What good is a suit? Part I

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted, it's been a busy week....and honestly I've been working on writing this series of posts. I'm sorry this one is going to be long, it's about 8 separate posts, but I think you'll enjoy it.

Follow along as The Boyfriend and I descend on a fancy restaurant in Downtown Chicago for dinner.

And so begins the Post........

As you may remember, just a few short weeks ago I bought a new suit, the first one I've owned in 18 years......and I figure if you've got a suit you've got to wear it. I mean really, what's the use of owning a suit if you can't wear it every now and again right? I don’t have to wear a suit to work, thank goodness, and it’s not that often that I get “dressed up” to go somewhere other than a funeral or a wedding, so I had to find some other way to wear the new suit that we got for the Alderman’s Dinner.

I’d been hoarding a Gift Certificate for several months now, just waiting for the perfect time to use it. It was given to me in exchange for a video I did, so I wanted to do something special with it, I just didn’t know what.

The gift certificate was for a restaurant chain called Lettuce Entertain You (get it, Lettuce…Let us…ok….) and it had a list of all of the places where it could be redeemed. Most were ho hum not too “out of the norm” but several of them stood out, the first one that hit my eyes was Everest. It’s one of the Grand Tables of the World, plus Alpena Singh, who is host of a restaurant review program on PBS as well as the worlds youngest Master Sommelier, is the Director of Wine & Spirits for Lettuce Entertain you. I think this was the place we were going to be spending that certificate at.

Now, we just had to find the “special occasion” – birthdays and anniversaries were past, and there was nothing new coming on the horizon, so it just sat there on the desk looking at me. But suddenly the perfect time did arrive – July 4th weekend!

Since our vacation was cut out this summer, we decided to do things we wouldn’t normally do, considering that we weren’t supposed to be here. Friday afternoon I called the restaurant to see if hope beyond hope we would be able to get a reservation for – the next day! I mean this is one of the best restaurants in the city and it was the holiday weekend, I’m sure that there would be a month’s long wait list. I imagined the call would go like this:

Me: Hello, I’d like to make reservations for tomorrow evening:
Hostess: Oh, sir. That’s so clever, the earliest I’ll be able to accommodate you will be on October 31, 2006.

I thought for sure that our hopes and dreams of a fancy dinner would be dashed. But you know what……they weren’t. I called Friday evening and easily made reservations for the following evening, of course it was at 6:30 – not prime dinner hour but it was still for the next day! The only thing that concerned me was when she asked for a credit card to “secure” the reservation, and that if we cancelled within 48 hours there would be a $50 fee…damn you’ve got to really commit to this place!

I called The Boyfriend and asked if he had made any plans for Saturday evening.