Subdued Celebration

Today is our fourth wedding anniversary but we celebrated last night since I'm heading to Philly for work today. Out for dinner at the best restaurant on our block.  

It's someplace I used to go all the time when I was single, and just hang out at the bar.  They still know me by name and bring me a drink before I even have to order.  Gotta love that! 

Hubby made the reservation in my name so it meant they knew it was a celebration for our anniversary, we got my fave table, and one of my fave servers (technically, my favorite probably, but there are three I adore): 


I celebrated my 30th birthday here, and as usual for any special occasion, you get a special signed copy of the menu.  For anyone who watched Top Chef, Trey Wilcox was the sous-chef at this restaurant when he went on the show.  Always amazing food.  Rarely anything vegetarian on the entree menu (it's Texas, that's kind of par for the course unfortunately), but the chefs can always be trusted to make something amazing: 


I started with a shaved artichoke salad: 

An intermezzo to cleanse our palates.  Mine was grapefruit and blood orange on the left, some kind of granita on the right (maybe goji berry?): 



My entree.  Usually I just request anything vegetarian and let the chef choose, but one of the sides on the menu was french onion mac and cheese, and oh, that sounded so good.  Mac and cheese is one of my favorite foods, and this did not disappoint: 

Dessert options. I have a nut allergy, so our choices were the second, third and fifth options.

Cheese options to end the meal, which we considered but didn't do (but I took a picture because so many of these cheeses sounded great and I want to try them eventually):

Earrings.  Hubby knows I'm not really a diamond person (did a huge project on conflict diamonds in college and have never wanted them since).  But before he knew that, he bought me a diamond necklace (the one I lost and found).  I wear it frequently because of course I love that he gave it to me (and it is beautiful).  And I've never said it, but I've thought simple diamond earrings to match would be nice.  And now I have them!


For dessert, we chose to share the fifth option, mini hucklberry fried pies with vanilla balsalmic swirl ice cream and heirloom apple butter.  Plus espresso and limoncello.  And dessert was even better because after I got the earrings, I went over to the other side of the booth to give hubby some kisses, so we were right next to each other to share the dessert.

Well, there were two truffles to end the meal, but I forgot to take a picture quickly enough:

So there's a recap of our fourth anniversary celebration.  Maybe we can watch our wedding video this weekend.  I am coming back from Philly for the weekend, but then flying back there on Monday.  Ugh!  It won't be too bad though, because I think we have an awesome plan for dinner Monday night and my boss is going too next week, so I'll have plenty of company for the awesome dinner.