Due to my giant flight delay, I only had one chance to actually eat in Albany. So on my second night there, I headed downtown to DP. This is actually in the Hampton Inn. That might make you think twice about eating here, but please, do not let that stop you. This place is good in my book. I dined at the bar and it happened to be happy hour. This is an impressive bar. The bartenders here definitely know their stuff. And it looks like they’ve won a bunch of local awards, which is quite deserved.
I had this cucumber martini which totally kicked my lame ass. It was super duper strong and whew, did this thing pack a punch. But it seemed healthy to me because I could taste cucumbers. That’s healthy, right?
Instead of bread and butter, DP does it right. They serve sourdough pretzel ball rolls with homemade whole grain mustard. First off, how cute are these things? And second off, they’re freakin delicious and warm! Please, someone tell me how to make these!
I got the soup of the day which was a potato and leek soup. This is one of my favorite flavors of soup, ever, and they definitely do it right here. It also had bacon in it. How can you go wrong with that?
The lobster ravioli. These kind of look a mess, but they tasted just fine. I actually found it cool that it was black pasta.
These were the pork dumplings, served in a chinese to-go box. Meh, on that presentation choice. There were two dipping sauces, the first brown one was just kind of gross, and the second one was a sweet chili sauce type which I greatly preferred. The dumplings themselves were just meh too.
The banana bread bread pudding! Yes folks, bread pudding made from banana bread. It was super good. If you like banana, I highly recommend it! The two bartenders that waited on me were awesome. They were friendly and helpful and gave me recommendations and were quite attentive. They also kept calling me young lady, which was hilarious. If I’m ever back, I’m going to jump in and try some entrees!

It’s always random the hours that restaurants have on weekends. We failed at going to one place that wasn’t going to be open for a little bit, so we headed over to Pei Wei instead. I hadn’t been here in awhile. I don’t remember being able to get beer there before, but you definitely can. And you can get big ass beers.
We totally got bamboozled by the menu. We read Japanese Chile Ramen and totally thought this was going to be a bowl of ramen noodle soup. Total order fail! Instead, this just ended up being a noodle dish with ramen noodles in it. You cannot imagine the disappointment. Anyhoo, this was a heaping bowl of egg noodles with a slightly spicy soy mirin sauce, scallions, garlic, bean sprouts, carrots, onions, lime, cilantro, chile peppers, and tons of tofu that we’d picked. It tasted fine, but it was totally not what we thought it would be. So it made us a little sad.
This is the Thai Dynamite with crispy chicken. It’s cooked in a sriracha sauce withh lime, scallions, garlic, red bell peppers, carrots, and thai basil. While there were some visible scallions, the carrots and bell peppers were few and far between.
I’m a creature of habit with certain restaurants, so here’s my Japanese Teriyaki rice bowl, which is my favorite dish here. It’s got a nice thick sweet soy glaze, onions, napa cabbage, carrots, spinach, scallions, and sesame seeds. And as usual, I got mine with brown rice, some of the best brown rice, ever! Why would two people order three entrees? Well, we thought we were going to share a nice bowl of ramen. Cue the sadface! At least we got to drink the crap out of some mr. pibb.

We headed back to Denver to hang out for one more night. We roamed around Broadway for awhile and then stopped for lunch at Spicy Basil. They bill themselves as an asian grill. They have a mix of thai, chinese, and questionably vietnamese dishes. They have some seating outside so we enjoyed our last al fresco meal in sunny colorado.
They have some very affordable lunch deals, so we both got one of those. S got the spicy basil chicken and the spring roll.
I got the spicy basil shrimp with a spring roll. Our server encouraged us to order two different dishes, but we didn’t care. That’s what appealed to us. So we had the same dish, hers with chicken, mine with shrimp. I really loved this. It was sweet and savory and slightly spicy. I loved that there was tons of baby bok choy and red peppers. I ignored the green peppers, as usual. And we both got brown rice. I need to learn how to make this because I could eat this all the time. It was quite busy when we were there so it seems to be a popular lunch spot with the locals.