Dinner in South Bend

After arriving in South Bend mid-afternoon on Thursday, we settled into our hotel room and then went off to dinner together. This would be the only chance to eat dinner together - and alone, if you catch my drift - all weekend. Prior to arriving, I had done an internet search of nearby restaurants and had settled on The Emporium. One of the perks was that it was within easy walking distance of the the hotel.

And this is our hotel, our home-away-from-home for the weekend. Besides our rather large group (we need about 300 rooms), the hotel also hosted eight different wedding groups this same weekend. It was so bad that you couldn't turn around without running into a wedding somewhere in town.

My dear daughter requested pictures of our room. I quickly decided that I don't like overly soft beds. After the first morning, I also gave up on making the bed, as the maid re-made the bed. Fine, if she wants to go through the extra trouble. I was trying to be nice. But the view was great as you can see from my last post.


I am not a fan of small bathrooms, though. This makes even my bathroom at home look spacious.



As we walked across the Jefferson Street Bridge that crosses the St. Joseph River, we can look downriver at the dam.



And there is our destination. Even better yet, once we got there, I found that they had some nice little specialty shops. No time to shop tonight, but I later returned. A funny story that...



I asked for a table that had a nice river view. The hostess led us up to the upper level.



This is the view from my seat.

And the view without the blinds in the way.

In my enthusiasm for dinner, I forgot to take pictures. Instead I will tell you what we had. As we had no particular schedule to follow, we decided to take our time with our dinner. Too bad that despite several gentle reminders to our waiter, he kept trying to rush us. Geez, they weren't even remotely busy. I will charitably think that he was simply being overzealous in his desire to provide us with good service.

Anyway, on to the food. We started with Skinny Dippers (loaded potato skins with sour cream). This is not necessarily a good-for-you-dish, but it is good. We felt like indulging ourselves this night.

Then, I ordered The Saloon (a marinated top sirloin) with a salad and a side of wild rice. My husband ordered the Tilapia Oscar (tilapia topped with Alaskan King Crab, asparagus spears and a bearnaise sauce) with a baked potato and a salad. Freshly baked rolls accompanied our dishes.

Both of our meals were very good, though I would have wished for just a bit more sauce with my steak. In the end, we both left food on our plates, but only because the portions were so generous. We did not even contemplate having any desert, but instead set off to walk along the river and the raceways in order to work off all those yummy calories. Again, more on this later.

And a special bonus just for my dear friend, Rosie Hawthorne....

Yet another funny sign.

"Door is Alarmed"?!! Who or what scared it?

This sign was just inside a door to our hotel.