Date night at the Colesseo Ristorante Italiano

   
    ♫♫ When the moon hits your eye like a big Pizza pie...


How many of you just sung  ♪ That's Amore ♪ either out loud or in your head??

Somethings will never go out of style, and just like that classic Dean Martin song, when it's date night, and I'm really craving pizza, one of the first places that pops into mind for me in this city is The Colesseo Restaurant on Corydon Ave.

Now Corydon Ave itself has always been a go to for my wife and I. We are both self proclaimed "people watchers", and I find that on a beautiful summers night that we always end up walking up and down the avenue checking out the scene.

This particular night, we parked down the west end of the avenue (on Lilac Street), and enjoyed a nice stroll down the strip, until we came to that iconic entrance

         

www.colosseo.ca

   For me the Colesseo Ristorante is more than just great food, I love the overall pageantry of the place. The Water fountain, the tiled doorway. the elaborate art work on the walls and behind the bar, right down to the white table cloths and the napkin stuffed wine glasses, the atmosphere alone makes you feel like you are about to sit down for a dinner in Italy.

This night my Wife and I decide to enjoy our meal outdoors. As you know there are only 2 main seasons in Winnipeg, Winter and Patio and with the terrific summer we are having we weren't about to miss a second of it by eating indoors .

Our waitress comes with our menus, and asks if we want anything to drink to start, only a pitcher of sangria will do on a beautiful evening such as this. The waitress leaves to put in our drink order, and my wife and I start the joyful conversation of catching up with each other with out any interruptions from little children while we flip through the menu. One of the waiters comes by with a pitcher of water, he quickly fills a glass for each of us and quietly slips away. 

Shortly after, our waitress returns with our Sangria, she pours us each a glass, and asks if we have made our choice for dinner. I always enjoy flipping through their menu. 12 pages of what feels to me like every Italian dish ever made, and even if the main ingredients in the dish are something you don't normally eat, the names of the dishes alone like pollo alla principesa or scaloppine picatta lambata (try saying those and not doing an Italian accent at the same time 😊) make you want to order the dish none the less, but on this night we were here for pizza , and the winner form the speciality pizza list tonight was the Mediterrano. After a resounding review of our choice by our waitress, she hurried off to get our order into the kitchen, and after a glass of the sangria and some more delightful conversation our food was placed in front of us.

The Mediterrano is a delicious pizza topped with spinach, onions, tomatoes, feta cheese, and chicken. I know... onions on a pizza when I'm on a date?? Well 1) My wife and I have been together for 14 years, so I know she always has mints in her purse, and 2) This pizza tastes so absolutely incredible that you might even be willing to give up that end of the night kiss just to eat it ... maybe lol

The evening continued perfectly from there. I moved to the other side of the table so I could sit by my wife and watch the people as they came and went along Corydon. We enjoyed our pizza, we told stories, we topped up each others drinks until the pitcher was empty, the wait staff came quietly by and cleaned are plates as we finished them, and topped up our water glasses as needed, our waitress stopped by to make sure that our meal was to our satisfaction and to make sure that we were still doing OK through the course of the evening. It was a true Italian dining experience of great food and great conversation taking place over a couple of hours.

Once the food and drinks were gone, we wrapped up our conversation, I paid the bill, and we spent the rest of the night walking around Corydon and the surrounding streets, checking out the people, the music, and the architecture that surrounds our Little Italy.

Please do yourself a favour, and check out the Colesseo Ristorate. Make sure you bring your appetite and give yourself plenty of time to enjoy the ambiance, the food,  and the conversation that will surround you that afternoon, or evening

If you like what you have read today, please follow me at awateats on both twitter, and Instagram. 

Feel free to share the link with your friends and family, and if there is a local place that you would like me to check out for you first or you think it is just so great that I  have to go then please let me know in the comment section below or again on either twitter or Instagram. 

Enjoy your day 

AWAT

The Diner's Grill

So I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I have a dream when I retire from my retail life. I would love nothing more than to own a little diner, somewhere in an industrial park, I'd open early for breakfast, do a great sandwich and burger menu for lunch, then shut it down mid afternoon and head home to the family. So  of course nothing makes me happier to find great places like the Dinner's Grill on Turenne St. just off of Panet ave in the Mission Industrial Park.

http://thedinersgrill.com/

On this particular day, I was meeting my good friend Terry for our monthly breakfast get together, and because of summer vacation, I had my 2 youngest in tow. We walked in through the front door, and immediately a smile comes across my face. From the pictures on the wall, the checkerboard table cloths, to the Popeye and Olive Oyl pictures on the washroom doors, this quaint little 11 table diner, had done its best to give us a quick little time warp back to the 50's and 60's,

We are greeted with a warm smile and a couple of menus. The girls decide to sit by each other and Terry and I sit at the other end of the table. Our friendly hostess tells us that she has a great pancake breakfast that is really inexpensive, and that it would feed both girls, however both young ladies already have eggs and toast firmly ingrained in their minds.

