Stories That Make Me Laugh: Chicago Dining Edition

Wednesday, January 7, 2009


February 2008

Since tonight is the premiere of the newest season (season 21) of The Real World I thought it would be the perfect time to share this story. This past February I went to Chicago with a couple of my guy friends to visit two of my most wonderful and dearest friends in the whole wide world, Sarah and Adam. Sarah is one of my bestest friends, and I hate that she lives so far away, but I do try to make it out to visit her as often as I can (or at least as often as my bank account can afford). So during this particular visit we happened to have the most amazing (and entertaining) dining experiences ever. It started on the first night, when we decided that we would all go out for a really nice dinner together with a couple of Adam's Chicago friends. It was a bit late in the night, and every place we tried to go had no open tables for such a large group. We were just about to give up when we stumbled across this one really cute restaurant, that just happened to have a table free. We were ecstatic, since we were starting to get really hungry at this point. So we gathered together, and the hostess led us to our table. AND by table, I really mean our room. Somehow we managed to snag our own private table, in our own separate little room (much like a Chef's Table). It might just have been the most amazing thing ever. The rest of the diners were out in the busy restaurant eating and chatting away, while we were in this fancy mahogany room, surrounded by wine and liquor bottles, in our own little private oasis. The waitress would come in pour us our glasses of wine, and then close the french doors behind her, leaving us to continue being our ridiculous crazy selves. Unfortunately I have no pictures to share of this dinner, but it was definitely one of my top five best dining experiences ever. After the amazing dinner of fabulous food and wine, and great conversation, we were pretty sure that this moment could not be topped. HA... were we wrong. The next day we decided to grab a quick lunch at a bar/brewery/pub place down the street from Sarah and Adam's condo. We noticed an extremely LARGE line outside the door and got very worried that we would get stuck waiting, and thus our quick lunch would not be. We went inside to check on the wait, only to discover that there actually was no wait. Hmmm we all thought. How odd. Anyways, we sat down and ordered several of their beer samplers (they brew their own beer - so obviously we had to try all of their offerings) and perused the menu. Our table just happened to be right next to the entrance to another room. In this other room there were several tables with people sitting, but no one was eating, and even though these people were all sitting together, they appeared to not know each other. Once again, hmmm we all thought. At this point we started to notice groups of about 10 people at a time walking into the room, and after about 15 minutes they would then leave (some a bit upset) and a new group would come in. So finally we stopped a girl as she was walking by us and asked her what was going on. She was a bit crazy, and looked at us like "Oh my God (insert valley girl voice here)... how can you not know what's going on?!?" before telling us in a rather loud and obnoxious voice that "Duh, it's the auditions for The Real World, season 21!!!!". Oh... oops! Silly us for not knowing. So needless to say our "quick" lunch turned out to be about a three hour lunch, due to the fact that we could not keep our eyes off of the train wreck that was the Real World auditions. We had a few other stellar dining moments as well during this trip... but these two were the best

1 comments:

mj said...

I'm so glad I'm not the only one whos still watching real world after 21 seasons! I've been so excited for this series premiere all week!