29 Going On 80

Alyssa's 29th birthday was this past week and I let her choose where she wanted to go to dinner. I thought she might select a fancy restaurant in Manhattan or even a trendy eatery in Brooklyn. So, a few days before her birthday she announced she found a place... in Hoboken, New Jersey. Hoboken? Where is that? How do we get there? Could you come up with a worse name for a city? So many questions. In order to get there, we had to use the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) which is the subway service between New York and New Jersey. Believing anything was better than the New York City subway system, Alyssa was excited to check out the PATH.



The restaurant Alyssa chose was called Amanda's, and the reason she chose it (besides the fact her sister's name is Amanda) was because it had an amazingly inexpensive 3-course prix fixe menu (we're talking $14/person). As an added bonus, the restaurant had a lot of charm.



The one catch: in order to take advantage of the $14 prix fixe menu, your reservation could be no later than 5:30 p.m. Since we normally like to have dinner a little early (or two hours early compared to most New Yorkers), we thought this would be just fine. We figured the clientele may be somewhat elderly at that hour, but who cares? When we got to the restaurant, sure enough, there was a group of senior citizens, complete with a walker leaned up against the fireplace, also hoping to enjoy the early bird special.



The food was delicious and believe it or not, it did get dark while we were there, which meant our food pictures didn't turn out too well. This empty plate picture will have to do. Alyssa's favorite was the key lime pie for dessert, and she kept raving that she could taste the butter in the graham cracker crust. Mine was gone before I even noticed there was a crust.



All in all, Hoboken provided Alyssa with a successful 29th birthday. Why do I have a feeling her 80th birthday will be very similar?