Bonjour Friends! Since my husband and I are now officially off of our restaurant diet and back to a dining-out budget, we decided to celebrate our success by doing, what else? Going out to dinner!
Seriously, we had planned this dinner nearly a month ago. We drove into the city to meet with friends we hadn’t seen in almost 5 years and had a blast catching up with them.
Dining with a baseball legend
We dined at the famous Harry Caray’s restaurant in downtown Chicago. Now if you’ve never heard of Harry Caray, he was the long-time, and extremely beloved, announcer for the Chicago Cubs baseball team, most known for his huge black horn-rimmed glasses and unpredictable commentary. He has since passed, but his spirit lives on in the city, the baseball team, and in his Italian restaurants, all named after the man himself. We ate at the main restaurant on Kinzie St., which, according to my husband, has the second biggest collection of sports memorabilia, next to Cooperstown – but don’t quote me on that!
Harry Caray's Statue outside of Wrigley Field in Chicago
Hmm…Cheeeeese!
Anyway, back to our dinner. Our table split the antipasto cheese platter that included slices of fresh parmesan reggiano, provolone, gorgonzola, pecorino, and mozzarela, with an accompaniment of grilled marinated veggies. The cheeses were fantastic! I sampled all but the gorgonzola, with some of the fresh house bread and was actually quite full after a few slices. I DID take photos but they did not turn out well. The lighting was great for ambience but terrible for picture taking.
Harry Caray's Antipasto Cheese Salad: Much better than the picture alludes...
Believe me, the salad was much better than it looks in the photo!
The good and the not so good
My husband and guests ordered some form of steak/meat (I don’t eat steak so I really don’t pay attention to the names) and they were raving about what they ordered. I ordered the spinach pappardelle Italian sausage pasta and am sad to say that I was not very excited about the dish. I won’t even bother with the photo! It did not taste bad, it just didn’t seem to have that umph that I had expected. It didn’t even look good enough for my husband to try and he nearly always has some of my dish when we go out – so that’s saying a lot. I did, however, try my husband vesuvio potato and loved it! Now, I’ve been to Harry’s before – we usually go once a year – and have loved all of my meals, so I will just chalk up this mediocre entree to a bad night.
Don’t worry Harry! As the saying goes, there’s always next year!
After having a night cap at Fadó’s Irish Pub, we said our goodbye’s and headed home. We did not get home until 11:30 PM! Yikes – we were both dragging this morning as we were getting ready for work. In fact, my husband looked at me and said “we can’t do that very often, can we?”
Yawn…my sentiments exactly.
Ciao!
