two fell swoops

Tim will soon write a post about our Valentine’s Day at White Castle. He will also probably take down this picture. But until then: UPDATE (by Tim): Yes, I’m weird about having pictures of my face on the  blog, so I took down the picture.  It’s still up at the White Castle Valentine’s Day site though.  It seems Andrea was trying to force me to write about it by posting the picture, so it’s only fair…

Even though I’d heard from several people that White Castle did a special Valentine’s Day thing, I was  still half expecting to be laughed at when I asked the lady on the phone from corporate for reservations.  But sure enough, she asked me my location and confirmed that the Castle on Packard near Carpenter participated.

All I told Andrea was that we had reservations and that she should dress up.  At a dinner earlier that week, some of her friends were impressed - “Ooh, how romantic.”  I just sat there and grinned; it was a fun secret to have.  That night, as we drove there dressed in our finest, my anticipation was bubbling over.  I watched Andrea take careful notice of every turn we made, trying to figure out our destination.  First to downtown, then back out towards Ypsi, to the southeast…Andrea wondered aloud what restaurants were down that way.  I could barely contain myself.

Since I’ve never been to that White Castle, I got in the turn lane too late and missed the driveway.  As I pulled into the adjacent vacuum store lot, Andrea said “For a second there I thought you were taking me to White Castle.”  I said nothing and only studied the expression on her face as I maneuvered the car back around to the White Castle driveway.  “You’re kidding, right?  You’re kidding….”

When we entered, a hostess greeted us and asked if we had reservations.  I said yes and gave my last name.  Then we were led to our table and presented with a custom pink-colored menu with my name printed on it.  Each table had a bouquet of fake roses and a candle on it.  The partitions were adorned with more candles, roses, and greenery.  Unfortunately, the florescent lights overhead could not be dimmed, or the restaurant would have looked closed from the street.  I doubt they have a dimmer control anyway.

We ordered a few sliders and were treated to complimentary sparkling cider in plastic wine glasses and chocolate cupcakes.  The service was excellent.  Andrea joked with one of our servers something about having to do this every day, and she replied under her breath, “Girl, you don’t even know…” or something to that effect. (I left a tip before we left.)

But you could tell everyone was having fun.  There were cute old couples there and lots of red clothes.  Since our reservation was during the last half-hour timeblock before regular Castle service resumed, towards the end some regular customers without reservations started trickling in.  One man sat down next to us, bewildered.  The staff gave him table service, and we heard him call someone on the phone and say “You won’t believe this….”

The manager came out and snapped the picture that I linked to above.  He was friendly and excited, and just before we left we saw him posing with the rest of the staff for more pictures.  It rounded out the nice feeling we had as we got into the car and drove home.  A Valentine’s Day to remember.

Our stomachs certainly didn’t forget it the entire next day.