While I avoid casual chain restaurants like the plague, sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. When stuck at an airport, your choices are limited. It’s typically a case of “least of all evils”. At DTW, I was given the illustrious choices of tgi friday’s, ruby tuesday, mcdonald’s, champps (where they allow smoking!?!??), cheeburger cheeburger, and a few other sandwich type shops, most of which were starting to close by the time I showed up. While I like cheeburger, cheeburger, the one at the airport was like a stripped down version, and it scared me off a bit. And the sandwich shops, those are always the pre-made ones, where the sandwiches have been sitting there for who knows how long! So really, what was I supposed to do? At that point, it was just a toss up between tgi and ruby, and for whatever reason, tgi mcscratchy’s won out.

I started out with a house salad and a virgin strawberry daiquiri. The salad wasn’t half bad. I haven’t been to a tgi friday’s for at least ten years, and I didn’t remember anything from it. The salad is nothing special, but I did like their vinaigrette dressing. This little fruit slushy was pretty darn tasty and refreshing too.

This is an airport restaurant, so it’s a stripped down version of a regular tgi’s with a limited menu. I got the dragonfire chicken, which is a grilled chicken breast glazed with a kung pao sauce and topped with pineapple pico de gallo,served over stir–fried brown rice, along side mandarin oranges and broccoli. Really, this was pretty good! The chicken was quite good, although the sauce was a bit too much on the gingery side for my liking. I didn’t bite into any ginger hunks, thank goodness, but the ginger flavor was a bit too strong. The sauce and the pico added just enough spice. The rice was pretty good, even though it was on the overcooked and mushy side. The mandarin oranges were from a can, so they couldn’t really go wrong there, and the broccoli was great! They were steamed just right, and not mushy at all. They still had some firmness. All in all, this sure beat a big mac!

I headed up to the far burbs for the first dinner party of 2010 at N’s house. There are 5 cats in that house, most are unfriendly. There’s a lot of N’s art all around the house. Naturally, as she’s an artist. What’s a dinner party without cheese and crackers? And grapes! I ate an unfairly large share of these grapes.

There was tons to eat. Bread, with butter and nutella! Little tiny crab cakes with a remoulade. A made those. Some little phyllo dough puff things filled with spinach.

Garlic broccoli, and some random flatbread type of stuff.

Rice and some dip for the flatbread!

There was even a warming tray to keep the food hot! Hello chicken marsala! Hello veggies! And hello veggie ravioli! A made the ravioli too. It was all freakin delicious. I loved all the red and white dishes too, they were adorably old school.

For dessert, a ginormous fruit tart! It wasn’t much of a tart, it ended up being pretty much just a cake with fruit on top, but it was still quite tasty. We ended up trying to play this game, Quelf, later on in the evening, but it wasn’t so easy. There were too many people and too many of them were drunk, so game playing proved quite difficult. But we’ll have to give it a shot another time. Thanks N for the lovely party!

I was talked into attending a Celebrate the Macallan event with promises of hot hors d’oeuvres and free booze. Well, we certainly got free booze, along with a high-tech lecture on scotch and scotch-making, but there were no hot foods to be had. In fact, we got a little plate of cheese and crackers and grapes, but that was it. And with no dinner in my belly, man, did these drinks get me. In fact, a table next to our table dared to ask H/A if they could have our cheese. He hesitated for a moment, and I was going to tackle someone if he somehow said yes to them, but he came to his senses and said no. How dare you ask for someone else’s free cheese? It’s our free cheese!

I don’t know about you, but I can’t drink scotch. Even if it’s free. It burned my lips with every sip. Oye. And after drinking fancy expensive scotch (10, 12, 15, 17, and 18 year-old versions) we went to Wendy’s to eat real food. Man, a downtown Wendy’s on a friday night is crazy!