Date Night restaurant reviews

With Hannah home for the summer and looking for hours, Marcus and I took advantage of this pre-baby time to get in lots of date nights this summer:

First, Olympic Provisions.  We had been to the NW location but Marcus took me to the SE location:

mid-June: lunch at Olympic Provisions

He got some sort of sausage sandwich and
I got the mortadella/salami with pickled
veggies and a fermented dill pickle.
Both delicious and very representative
of the Portland foodie revolution.

Toward the end of June we went to Red Lobster before a mall trip.  Red Lobster was on Marcus' bucket list.  :o)  I remember going as a kid (it was our "nice" restaurant, a real treat) but he had never been!!!!  So before partaking in Nordstrom's Men's sale, we stuffed ourselves full of seafood:

Marcus got lobster stuffed lobster.  :o)

I got some sort of crab leg dish with potatoes
and veggies...so buttery and salty!!  Yum!

Marcus liked it but he isn't so sure he'd spend a date night on Red Lobster again.  We like experimenting with Portland's great food scene, not so much eating at chain restaurants (no offense to R.L. of course).  I really want to take the kids--Bunny would be in heaven!  So I'll have to plan that sometime soon.  But this was a really fun experience and went along nicely with mall shopping….

Then of course in July we had three days of glorious meals at the Grand Hotel:

And later in July, an evening at the Grand Lodge (McMeniman's) out on the lawn.  That was a really nice evening, great weather.  No pictures.  :o(

In August we scheduled a brunch at one of our favorite Portland establishments, Beast.  They do prix fix menus and their reservations fill up quickly.  It's neat to try "anything" that the chef wants to create that week:

Beast is a one-room, open-kitchen kind of place.

Bonus: we got to drive by the "Women and Women First"
bookstore from Portlandia.  :o)

To round out our summer, we took a couple of more reasonable visits, one to the mall (love that Indian food) and one to Happy Panda.  I really like these types of trips because it's low pressure and much lower cost, and we have time to do other things like errands, shopping, and even a quick trip to the Cruise-In Country Diner for a malt and Marionberry Cobbler….

And finally, our final date night before baby's arrival--just this past Friday we dropped off the kids at grammae and papa's (thanks for babysitting!!) and made our way to Imperial in  downtown Portland.  We've recommended it several times to friends/family, but we've never been there ourselves.  Joe and Steph visited last March (see this post), and Marcus' former manager has been there on our rec as well.  So we were so happy to finally go and try Imperial for ourselves.  And it did not disappoint!!!  It was fantastic!  Casual but hip, clean, modern but old-fashioned trendy, etc.  Marcus noted that almost all the men (employees and customers) had some sort of beard, and most were wearing plaid.  :o)  You can see from the pics that Marcus also fit that bill:

with a Moscow Mule (I got a Ginger Mule,
the non-alchoholic version)

Fried Rabbit for my dinner.  It was aMAzing.
It even had a piece of fried bacon with it. :o)
Served with jalapeño corn cake and pickled
watermelon rind, and a dropper bottle of house-
made hot sauce and honey harvested that day
from their rooftop bee hive.  ha ha ha

 Marcus ordered:  Carlton Farms Bone in Pork Chop, sage & black pepper honey (GF) $21 and we also had: Seared and Stuffed Eggplant, walnut sauce, grilled onion, sweet herbs (GF)(V) $9 and  Grilled Romaine Salad, cherry tomatoes, Israeli feta, salsa verde $9.  The portion sizes weren't too huge so we did have room for dessert: 

I chose the Texas Sheet Cake with Marshmallow
Sauce and toasted hazelnuts.  YUMMMM!

In sum, it was a fantastic summer of dates with the hubs.  Now we are all "filled up" and ready to spend the next 1.5 years without such grand adventures.  We'll still try to go on some dates, but either with a baby in tow or with a very limited time frame due to nursing.  But we'll have these memories and the pics on this blog post to sustain us until that next window of opportunity.  :o)