Impromptu premature birthday lunch

As I mentioned on my previous post, hubby's birthday falls right after Thanksgiving. This makes birthday plans a bit problematic as 1. We'll be up to our eyebrows with leftovers, so dining out would feel really unreasonable, and 2. Traditionally, this particular Friday is called Black Friday due to the door buster deals that many stores (mostly electronics) feature, which makes people virtually camp outside the doors well before the sun rises. Hubby mentioned that he might want to take advantage of such a deal or two, as long as the weather allows for standing outside. If he does that, he'll probably won't want to leave the house again after he's back.

That been said, dinner plans for Friday night will probably just not happen. So, today we decided to go to downtown Chicago and get him his presents: A bunch of heavy metal CDs and vinyl records from the premier heavy metal record store of the city, Metal Haven (The Chicago Headbanging HQ, as their store label informs us). There is a good number of nice restaurants about the area, notably a pizzeria called Giordano's, a Greek restaurant called Mythos, that serves Real Greek Food (TM) and a Thai place called The Royal Thai.

We originally wanted to go to Mythos as I had missed their saganaki, but unfortunately they are only open during dinner hours. I opted against pizza since I'm trying to eat some sensibly with Thanksgiving in the horizon, so Royal Thai it was.

We had dined there before, and we were very pleased with it. It's particularly nice when you can get the table right on the window so that you can look outside, however this time it was taken. Oh well, the table we got was equally nice.

I ordered ginger tea which was really tasty, hubby had diet Coke, and we started with pork pot stickers. I have been asked for more pics in the blog, so I took the camera out of the purse and started snapping away.


Then we both had Thai curries, he had the Green curry and I had the Panang, which was delicious with a very deep flavor between the coconut milk and roasted peanuts.





I didn't get up to get a pic of the green curry, but it was equally good looking and tasty, as bite swapping is always part of dining out! We could choose between mild, medium, spicy and very spicy - I got medium and he got very spicy, and I still got all teared up with it!

Prices were also quite reasonable, we paid about $24 plus tip, and we left pretty stuffed.

Next time though, we're doing Mythos!