Things I Love About Fancy Restaurants

1. When you arrive, they greet you by name and are so smiley, like they are sincerely glad you're there
2. When they seat you, they place your napkin in your lap - if you're wearing black, they take the white one away and replace it with a black one, so you're spared from the horror of getting white lint on your black outfit
3. When the waiter comes to ask how you're doing, he calls you Madame
4. They don't rush your meal - twenty minutes for the appetizer, an hour for the meal, twenty minutes for coffee and dessert
5. There is always bread (free!) and sometimes the butter is even flavored (more on this below)
6. There are always candles
7. In between your courses, they replace your silverware
8. The portions are just right - very fancy restaurants don't need to impress with you giving you huge portions (which distract you from the fact that the food is so-so) but a really nice one will always give you enough
9. After your meal, if you order dessert, they come by with a crumb scrapper (does this thing have an official name?) and clean your tablecloth so you are, again, spared the horror of sitting in your own mess
10. The atmosphere - this depends on where you go, but the lights are usually dim, the walls usually covered in cool art, there is nice but not overbearing music playing in the background and the tables are not jammed all close together

As you might have guessed, Ian and I went to (yet another) fancy dinner out last night. Through my work, I got invited to a "rehearsal dinning" for a restaurant that was opening a newly renovated room called the Queensview Steakhouse (you can see the Queen Mary from the MANY windows on that floor). Our whole meal was free - an appetizer for each of us, the bread (of course - and they served it with chestnut butter - have you ever heard of such a thing?), a New York steak for him and a petite fillet Mignon for me, decaf coffee for both of us and a Key Lime tart (so good!) to share. All of the food was so delicious and the service was great and the views amazing - basically 360 degrees of the Long Beach harbor. Of course, we were enamored with the fact that it was all free, but as we sat in our candle-lit table, we said to each other, "I love eating at nice restaurants."

Our lives are so rich and we're truly blessed. All this fun celebrating and eating out will someday come to an end as other responsibilities take priority, but we're living it up in the meantime. Especially when it's free! (Don't worry, we left a tip.)