Spontaneous Summer Outing!

Now that my trip blogging is done I can get back to tales from the city! Just in time too since Saturday was such a great day!

Last week was a long one. I spent almost the entire week working in my classroom and JO was gone hiking Granite Peak in Montana. In addition, the heat and humidity were out of control, preventing me from enjoying anything that required me to be outside. By Friday I was going a bit stir crazy.

On Saturday, with temps plummeting into the 70s, our good friends invited us out to join them for a night in Boston. I was pretty sure JO would be too tired from his hours of flying but thanks to jet leg we were able to join them.

Since they had headed in earlier then us we met them at the Union Oyster House to plan the rest of our evening. The last time we were at the Oyster House we were joined at the bar by two children which led to the coining of the phrase, "I don't drink in your daycare, don't play in my bar." Luckily for us there were no children in sight.

We decided to head into the North End for dinner. This was a bit risky since:

a) It was a Saturday night
b) We didn't have reservations
and
c) It was the first night in over a week that the weather wasn't disgusting so everyone had similar ideas about being in the city.

We thought we would have better luck if we tried to find a place off of Hanover Street. We hit the jackpot on Richmond Street when we found Vinoteca di Monica with no wait for a table for four. I loved, loved, loved the food and the atmosphere was great too. Sometimes restaurants in the North End can be a bit stressful what with the tight quarters and tons of people. This place was small, but not too small, and I never felt too packed in even though lots of people started arriving after we were seated. I also really liked that we never felt rushed, another pitfall of many North End restaurants.

We got the grilled calamari for an appetizer. I've only ever had fried calamari so this was a welcome change. Plus it was served on a bed of arugula and fennel. My volume of Food Network watching goes way up in the summer and there have been a lot of recipes with fennel recently so this was a perfect opportunity to try it. It was yummy :-)

I got the pasta carbonara for dinner and it was delicious. It was less creamy and more eggy than other carbonaras I've had before and I quite enjoyed that. The homemade pasta was cooked perfectly.

The only downfall was the fact that my leftovers were thrown out before being wrapped up but they gave me a free dessert to make up for it. I had been craving tiramisu for a while so this worked out quite nicely.

After dinner we decided to head over to The Last Hurrah at the Omni Parker. This is quickly becoming a favorite of mine as evidenced by this and this.

Great weather and great company makes for a great night!