Dining out

My basic rule in restaurants is to never order something I could make for myself at home.  Not that you see Fried Spam On Rice all that often in restaurants, but it's the principle of the thing rather than the whatever, if you know what I mean.  This means that I tend to be lured into ordering dishes that I don't fully comprehend because I don't know what some of the key ingredients are, or perhaps the method of cooking is alien to me.

We went out to our Chinese New Year slash Valentines slash Birthday dinner tonight and I came sooooo close to ordering something I didn't particularly like the sound of, simply because it came with something called "labna and ponzu".  Call me ignorant, but they didn't have much labna and ponzu on the streets of Struggletown where I grew up.  Can anyone tell me what they are without using a search engine?  I could be wrong, but perhaps they are the main characters in a novel by Michael Chabon.  In which case I should have ordered that dish after all.

I ended up getting a curried snapper and fried oysters on babaganoush, which was deluxe.  My Smaller Half had zucchini flowers and smoked duck, which was also deluxe, even though the zucchini flowers mystically transmogrified into mushrooms by the time they arrived at the table.  Such are the perils of gourmet dining!