Romeo & Juliet's Birthday Dinner

Tonight Becky and I went out to dinner for my birthday. We initially were planning to go someplace casual and maybe save the nice dinner for another time at a fancy restaurant. We considered several of our usual places before settling on Romeo & Juliet's Cafe on Hertel Ave. It is one of our favorite nearby restaurants both for take out and for dining in. 

We were just there recently to bring some pizza home for dinner and we had had enough for a couple of meals and some snacks too. At the time we said we should sit in the dining room some time as we hadn't done that in a while. We also hadn't sat on the patio for dinner this past summer. So we decided to have some dinner there tonight. It was a great choice.

We got a nice table for two near the front window and started off with some wine. It turns out that Wednesday is Wine Night and bottles are half price. Well, that's good except I wanted a red and Becky, who hasn't been drinking much wine lately, wanted a rose. So we passed on the wine deal and got our glasses. I had a wonderful Italian montepulciano.

There are so many great choices on the menu and we were having a hard time deciding. We ended up getting a lot of food. We started off with their Italian Antipasto which was spectacular. I was even eating some olives. It had marniated artichokes, peppadew, stuffed with goat cheese and cream cheese, eggplant, soppressata, prosciutto crudo, assorted cheeses. Accompanied with roasted garlic and crostini. We wanted a pizza and selected their pepperoni and mozzarella pizza from a wonderful selection. I had my heart set on a panini sandwich so we ordered  their Alberti turkey panini. We had way too much food but we also really wanted to have some serious leftovers for dinner tomorrow.

We spent about an hour and a half sitting at our table enjoying the meal and the wine.