Valentine's Day Out With Friends

For Valentine's Day this year, Tim and I had decided to go out to a nice restaurant in the city with our friends Tim and Katie and Scott and Lindsay. After much deliberation, we decided to go to the steak house, Shula's.  We were all excited to go out together, when the Logan family caught the flu and Scott and Lindsay were not able to join us. We felt so badly for them and missed them dearly.  We would still like to go out with "the whole crew" at some point.

 

This is the four of us at our apartment before we left. We were fortunate to have two of the graduate school girls from our church agree to babysit Madison for us. They were so sweet. We were so thankful for their help. Maddy just about slept the whole time - so we are hoping we have them hooked as sitters because they think it's a piece of cake :)

This was us trying to get a family picture right around Maddy's bedtime - so she was freaking out. We kept trying to bounce her and try to get her to be calm for just one second - I couldn't help but laugh!

Ok - this one is better :)

As much as we both missed Madison while we were out, it was nice for us to get out without her for a few hours and spend some romantic time as a couple - much needed :)

We found out that Shula's had valet parking for $12, so we decided to take the Barker's car into the city. I won't go into the details, but the trip was quite eventful - maybe Katie will add more details on her blog :)  Long story short - Google Maps brought us beneath the Restaurant on underground streets with the same names - weird! 

The restaurant was inside of a Sheraton Hotel. This was Katie in the lobby checking out the centerpiece. Those were actually real flowers!

The restaurant is owned by a former football coach - so it was interesting because it is fine dining but the pictures on the walls are all of football players. But as you can see in the picture below, they are in very nice frames :)

In this picture, Tim was making fun of Katie and I for taking so many pictures. And in all our picture taking, I didn't get any of the food! 

The steaks were just gorgeous coming out of the kitchen. 

But the aroma and taste beat the presentation by far.

 Everyone at the table was just perfectly silent as they tasted their first bite.  Then their was a quiet gasp of delight around the table as each person tasted his steak. I had the 8 oz. filet mignon. It was absolutely divine! We all decided that it was the best steak that we had ever tasted. I guess they raise their own cattle and have higher standards for themselves than even the FDA.  If you like steak, you should try Shula's out. They have them all across the East and Midwest. It was pricey (think $10 more than Ruth's Chris) but definitely worth it for the experience. 

I hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day as well! What did you do on the special day?