Our last team dinner was at Grand Lux Cafe. I’d never heard of this place before, but it’s a basically a different version of the Cheesecake Factory, with a different name. It actually quite looks similar, but with less emphasis on cheesecake. Since Philadelphia is always the last to get chain restaurants, it didn’t surprise me that this was a chain.
Here’s my Asian Chicken Salad with chicken, fried wontons, rice noodles, lettuce, cabbage, almonds, carrots, tomatoes, in their asian dressing. As with any cheesecake factory item, it was ginormous. But also, not bad.
This is the Salmon Three Ways. It is done in soy glaze with shiitakes, horseradish crusted with asparagus, and finally almond ginger with green beans and buerre blanc.
While the food was really just ginormous portions of mediocre food, I really enjoyed the desserts. They have many baked to order desserts that you have toorder with your main entrees, as they take a long time to prepare. Since I love me some cobbler, I got the Peach Cobbler. It is super hot and served with vanilla ice cream. Delicious!
Here are the adorable Roasted Pineapple Upside-Down cakes, also served with vanilla ice cream.
They do a really decent Beignet! They are served with different dipping sauces.
Also, on a random lunch, I had the biggest baked potato I’d ever experience in my life. It was the size of the entire container. I swear to  you, it was the size of my head!

Can you believer I’ve never been to Waffle House? It’s true! So on the way back home from delaware, we stopped at one of the couple Waffle Houses we passed. Looks like there isn’t a Waffle House in greater philly. You have to go out to Lancaster or a bit deeper into Delaware than just across the border. I’ve seen these yellow signs plenty of times during my travels, but never felt compelled to go in. Well, I finally broke my Waffle House cherry.
They have waffles here. But not just waffles of course, but other breakfast type items, burgers, sandwich, y’know, diner type stuff. It was way past breakfast and lunch time, but you can get breakfast any time here. And who doesn’t love laminated placemats?
We got some waffles, bacon, eggs, and hash brown. That’s about as breakfast-y as breakfast gets. Everything was great! The waffles are big and thin and not crispy, and that’s not a bad thing. As much as I like the big motel do-it-yourself waffles which tend to have a crispy outside, these waffle house waffles are just great. It soaks up the butter and syrup so every bite is moist. And I absolutely love hash browns like this, the ones with the shredded potatoes. There’s just something about browned and crispy potatoes cooked on a big old griddle. It’s hard to duplicate that at home. And well, all this food pretty much cost next to nothing. I loved it!

We eventually made it to Cedar City, which is actually quite a big town. How do we know? Because there’s a Home Depot and a Target and a Starbucks and highways! We ended up eating dinner at Cafe Rio, which is a mexican chain joint out of Salt Lake City.
We both ended up getting burritos. S got the sweet pork barbacoa burrito, enchilada style. So basically, that means it was slathered on the outside with sauce. These things are sizeable. S found the pork to be a bit too sweet, but I quite liked it. But I do agree that it might be a tad too sweet, even for me. The sauce was a little bit sweet too.
I got the fire grilled steak burrito, and did not get enchilada style. At first, they made it enchilada style anyway, without asking me, and then ended up redoing it for me. The steak is actually fire grilled, I saw them make it while I had to wait for a new one, and damn, the beef is really freakin good. It was a lot better than the pork, in my opinion. But I should have gotten enchilada style as it does make it a bit better. I don’t know what they do to the beef, but they’re doing it right. It’s really quality. I prefer this spot over chipotle or qdoba or any such nonsense.