dinner and a movie

Carey and I like to go out to eat a lot with his 93 year old grandmother Doris. Carey asked me to start keeping track of the restaurants that we go to, kind of a little review, so we can actually remember why we did or didn't like a particular spot.

DINNER

Fireside Grill
Pullman, WA
**** of a possible 10

What didn't go wrong? We went there with Doris expecting a nice relaxing meal without the kiddies. Carey ran in real quick to make sure there wouldn't be a wait. He was told there wouldn't be, we get in there, and we have a 15 minute wait although there were several empty tables. We finally sit down, ordered a couple of drinks that actually came fairly quickly and then started deciding on our meals. It took over 20 minutes for our server to rematerialize to take our order and in fact, we were just getting ready to leave. We ordered the stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer and they were good; I highly reccomend those. But it just went downhill from there. I ordered a strawberry lemonade spritzer at the same time as the appetizer but didn't recieve it for a full thirty minutes after the appetizer was already a pleasant memory. (We had to sic the hostess on our server about this one.) So by this time we've been there over an hour. Two chowders were ordered (very good) and a ceasar salad (also very good). So we were rather looking forward to dinner. This was a complete bust; tasteless, dried out and cold. The smothered chicken and the flat iron flap steak were both excellent with Heinz 57 sauce (very sad for the amount of money being paid). The jumbo shrimp were cold and mushy. For dessert: fudge brownie w/ ice cream for two, and a New York style cheesecake. The cheesecake was good. But pass on the brownie. It was described as fresh baked that day; try rock hard and stale. The ambience was quite nice though and the seating was comfortable. But all in all, the slow service and the lousy food makes it mediocre at best and just doesn't cut it for those kinds of prices.

MOVIE


After taking Gramma home for the evening, we caught a late night showing of Ben Stiller's new movie, Night at the Museum.

A bumbling security guard at the Museum of Natural History is caught up in an ancient curse that causes the animals and insects on display to come to life and wreak havoc every night after midnight. With such notables as Robin Williams, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Rooney, Ricky Gervais, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan and others, we were looking forward to this one.

It was really cute, definitely a great kids movie. (The peeing monkey was a bit much but Carey loved it.) I had a smile through most of the movie (even with Kitty's very noisy commentary through the last half). Some of the roles weren't as developed as I would have liked but this is a great feel good movie that the whole family will enjoy. 9 stars


Check it out at IMDB and the official movie site.

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