Us with CT and Sienna (Sean and Tracey's baby)One of our wonderful Chicago friends, Christen Terry, had a birthday today. It's a little ironic that last year we (not me) were running a 1/2 marathon to celebrate her day of birth. This year we were stuffing our faces with tapas.
For those of you who are from Chicago, I don't need to tell you how great Cafe Ba Ba Reeba is. For you non-Chicagoans, this a badass tapas joint in Lincoln Park that serves up small plates in a big way. I hit up this place long before I moved to Chicago, and have been here several times since moving here. Wendy and I even spent NYE 2010 here when we were living up in the LP. Amazing place. Highly recommend it.
We gathered around a huge table with some awesome people, most of whom work with an advertising agency (with Christen) called Integer. For those of you who are fans of Office Space, I consistently refer to Integer as Intertrode (which if you remember was Initech's rival company that Michael Bolton and Samir went to work for after getting laid off) for my own personal amusement. At any rate, a great crew. I should definitely hang out with Wendy's peeps more often.
After ordering up a couple of pitchers of sangria, everyone started looking around at each other with hungry eyes (think Kobayashi, not Patrick Swayze). John Wilhelm, a CoorsMiller man (I think he'd like that) and a tried and true foodie, was entrusted with the daunting task of ordering for this big crew. This is the type of thing that you couldn't pay me to do (especially since I'll eat anything so why not dump the ordering on someone else). Wilhelm spent what seemed like a pretty short amount of time talking with the waitress. Several minutes passed by and a couple of puny plates got dropped off and I thought for sure Wilhelm had blown it. No sooner had this thought entered my brain than an onslaught of the best (and the most) Spanish food you can imagine hit our table. Spicy potatoes with aioli, lamb skewers, garlic shrimp, smoked salmon, andalucian meatballs, bacon-wrapped dates, goat-cheese marinara, bistec with bleu cheese, and I don't even think that covers it. It got to the point where people were getting so full they'd pretend not to see the server drop off another round of tapas because they didn't want the plate to get passed to them. What they didn't realize is that Wilhelm and I had also pre-ordered a giant plate of paella as the "main course". Once the paella came out steaming (with loads of shrimp and scallops), I think everyone forgot they were full because it got completely devoured. Everything was unbelievable.
We capped off the evening with some candle-blowing and some BYO strawberry shortcake, which was lovely.
After saying our goodbyes, Wendy and I realized we only had 4 minutes to make it 1/2 a mile on foot to catch our train. After a dead sprint and a little throw-up in my mouth we caught that ol' southbound Brown Line train to our little abode in River North.
Not bad for a Monday night... HAPPY BIRTHDAY CT!!!
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