What's Your Favorite Restaurant?

I'm a little early with my post for tomorrow but we're heading out of town . . . My favorite thing to do on Friday night is to go out to dinner with Andrew. It isn't original, but after a week on the job to sit comfortably and quietly with another adult, to choose what I want to eat and have another person clean up after me is an experience like no other.

Andrew is sweet about it and usually lets me choose where we go. His reasoning is that he eats out during the week frequently on business lunches so he wants me to be able to go where I want. This earns him big points I tell you.

You may think Anchorage, with its population of around 300,000 is too tiny to have any decent food but oddly enough, with it's proximity to Asia via air Anchorage has developed an arts and food culture that is unusual in a town its size. Tourists and business people, Fedex planes and oil execs all seem to route through Anchorage and have contributed to a quality dining experience. We may not be fancy--jeans are optional--but we know good food when we taste it.

I've written about my favorite restaurants in Anchorage and Andrew's Washington D.C. business trip last month which supplied me with sandwiches from our favorite sandwich shop back there, but there have also been a few other restaurants that have special significance for us.

The Olive Garden. Don't laugh, I know it's not exactly haute cuisine but it was the nicest place to eat in our college town back in 1991 so it was the scene of our first date. Later, we ate at the Olive Garden in Littleton, Colorado the night before we got married, then at the Olive Garden in Louisville, Kentucky on our first New Year's Eve together. We ate there for our first date after Grace was born and I took Grace to that same first-date Olive Garden when we took a mother-daughter trip together last March. Funny thing is, there's not an Olive Garden in the entire city of Anchorage. Go figure.

Cafe Ciao. A couple years ago when we took the kids to Maui Andrew and I had Grace babysit while we went into Wailea for dinner. The meal at that restaurant was perfect. We ate outdoors, serenaded by a guitar (or rather a man playing a guitar) and ate the most fabulous food that tasted far superior to the Costco fare we'd been consuming all week. Stars, surf, moonlight, mushrooms, nothing else could have been better.

International House of Pancakes. Ha! Another classy place, but it was the scene of Thanksgiving breakfast 1992 when Andrew had his first trip to California. We ate at the IHOP in Anaheim next door to Disneyland--the old chalet-style one that's been replaced--and he ate fifteen pounds of strawberry-covered bacon Belgian waffles before his first trip to the Happiest Place on Earth. We still remember how fun that day was.

And there are others . . . breakfasts with my Mom at the Woodmark in Bellevue, Washington, a family-style meal in an Amish barn in Lancaster, PA, a machete-sliced pineapple off the back of a pickup on Harbor Island in the Bahamas, a ridiculous meal at the Mayfair in Brussels where I could only translate "steak and French fries" so that's what I ordered. Funny how dining isn't just an experience for the mouth but for the memory as well.

So what restaurant is your favorites? Is there a reason for your affection such as a particular dish served or a particular memory associated that makes it so special? Is the restaurant still in business? Now's your chance to play restaurant critic and pass on your advice for the world to read (or at least the ten or fifteen people that read this blog).

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