I Heart Roast Beef, and Jon

I've never been happier to see a pile of roast beef on butcher paper than I was the night of Thursday, August 16th--the night Jon asked me to marry him.

My path to that roast beef started the day before, when my boss invited me to join him for dinner at Bouley with one of our top investors, who was going to be signing a large chunk of change over to us. A free dinner at a restaurant I can't afford sounded divine, and I was looking forward to blogging about the meal.

There was something different in the air at the office Thursday, which I attributed to my boss' nerves and my little black dress, heels and pearls. I purposefully ate a small lunch, thinking dinner would be at 6. Around 4, my boss told me our client decided he didn't want to sign the documents at dinner, and that we'd first need to go to The Bowery Hotel to have his vice president, who I'll call Lora, sign them. A little while later, my boss was "running late," so I volunteered to take the documents and meet him at the restaurant.

The Bowery Hotel is two blocks from our apartment, and over the last year Jon and I watched it being built and talked about how it'd be fun to stay there one day. It's very new Lower East Side chic, the type of hotel you picture models and billionaires living at for months on end.

It's a testament to my boss' finesse that I didn't suspect anything out of the ordinary as I entered the hotel lobby and asked for Lora's room. When I reached room 416, I was surprised to see the door ajar. I paused, knocked, paused, called out "Lora," opened it a bit, and froze when I saw a wall lined with flowers and tea lights and a boudoir with even more candles.

"F*%$, Jennifer, you've got the wrong room. Now you have to go back to the front desk," I thought as I seethed with self-annoyance. I was about to back out when Jon stepped into my line of sight, wearing a suit.

I dropped the documents.

"Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god," were the only words I could muster as he led me into the room to propose. I was so shocked that I didn't take my purse off until after I said yes.

One perfect proposal and outstanding bottle of Billecart-Salmon Brut Reserve champagne later, we were ravenous. On the hotel room floor, we cozily ate the picnic that Jon had put together earlier in the day -- baguettes, Heirloom tomatoes, Brie, Manchego, and that pile of rare roast beef, which I piled into my mouth three or four slices at a time. It wasn't that the roast beef was out of the ordinary, but that my post-proposal culinary needs had been so thoughtfully anticipated.

Dessert was a selection of chocolates, the kind I only ever buy for other people, many of which I've been eyeing at Whole Foods for years. There was one shaped like a candy apple, another like an ice cream cone, and ones flavored with port (we once did a fabulous port tasting in Manitou Springs, CO), cinnamon (a little like the 5 Boroughs Ice Cream I raved about earlier this summer), caramel (because Jon knew I'd been craving it for weeks), and orange (like the Grom gelato we had the week before).

I especially love chocolate in the morning, so as Jon knew I would, I finished the chocolates for breakfast. Then, just as we have for the last six and a half years, and now as we always will, we started talking about what to eat for lunch.