30th birthday. Ben, who used to live in South Lake, chose the restaurant, Freshies. I was skeptical because the only other major house outing was to a bar in Meyers, chosen by Ben. The place smelled like ass and many of us left and went to the casinos which smelled only marginally better.

Frshies is a small place in little strip mall. It only has about 8 tables and they don't take reservations, so we had to wait. I hate waiting for anything, especially to be seated at a restaurant, but I subjugated my needs to the will of the group and dealt with it.

We waited about 45 minutes for a table that would seat the 7 of us. But when we finally got in the place, I was not disappointed. Freshies has an ecclectic menu. It's sort of Polynesian themed, but with a broad ethnic flair with an assortment of vegetarian and vegan dishes. Everything was organic. Everything was super fresh. There was so much good stuff on the menu, I had a hard time deciding what to get. We started with fried calamari and this shrimp, avo and ahi nori roll that was lightly tempura'ed. Delicous. I had the chicken tortilla soup (I can never pass up a good soup), but I had a tough time deciding what to get for the main course. Everything sounded so good. Cumin rubbed seared ahi tuna steak, tempura anything you can imagine, eggplant parmesan, chemical free shrimp and scallops, grilled alaskan rock cod, hawaiian style baby back ribs, and on and on. There wasn't anything on the menu that I would have been unhappy with. I finally settled on the jamabalya salad which was massive and smothered with diced chicken, andouille sausage and bay shrimp. It was amazing. I couldn't finish it. Not even close. It was like the endless bowl of salad. I picked at it for half an hour and hardly made a dent, but I was stuffed, seriously stuffed, like unbutton the top button stuffed.

Then the waitess came over with the dessert menu. I was, like, forget it, there isn't a chance I'm going to have room for dessert, but that was before she started describing the Big Kahuna, which was something like a mud pie on steroids. Before she even finished the description, I blurted out that I'd take one. It was a amazing. Just a stack of coffee ice cream on a chocolate cookie crust drizzled with chocolate suace and topped with whipped cream. OH MY GOD.

They had to roll me out of there, but I'll be going back. You can count on that. I'm salivating just thinking about it.