Monday, February 1, 2010

The night out at a fancy restaurant!

Usually we don’t go to fancy restaurants. Living a humble lifestyle, if we ever eat out, it’s usually either at a local fast food chain or a family restaurant. Last year Joe put quite a few hours in at the station, putting together a new graphic look, saving the station thousands of dollars. Joe wasn’t about to get a raise or compensation for it, but he was given a gift card from the news leadership team for Cotton Row, a fancy restaurant downtown on the square. We have been holding on to the gift card for some time now, hoping there’s no expiration date on it. We finally decided to cash it in this past weekend and go on a date to the fancy restaurant.
Earlier in the day before we went we decided to look at the menu online and see what we all had to choose from, expecting there to be a world of variety. But instead we mainly found seafood dishes which I don’t really care for and most of them were French words and specialty dishes that took a dictionary to understand. We were getting a little bit scared; hopefully they had something we both would like. We got there in the evening and it was freezing outside. Of course we would pick the coldest night of the year to do this.
We had a candlelit table and the restaurant was interesting. They had preserved the history of the old Huntsville building and used that as part of their décor. The walls were ancient brick, and you could see the old wooden support beams in the ceiling. This building used to be a bank and the vault is still in the wall, pretty interesting.
When the waiter came by he explained the menu and had to translate a few words for us. Luckily there were some added dishes that weren’t on the menu and both sounded more appeasing than seafood at the moment.
We ended up ordering a dish of Marscapone Gnocchi, which is basically potato dumplings with some yummy sauce; to our surprise they were really good. I got duck breast with some side of vegetables and pasta mixture. And Joe got what the waiter called the crème de la crème of steak, the Kobe Beef dish.
The waiter said this was so good because the cow was on a careful diet which included white wine and classical music. We thought it was a joke and Joe had to ask if he was serious.
I’ve never heard of feeding a cow alcohol and constantly playing classical music for him. Apparently it has an effect on the tenderness of his muscles. Both dishes were really good.
I’ve never eaten duck before and I was afraid to try it. Joe said it probably tastes like chicken, but after trying it we both think it tastes much better than chicken. The vegetable pasta mixture was really good too, I wish I knew how they made it. It looks like we’ll be doing some duck hunting in the stores now.

Joe’s meat was also really good. Maybe we should go out and get us a cow and play some Mozart for it through Joe’s sound system. Dessert was also good, different, but good. I got a Banana Bavarian something and Joe got peanut butter and jelly something with ice cream, we enjoyed it.
The atmosphere took a while to get used to. Candlelit tables surrounded by rich people in suits who were very chatty, was a big difference from Arby’s and Popeye’s that we’re used to.

Before this, the most expensive restaurant we’ve gone to was Olive Garden. We were discussing how much of a different lifestyle rich people like this have, going out to fancy restaurants every other night to socialize with other rich friends over a glass of expensive wine.
The biggest shock of the night was the bill. We expected it to be high, but not this high. Our total was $121.00, just for the two of us, wow! Joe’s beef was fifty-five dollars.

They must have played that classical music through a high-dollar Bose system! That’s probably the best steak that Joe will ever have eaten.
It was a nice treat but we probably won’t do that again for a long time. Luckily Joe’s gift card paid for a hundred dollars of it, leaving only twenty-one dollars plus tip for us to pay out of pocket. All in all it was a really nice evening with each other out on the frozen town.