If you know us well at all, you'll know that when Chad and I plan a getaway, we usually...well scratch that, we ALWAYS plan our trips around food. We make mental notes of the things we absolutely MUST try in each city. We try to find out what foods the city is known for...what makes it special... if certain foods have been on the Food Network or some other foodie show... you know, those sorts of things ;) For the restaurants that need reservations, (usually the fancy schmancy ones Chad wants to try that have famous chefs at the helm)... reservations are made AS SOON as plane tickets are purchased. It was obviously no surprise that Chicago had a LONG list of restaurants for us to try and food to endulge in. UN-fortunately.. (but a good thing for our bank account)...Chad wasn't feeling up to snuff and was battling his non existent taste buds... so we ended up scaling back our reservations to only a handful.. lol..)
This little extended weekend getaway, which actually marked our two year wedding anniversary!!(woo hoo and awwww all at the same time ;) was a food binge like no other. (I've honestly never eaten so much in my life.. one day, we actually had dinner reservations at TWO restaurants...Holy Food Overload is all I can say! Apparently reservations for these places were hot commodities and we took what we could get just so we could say we had tried it. CRAZY-NESS!
But first.. we had to check in to our hotel and take a gander at our surroundings...
The Allerton Hotel right off the Magnificent Mile at Michigan Ave. and Huron St.
Two seconds after we checked in...it was DARK! Sunset here was at 4:30pm... crazy
On our walk to see what was around...and to find dinner..
We ran into The Old Water Tower of Chicago
This day was only MILDLY binge-y (it was technically a half day afterall) with one of my all time FAVORITE foods...Chicago style PIZZA!! On our walk around our little part of the city, we ran SMACK into Lou Malnati's, a Chicago favorite over Pizzeria Uno on Food Wars. :) I was pretty giddy, I must say. It was YUMMY!!
First of the Trilogy of Pizzerias we needed to try... for "research" of course.. ;)
Lou Malnati's - Soooo good.. Butter crust was awesome
Even the "small" pizza was massive! Time to walk off this beast...
Next Up: The John Hancock Observatory. We'd heard that you could skip paying the Observation Deck price by going to the lounge on another floor... BUT, we ended up not taking that route considering it was Saturday night and there was a HUGE line to get up to the bar. We were also both NOT dressed to be amongst the "trying-too-hard-to-look-cute-so-someone-will-buy-me-a-drink" crowd....so, we bit the bullet and bought the "Sun and Stars" pack...which just meant we were able to come back for a day time look at the city as well. (cause during this first go round at night...we had NO idea what anything was!)
Beautiful at every turn :)
Information about the city...
Time to rest up for Day #2 :)
