Date Night

My mom offered to watch Ella for a couple hours yesterday evening, so that gave Donald and me a chance to work on my date night goal. We only had about 2.5 hours, which meant we needed to stay in the Northeast area for dinner. Choices on this side of town are a bit limited (mostly chains), but we did the best with what little time we had. Donald wondered if it should even count as a date, but I figure since no children were present, it was definitely a date!

We hem and hawed over where to go. Should we do a nice adult restaurant, or should be stick with casual and go to a bar and knock back a few while noshing on bar food. Hmmm...bar it is! Not a tough choice there. So we headed to Bar Louie, which is in the outdoor mall near our house. It was a gorgeous night and we thought it would be nice to sit outside. When we drove up, I noticed no one was outside. That should've been clue #1 that this was a bad choice. We walked towards the restaurant and noticed at least 7 wait staff standing around outside smoking and chit chatting (Clue #2). We walk in and it's a "seat yourself" kinda place (Clue #3). We took a table by the bar, thinking this would help our chances of being served. The dining area wasn't packed, but all the tables around the bar were taken. You'd think the wait staff would be more attentive. We stared at the menu for a good 10 minutes and not one single person acknowledged us. So we finally decided Bar Louie was not the place for us and walked out. Not sure if we'll ever bother going back there, which is a shame because their menu prices were decent and they have a nice outdoor area.

It didn't take us long to decide on our next option, but we'd dwindled our time down to about 1.5 by now. In the same outdoor mall is Arizona's Steakhouse, which is a bit more on the adult dinner side. So we headed over there and as luck would have it, there was one outdoor table left! The weather was perfect, the food was good, and the company was even better. Our only complaint would be the number of flies that seemed to swarm around us while we ate, but we didn't let that ruin our evening. And I even ran into an old friend as we were leaving.

Yay us for being able to turn a bad night into a good one.