Burgers, Beef and Security

So with our 10-year wedding anniversary behind us and Alexis’ birthday just a few days away, I thought I would recap our weekend for everyone! 

It started on Saturday morning with us taking Alexis to see Cars 2 with TJ and rest of The Leckie family.  Since this is my blog, I will give you my review…it was NOT as good as the first one.  Way too much action for my liking.  It was the characters that made the first one and they seemed to get away from them in this one.  But I digress.  The kids loved it and that is all that mattered. 

After the movie, we took Lex over to my Dad and Stepmom’s for the day/night.  I thought since we had time before check in at the hotel, we would hit one of the new In-N-Out burgers in D/FW.  I will blog about this later, but we LOVE In-N-Out.  Great food.   We waited in the drive thru for about 20 minutes and then sat under a tree in our car to devour it.  Man, it was worth the wait!

From there we headed to the Hyatt Regency in Dallas for the night!  We got checked in and hit the “pool”.  I use the quotes, because it was like a large hot tub.  It was BAD.  This is a 4 star hotel with a 0.5 star pool.  It was about 15 foot wide and about 25 foot long and only held about 10 people comfortably.  No swimming could be done unless you were the only one in the pool.  Really disappointing.  BUT we were at the pool with no kid and it was nice! 

After the pool, we headed back to the room to get ready for dinner.  But because we are “Peery’s” things didn’t go as planned.  There was a horrible noise in our room…our room with a king size bed and great view of downtown.  It sounded like someone was dragging cables through the wall.  Really annoying and no way we wanted to spend our one night away from Lex listening to the noise!!

I got ready and went downstairs to see if we could switch rooms and the hotel was booked except for one room with double beds.  Not ideal, but we still had our good view and we didn’t have to listen to the crazy noise!!  We finished getting ready and took all our stuff to our new room and headed to dinner.

Dinner was at Al Biernat’s.  I have heard about this place for a while, but we hadn’t had the chance to go until now.  Two or three times a year we try to go to a nice restaurant so we save our pennies so we can get what we want.  There are 4 parts to dinner…cars, food, security and atmosphere…so I am going to break them down for you.

Cars:  We pull into the parking lot and there are 2 Maserati’s parked next to some really nice Mercedes and a Range Rover.  Being a car fan, I just wanted to go over and look at them all.  I quickly remembered that we were eating dinner and not at a car show!

Thinking that it couldn’t get any better, we walk outside to leave and parked on either side of one of the Maserati’s were two Rolls Royce Phantom’s.  If you don’t know what these are, google them!  They are $450,000 each!!!  I was looking at over a million dollars in 3 cars!!!  It was crazy!!!  So when they pulled our Ford Fusion around from the auxiliary lot (you didn’t think they would park us with the nice cars, did you?) we jumped in as fast as we good and left!!  This is where having our Lexus would have been nice!  We wouldn’t have seemed so out of place! 

Food:  One word…amazing!  We spilt the calamari that came with two sauces (for which there are fancy French names for) and each had a Caesar salad.  I had the dry aged 16oz NY Strip and Heather had the 8oz filet.  We split mushroom risotto and creamed corn.  While the steaks were great, the risotto was unbelievable.  So good!  For dessert we split a chocolate cake with a scoop of ice cream.  We were stuffed!!

Security:  As we were wrapping up, the owner comes over to the table next to us and tells the guy setting up that this table will be “security for table 12”.  Next thing we knew, they were setting up the table behind us for “security” as well!  We were intrigued.  This place was the hottest ticket in town for the Super Bowl where you couldn’t get a table no matter who you were!  Not only that, but President Bush lives in the neighborhood.  All the local athletes eat here too.  Who could it be?  Who is that big that they need two tables for security?  I was really thinking it might be the President! 

Well, to this day we have no idea who it was!  It was a Hispanic family that was not dressed to go out or they just had so much money they didn’t care what they had on.  But they came with a “security detail/entourage” of 5.  We were slightly disappointed. 

Atmosphere:  This place really was nice!  It was in an area of Dallas were all the “money” is.  This is old Dallas money.  This isn’t money that a rapper gets for selling records or a reality tv star gets…this was old Dallas oil money.  The cars in the parking lot were not rentals or leases or loaners.  These people were the real deal.

As a side note, we were wished Happy Anniversary no less than 5 times by the staff.  There was a good chance we were the poorest people in the restaurant that night, but they all made us feel like a million bucks.  If you ever have a chance to go, save your pennies and go!  It really is worth it all!!

So that was our weekend!  Picked up Alexis Sunday afternoon and back to the real world!  It is always nice to get away, even if we only went 20 minutes away for 2 days!!