I order the Light Breakfast for myself, 2 Eggs over-easy, bacon, 2 slices of rye toast, hash-browns with a coffee to drink, and ask our hostess if it would be possible for me to order the same thing for the girls with a spare plate on the side and I will just divide it into two for them. She smiles and says "no problem", then turns to my girls and makes the  honest mistake of asking them if they wanted BACON, or SAUSAGE... let the battle begin.... In almost exact unison, except for the word, the 3 year old shouts out sausage as the 8 year old shouts out bacon.  Being the great negotiator that I am, I try to calmly explain that we have to choose between one or the other so of course now each one is sticking firm to their own choice. Without so much as a blink of an eye our hostess turns to me and says " It's OK, I will put one strip of bacon on one plate and one sausage link on the other" . I tell her that she is amazing and thank her very much, and before she can ask the next question that is surly to start another great debate as to why pop is not OK at breakfast, I order them each a glass of milk to drink and she heads to the kitchen with our order.

The food comes quickly and as ordered, the girls portions have already been rationed out by the kitchen,  1 egg each, a strip of bacon with one meal and a sausage link with the other as promised, hash-browns and a piece a toast complete the plates. I quickly cut the eggs for each girl so that they can start eating and that Terry and I could enjoy some conversation while they ate.

Our Hostess comes back to check on us, the girls tell her that everything is great with large smiles on their faces, and our hostess tells us that the meal that the girls are eating is the breakfast special and it comes with a drink so she will only charge me for 1 extra milk. With a smile I thank her once again, between the food, the atmosphere and the conversation this breakfast was pretty well perfect.

After our conversations were finished and our plates practically licked clean, I cleared up our bill, a mere $24 after tax for the 4 of us. I Thank our hostess again for our wonderful experience and ensure her that we will be back, next time to check out the incredible lunch menu that they offer.

The girls and I say goodbye to our friend, and head off on our day to start another adventure.

If you find yourself in the east end of the city with a hunger in your belly, before you pull into the drive thru of one of the big fast food chains, find the link here in my blog, plug it into your GPS (It's not that hard to find really) and head to the Diner's Grill instead. I guarantee you won't be disappointed

If you like what you have read today, please follow me at awateats on both twitter, and Instagram. 

Feel free to share the link with your friends and family, and if there is a local place that you would like me to check out for you first or you think it is just so great that I  have to go then please let me know in the comment section below or again on either twitter or Instagram. 

Enjoy your day 

AWAT

The Power of Food

Well it's been a while my friends, but it is time to get back at it. I apologize for being away so long.

It's funny that no matter how busy life gets...husband, father of 4, friend, retail manager, there is always one constant that keeps me grounded, brings me back to reality, calms me down after a bad day, makes a good day into a great day, and that's food. Now, it's not the I need to sit down and eat a family size bag of potato chips to myself type of food experience that I am talking about, It is the excitement of seeing a new recipe I want to try on one of the social media platforms, it's watching The Food Network with my family, it's going out to a new restaurant or food truck that we haven't tried before, and last and most importantly of all, it is cooking for my friends and family.

The power of food to bring people together has had an over-whelming effect on me. When I think about it, I think back to my childhood and to the importance of the Sunday dinner. This had many different forms over the years, from those "special treat" Sundays where my parents would let us eat dinner downstairs in the recroom and we would put on the CBC on channel 2 and they would  let us watch the Disney Sunday Movie as a family, to a time where my sister and I had just recently moved out and started our own separate families, so the Sunday dinner became the time where we all got back together around my parents dinning room table and caught up with each others lives.

One of wonderful thing about the Sunday dinner was the different variety of guests that would join us around the table. From Aunts, Uncles, cousins, and Grandparents to friends and co-workers, all ages, all different backgrounds, the Dinner table was a place to eat, to drink, to break bread, to share ideas and opinions, to debate, to laugh and to enjoy. Jokes were told, world issues were solved, and heated debates carried out until the dinner plates were cleared.

Like everything in life, things change things adapt. My parents eventually retired and moved out of the city. This made the Sunday dinner a little more challenging, but as our adult lives evolved so did the new version of the Sunday dinner. It wasn't specifically on Sundays anymore, and now it wasn't primarily at my Parents place. Family gatherings now became the new Sunday dinner.. Birthday parties, Holidays, Super Bowl parties, these were the new get togethers, and wow how they have grown. What use to be 4 - 10 people around the dinner table has now flourished into 20- 30 people occupying all areas of the house, eating, talking, debating, joking and laughing, with different topics of converstion from one room to the next.

The faces have changed over the years, some friends have come and gone, some family have come and gone as well, but the power of food to bring people together hasn't changed. It allows us to live in that moment, it makes us feel like we have never been apart, it lets us feel safe,  that our opinions do matter,  that there is always someone to listen, and that what ever may be going wrong in your life just doen't matter right now, because the feeling of being part of this event just feels so right .

So, If it's alright with everybody, I'd like to invite you into my world of food, to have all of you join me at my virtual dinner table. I will share some of my favorite recipes, review some of the local restaurants and smaller unknown grocery stores, and we will have a few dinner table debates over some of the topics of the day.

Please follow me on twitter @awateats  and look for me on instagram under awateats as well

I look forward to sharing this journey with all of you

Awat