Yes, I definitely remember the original Wild Ginger. I was living in Alaska but frequently flying in/out of Seattle for various professional services not available at home. I know I've never been so enamored of a restaurant in my life--we'd go straight there from the airport for lunch. Ritualistically, that meal would always be a whole crab Burmese curry and whatever other seafood dishes we fancied with a Gunderloch Spatlese, and then we'd return for dinner and order meat curries and a California Zinfandel. It was there that I tasted my first Rafanelli Zin. The impressions the restaurant left on me are, obviously, indelible; and the new space, both before and after expansion, has fed me well a time or three but never quite met the standards routinely set by the original.
And yes, I accept it as normal for this to happen. But I don't have to like it.
