Saturday, February 28, 2009

Restaurant fortnight

Julia and I had a great time at Mel's last night, enjoying the closing of her day-long birthday celebration and a delightfully tasty dinner, too.

As you may recall from my last missive, we had decided to take advantage of Denver's restaurant week twice because that's the kind of loyal "feed me!" people we are.

In the time since we made our reservations several weeks ago, about half of the participating restaurants, over 100 of the more than 220 who took part to begin with, decided to make a fortnight of it and extend the $52.80 dinner offer for a second week.

Well, we so-enjoyed dinner last night, that as soon as we got home, I up and reserved us another opportunity at Mel's.

Last night included a first for us, by the way: in our more than 11 years together, we had never both come to the conclusion that our spouse had the better dinner. Sure...we sometimes realize that one of us made a less-than-ideal choice, and we are good enough to each other that the one with the prized entree always shares.

When we started in on our dinners last night, though, we each realized we wanted the other's dinner. So, after a few bites to be sure we were ready to commit, we simply swapped plates. We were both very happy with the resulting taste-bud enchantment!

Having now sampled Mel's menu (most of the more-expensive places do what Mel's has done, which is to offer a subset of their regular menu for those taking advantage of restaurant week), we are going back and ordering exactly what we already know we love. That's why we are going back: we want more of those items we know we did not get our fill of last night. Example: the calimari appetizer. Calimari is a common offering in Denver restaurants, and we have had a couple of versions at other eateries we really loved before last night. Last night, though, we died and stayed in the dining room (heaven, that's what that dining room was for us was last night).

Not knowing it was going to be so amazing, we only got one order, and we ordered a salad as the second appetizer. Now we know! On Thursday, two calamaris, please!

[editor's note: we would have included a photo of the lovely couple, but Julia had her eyes closed in the only shot we had available. Apparently, the photog had not made any arrangement with her agent, so all he got was a smile and eyelids shut]

2 comments:

Lynilu said...

Order a calamari for me, too, please!

No photo? Well, now I understand why you're going back again. Take the camera and remember the rule .... Always have someone take at least 2 snaps. Always!

Olivia said...

Beautiful. You can feel the vibes of the place just in this picture. Will look forward to one from round two though of your two!? xo, O