Brian and I went out to dinner to a new place and weren’t really impressed by what we ate. We weren’t satisfied like we usually are after eating at The Olive Garden. I had a steak dinner called Bistecca Franceshe-it was NY strip covered with a mild pesto (I couldn’t really taste it) and accompanied by stringy broccoli rabe and cannelloni beans. Beforehand, we had a salad-it was just a large pile of mixed spring lettuces with ‘one’ sliced cherry tomato and served with vinegar and oil.  We also had crusty bread served with a bowl of plain olive oil for dipping. Brian had a Salmon dish and they were nice enough to substitute asparagus for the mushrooms it is usually served with. He had a small pile of spinach too. I gave him almost half of my dinner as I could tell he hadn’t had enough of his own. That left room for me to get the Chocolate flan-which was like a thin brownie with warm chocolate inside served on top of vanilla custard. The presentation of the food was really nice and I told our server I wish I had brought a camera. She was a nice girl, but you couldn’t help to notice that she has a pierced tongue as you saw a turquoise ball there everytime she spoke.

I don’t think we’d go here again. It has a fancy Italian name and we were thinking The Olive Garden on a grandeur scale and it wasn’t.

When we got home, Brian ripped through his gifts in about 5 minutes. He got mainly clothing. His one non-clothes item from me didn’t arrive yet. He had a quiet birthday, but it was nice to send some alone time together-the restaurant was very low key with some interesting belly dancing type music in the background. There were other patrons, but they were very quiet.