Chomp!

Orlando! Romance! Fine-Dining! Denny’s?

 

By Ron Aiken

 

Orlando offers a stunning array of fine-dining options for the tourist with some dollars to drop. During our weeklong stay here on our summer family vacation, my fiancee and I planned one evening away from the children, the noise and the sensory-overload madness of the world’s No. 1 tourist trap.

Being a foodie and in need of a column, I did my research ahead of time. It was going to be either The Palm, Deep Blu Seafood Grille, Christopher Del Frisco’s or The Cask & Larder, with the fallback being Landry’s Seafood.

As it turned out, the closest to our hotel was Landry’s, so though we left a bit later than we’d hoped (isn’t that the case with any date night parents bravely take?), we realized we had some time on our hands so we went over to International Avenue to walk around, an area we knew from when Chomp! and the family was here in January for the Capital One Bowl and Epcot.

We strolled, we lolled, we straight-up LOL-ed. As any parent knows, the most valuable commodity in a relationship is time alone to have conversations, and often during the course of a busy week several important topics of discussion get put on a waiting list until there’s time to take them all in turn, which is, odd as it may be for children to understand, enjoyable for parents because it’s where responsible decisions are formed and consensuses reached. It’s where good parenting happens and where the bonds of that crucial husband-wife (or in our case fiance-fiancee) bond is maintained. Even when you’re together forever, you still need to go on dates and make the other person feel special, valued and loved.

All this also happens to make time fly, and when we looked at our watches cell phones, we realized we had to book it to make the restaurant by 10. As you may already have guessed, given the Orlando traffic, especially around International Drive, we did not make it in time. For anything. After driving around aimlessly, our romantic evening ended up back at the Davenport exit Denny’s, where, it turns out, you can have a lovely evening getting fun breakfast foods and not caring and doing little else but looking into your partner’s eyes and giving thanks that he brought you the most wonderful companion you could have hoped-for, a person created specially to partner with and bring out the best in you.

So, we had this:

 

I had the “meat-lovers” omelette, but I substituted avocado for peppers and onions. It was fine, but the sauce/gravy there they put on top tasted out of a packet and was a bummer.

 

My sweetie-pie had the blueberry pancake slam with hash browns and turkey bacon. She devoured the hash browns. Score!

 

For the kids, we brought back a Sticky Bun French Toast Slam with scrambled eggs and bacon. They also got and enjoyed all the potato wedges from my plate that I didn’t eat because I’d ordered hash browns but didn’t feel like making a fuss because I knew the kids would eat them.

 

The food wasn’t great, the server’s first words to us were how tired she was and was ready to leave, which apparently she tried to do several times during LONG stints away from our table, and our fellow customers resembled the cantina clientele from Star Wars, but all in all it was an AMAZING DATE NIGHT for one reason and one reason only, the most important there is in all the world and which makes food itself just a meaningless accessory:

My baby!

 

Til the week after next! Enjoy your Fourth! And if you’re looking for picked watermelon rinds, hit me up, because I still have like five vats. Cheers!