Eating Our Way Across Richmond

Between our birthdays, Nikole and I managed to eat out more this week than we have in months.

We started Monday night with a white sauce pizza from Superstars laden with garlic, spinach and roasted red peppers. I've still not found a pizza place in town that makes pizza as good as the take-and-bake variety served up by Superstars.

On Wednesday morning and on Saturday morning -- our birthdays -- we started our day at Joe's Inn, which along with Perly's has long been at the top of our list of breakfast destinations. For a period of time, we ate at Joe's or Perly's every Saturday and Sunday morning, which probably explains why we're not millionaires. Now I tend to make breakfast for us on weekends.

We almost died of starvation on Wednesday afternoon. The concrete contractor stopped by to talk to us about replacing our porch, which had been damaged last year during the Great Sewer Fiasco, and he talked, and talked, and talked. We made it to Tarrant's Cafe around 2:00 and had an excellent lunch. We'd been trying to find a good reason to visit Tarrant's for a while, and my birthday provided the perfect excuse.

My mom came over on Thursday and fixed dinner for us -- baked potatoes with broccoli and cheddar, or with turkey chili. Strawberries and cupcakes for dessert.

Saturday was a duplicate of Wednesday, at first. We started with breakfast at Joe's, and almost immediately followed breakfast with another lunch at Tarrant's -- this time with Nikole's mom and stepfather. The lunch portion was not as stand-out as it had been on Wednesday, but the massive bowls of dessert -- bread pudding with caramel sauce for Pat and Ed, and a huge brownie with ice cream and whipped cream for Nikole -- were mind boggling.

We had plans to meet 10 friends at Bottom's Up Pizza for dinner on Saturday night to celebrate four birthdays, an engagement and a pending baby. All of us forgot that St. Patrick's Day was going to be celebrated in the Bottom -- until we fought our way through traffic and past very cheery clusters of people in green clothes. The wait for a table -- about an hour.

After a quick consultation with the group, we leapt into our cars and headed to The Phoenician for the most amazing Lebanese meal. We had a nice private room, which meant plenty of space to mingle and an easy space for quiet conversation. As a group, we ordered the mezze and were astonished as the never-ending plates of food made the rounds. I had rockfish, and Nikole had fattoush salad, and we monopolized the room until our stomachs could take no more.

Now we're broke. Well-fed, but broke.