Valentine's Day (Deferred)
One of the many things I love about my wife Mary, is that she isn't hung up on convention. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and the like, are not the types of things that have to be slavishly adhered too. There are some things set in stone, of course, like opening presents on Christmas Day and ritual consumption of the turkey on the fourth Thursday in November, but pretty much everything else is open to modification. Even birthdays. Although gifts should be exchanged on that special day we slid down the birth canal on our first ever E-Ticket ride, getaways and restaurant reservations can be made for another more convenient day.
Which brings us to Valentine's Day, one of my least favorite holidays. First, you don't get time off from work. Second, there's no ritual feasting involved. Third, there's no sporting events on TV. OK, granted, I don't actually watch sporting events on TV any other time, but it's the principal of the thing. Mary agrees that Valentine's Day is not something that's very important in the greater scheme of things so we can celebrate it when we want to and not when the overlords of the greeting card and floral industries decree. This also means we'd have no trouble getting a restaurant reservation, flowers would be significantly cheaper, and displays of heart shaped boxes of chocolates would no longer be available having been replaced by waxy faux chocolate Easter rabbits and marshmallow Peeps.
This year our delayed Valentine's Day was scheduled to take advantage of a promotion running in Denver called Restaurant Week aka 5280 Restaurant Week (5280 - Mile High City - get it?). 5280 Week is a fairly brilliant marketing ploy in which a bunch of restaurants agree to offer a fixed price meal for two for $52.80. Like the symmetry? I do. I don't know how many restaurants participate but from the list, which I'm too lazy to count, it's in the triple digits. Pretty amazing. So instead of having to make reservations for February 14th a month or more in advance, we lined up a table a mere couple of days early. Since it was all the way up in
I'm a little vague on whether we decided on the restaurant or the hotel first but it turned out to be serendipitous since they were across the street from each other. We got a room at the Hotel Teatro, in LoDo or the Lower Downtown, the uber trendy urban area where all the hipsters and hepcats hang out, or at least it was until the economy went into free fall. Mary found a pretty good deal on the hotel since it was a Sunday night so that made our night out all the more romantic since we were saving money.
Hotel Teatro
The Hotel Teatro is right next to the
The hotel, yes, convenient, nice and has a theatrical theme as the name implies. I liked the place. It's a great location, the hotel is clean and uncluttered and the most prevalent design feature is large photos of famous actors in stage productions of famous plays. Or so I assume, but since the vast majority of the actor's names and the plays are unknown to me, they could be shots from dinner theatre in
The rooms were attractive and at least our corner room had an interesting design with a long entry hallway leading to the bathroom and then the bedroom. We were upgraded to the corner room on arrival, probably due to the fact that it was a Sunday, but just possibly because we're cheery and pleasant people. Although the bed was quite comfortable, we both had some difficulty with sleep as the street noise was a little louder then we were used to, coming from high up in the mountains as we were and all. All in all we remarked that if we ever do actually come up to
Oceanaire Restaurant
For our belated Valentines' meal we dined at Oceanaire, one of a chain of sixteen or so restaurants located in all the major metropolitan areas one would expect for a upper end seafood establishment. We'd noticed one across from out hotel during our last stay in
We really liked Oceanaire. Everything about the place seemed to designed for our personal proclivities. The staff was efficient and warm. Décor was understated with lots of red and warm wood tones. The bar was subdued and the blue lighting really set the tone for an aquatic based meal. The background music was from the Forties (or at least it sounded swing like) and set the right ambiance. And the staff was willing to indulge us in our desire to enjoy a leisurely cocktail first before ordering. The food was up to par with the rest of the experience. As part of the 5280 promotion one orders off a more restricted set menu but we had no problems finding three courses each. We added a bottle of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that went perfectly with the meal and the fact that we only had to stumble across the street to get to bed meant that there were none of the usual guilt or anxieties to deal with. All in all, we had a most excellent Valentine's Day and probably at less than half the cost of doing it on the day appointed by the greeting card industry.
