Chicago Restaurant Week - now through March 6th!

Check it out - it's been extended for one more week!  eatitupchicago.com

Chicago Restaurant Week

It's coming...Feb 20-27, to Chicago! Here is yet another great time to try out 130+ different Chicago restaurants - $22 for 3-course lunches and $32 for 3-course dinners. Check out eatupchicago.com and make your reservation through opentable.com to your points there too! Looks like we'll try out Tizi Melloul one night for dinner.

Chicago…North Pole…Chicago!

Since we enjoy food so much, we make it a point to go out for our wedding anniversary. For our 4th, we went to Custom House and thoroughly enjoyed it! It’s a nice steakhouse a train stop away from our house. The food was excellent – definitely geared more towards beef and seafood, which was fine with us. We had some grilled octopus, a juicy steak, short ribs, and I tried sweet breads for the first time…wow decadent! In honor of Sarah Palin, for dessert we had a baked Alaska…baked ice cream! Oddly enough, later I read that on this day, it was warmer at the North Pole as compared to Chicago.

We redeemed Amex points for a $100 gift certificate from our now obsolete IN: CHICAGO Amex credit card. We’re going to miss getting restaurant gift certificates for points but thanks to the Amex Blue card we can at least get cash back.

The crazy part? After paying minimal for our dinner, we achieved 10,000 points from opentable.com! Now we get to choose from a very long list of restaurants to redeem our $100 opentable.com gift certificate. There are so many restaurants to choose from…I think we’ll finally try Topolobampo, TRU or The Publican. Any suggestions?

Dining out on a deal (in most cities)

restaurant.com allows you find dining coupons for restaurants near your location for a fraction of the cost. If you use a coupon code from slickdeals.net again, act fast since the popular restaurants sell out fast. Read the fine print on this site - some apply the gift certificate for only food, not drinks...and sometimes they can only be used on certain days.

One thing I learned last year, is either buy it right before you go to the restaurant or double check that the restaurant is still honoring the coupon before you go. I did and found, the easy way to check – just click on the restaurant link within the printed coupon you receive in your account. If the restaurant cannot be located, then that means the coupon is no long good…this is when you email the website, and you will be credited for the amount of the coupon (not necessarily the amount for which you paid.)

If you dine out often, also cross-check opentable.com to make a reservation. You can earn points for every time you dine on a reservation made through their site. It’s usually 100 points per dining experience. If you tend to dine out during the week, it’s pretty likely you can get 1000 points for a dining experience. Once you accumulate 10,000 points, you earn a $100 gift card for any restaurant on the website. (Or 5,000 points = $50, or 2,000 points = $20) We’re 100 points away from getting a $100 gift card, can’t wait!

A New Year of Deals

The purpose of my first blog in 2009 is to let YOU know about the deals going on.  Whether it's a FREE event or a bargain priced anything, I hope to share it with you here.  To get the hang of blogging though, the first couple of entries are a few of my first deals of 2009.

To start off the New Year right, we went to Cafe Ba Ba Reba for their New Years' Day Pajama Brunch.  If your group shows up in pjs, you receive a gift certificate for a future visit in the amount of our meal.  Earlier in the week, I secured a 1pm appointment for 4 since I knew we would need time to recover from our NYE celebration together.  

It was a great deal of food!  Between 4 of us, we could barely finish our brunch tapas - tomato bread, crispy spicy potatos, spinach & artichoke crepe, baked mac'n'cheese with bacon, sausage paella, poached eggs, grilled squid, spinach empanadas, and baked goat cheese.  The spicy potatos and grilled squid were the best.  The bottomless freshly squeezed orange juice was refreshing and just what we needed after a festive night out on NYE.  The crowd was great, all decked out in festive pjs.  We'll be back soon for tapas all over again, but just not in our pjs.  Happy New Year!!