Vida. Risa. Amor.

What do you want to do?
I don't know....what do you want to do?...
I don't care, you pick.
Come on,  you decide this time....

Yeah, so sometimes when my man has a day off we kind of don't know what we want to do with ourselves.  We want to do something, (yeah that too), but not exactly sure what. 

July does not provide hiking weather.  Our kids won't sit still in restaurants.  Malls are lame.  We've seen every other movie.  The more you Kohls, the more they know you... and I'd honestly rather shove bamboo shoots up my fingernails than hang out in Best Buy one more time.

Our kids have actually begged us to just go out on a date already.  The last thing a kitchen manager wants to do is cook on his day off and the last thing a mother of 4 wants to do is prepare one more meal and have to clean up after it, so we go out to lunch.  We're even pretty thrifty about it too...we have found many "buy one/get one free" deals in the junk-mail throughout the week and set them aside for later, so we almost always check the coupon book first for ideas of where to go.

My husband and I would make the best restaurant critics.  Between the two of us we have over 30 years of restaurant work experience and 10 more if you count all my childhood days of growing up with my Dad as a director of operations in a chain of ice-cream restaurants.  Since I was 9, I probably ate half of my meals in those restaurants, and had it engraved in my brain to know what was acceptable for quality/temperatures of food, plate appearance, ticket times, and the overall service of each visit.  My husband and I also know ice-cream...we met while working together back in 1992.  It's true....Ice-cream brought us together...(more on that story another day)...

So with all that said, it is next to impossible for us to sit through a meal in a restaurant and not notice details.  How the restaurant looks outside, how the hostess greets us, the server's personality, specials, the portions, the silverware, the salt shakers, the value, the quality, the everything.  Sure we're supposed to be on a date, but this is actually fun for us.  We can't help it and it actually makes us laugh when something is so outrageously wrong.  Like an $8 lunch salad served in a soup bowl, or a servers pants pulled halfway up, or nachos with 3 pieces of meat on them, or when the server just walks up and looks at you without saying a word while running their fingers through their hair...

So I don't think my husband and I have very high standards when it comes to going out to eat, but it almost seems as if people just don't care as much about their customers. Hospitality seems to be foreign to most places in Arizona, and we have yet to be amazed with decent service and great food, (although we do have a few places we go regularly anyway). 

Sometimes we go out for the place.  Sometimes we go out for the food.  Sometimes we just show up and try something new.....but we always go out to lunch to be together.  I don't believe going out to lunch was meant to be eaten alone, and  I love that my man takes me out to lunch....(no pun intended).