This weekend was date night with dinner out and a show at the Hippodrome. Since it was the weekend before Valentines day we decided to just roll it into this weekend too. For dinner I picked the restaurant out which is how we ended up at Flemmings. I didn’t realize at the time that the place is part of a chain and that it is primarily a steak house. I just liked their website and they had listed prime rib which I had been craving since we were home in Hawaii when I didn’t get any. Getting to the place was kind of a pain since we had to go through the inner harbor and traffic there was pretty bad. Once we got to the place we valeted the car so we wouldn’t have to deal with trying to find a parking space. The only odd thing was that you paid for the valet when you dropped it off instead of when you picked it up.
Once we were inside Flemmings I was pleased by the decor and ambiance. It was surprisingly busy since we were there at 6PM which is a little early for the dinner rush. We got seated immediately and were presented with our menus. The menus were kind of cumbersome since you had a large bulky regular menu, a specialty drink book, a reserve wine list, a prefix winter menu, and a restaurant week prefix menu. This combination of 5 separate menus to look at was kind of intimidating and made the table feel cluttered and chaotic. We started off with two martini’s from the bar which were awesome. I got something called the Tropical Martini which was coconut flavored and Nicole had a Pink Lady. Both were shaken and poured at the table which was neat. For dinner I ended up ordering the restaurant week prefix menu since it had prime rib as one of the options. Nicole got the petite fillet imperial which was one of the daily specials that our waitress told us about. When my prime rib came I wasn’t really impressed with it. It came with these 3 sauces to dip the meat into but I was disappointed since the meat itself didn’t have much flavor. Nicole’s steak arrived and she thought the meat was very good but she was a little disappointed that the crab meat imperial was basically just some lump crab meat piled on top without any preparation.
The salads and entrees were kinda slow in coming out which meant that it got to 7:30 and we still hadn’t ordered/gotten the dessert that was part of my meal. When i got our waitresses attention I told her that we needed to be out of there in 10 minutes and she said it was no problem that should would box up my cheescake and bring us the check. Unfortunately when the check arrived it had an extra ($10) drink on the bill which we didn’t have but since we were in a rush I just paid for it so we could get out of there so we could make it to our show. Once we got our car back from the valet and were leaving the place we realized that the ‘cheesecake’ that she had brought out in a bag for us was actually someone else’s leftovers (gross). As a result I didn’t like the place as we ended on a couple of bad notes and doubt I’d ever go back to the place. More importantly though I don’t think I like steak houses as I find the value just isn’t there (I can do as good if not better steak at home for 10% of the cost).
Since we got a late exit from Flemmings we were in a bit of a rush to try and make it to the play on time. Unfortunately we ran into a massive traffic jam trying to get the 2 miles from the restaurant to the Hippodrome. When we finally got up to the parking garage we usually park at it was closed. I didn’t think anything of it since we were almost 10 min late so we ended up driving around the block and managed to luck out and find some street parking. I was a little wary about the street parking since it was a pay to park place but the meters weren’t accepting any money. So I was little stressed out about the car/ticket during the show. Turns out that its only pay to park till 8PM which i thought was a little odd.
We make it to the show at least 10 minutes late and we can hear the performance has already started. Thankfully the Hippdrome let us in without any problems. Once we got into the theater we were really surprised since it was mostly full. We actually managed to get seated before the first big musical number started. The show itself was fantastic and we really enjoyed all the singing. One thing that was surprising to me was how different the play was from Grease the movie with John Travolta. There were a lot of little differences that kind of caught me off guard since the movie was based on the play. Still we had a great time and enjoyed the show. We figured out that the reason the show as probably so busy was because Taylor Hicks the American Idol singer had a number in the show. It was kinda neat to hear him but i didn’t think he added anything to the show but it definitely worked as a way to fill the theater.
Still we had a pretty good night and definetly enjoyed our show. It was a pretty good way to celebrate Valentines day out.
