A Night Out on Midland Commons

What's up, guys.

So our friend group is pretty big - ten families in total - so planning simple outings can sometimes be a pain in the ass.  Now, like I've said before, five of us families are much closer with one another, and this 'inner circle' generally gets together more often than we do with the whole larger group.  This evening, we decided to have a 'date night' with just those couples in our Fab Five group (as the wives call it.)  One of these families - Mitch and Kelli - sadly couldn't make it out, due to previous engagement, leaving just us, the Johnsons, the Larsons, and the Colliers.

We decided on an upscale Italian restaurant called Gratzi's for dinner, located right downtown, followed by some drinks at this new beer-and-retro arcade place that just opened up farther down the street.  A pretty fun time, and a nice little break before we head out for Florida in a few days.

Enjoy. . .

The Larsons were the first couple that made it downtown, and promptly sent out this picture to update the others of their status.

Kris and I, en route, responded with this.

When we arrived to their table, we dudes killed time between drinks with drawing weird pictures on the table in chalk.  You know, because we're all 13-year-olds at heart.

Live music down on the Midland Commons.

And one with the wives: Courtney, Danielle, Kris and Mees.

. . . aaaaaand one of them in. . . some kind of a frame.  I don't know.

Our table at Gratzi's.  The restaurant wasn't busy at all, but the service was appallingly bad.  It took forever to get our drinks, our orders put in, for our food to come in, etc.  It was unacceptable, and I will definitely never be eating there again.

Ryan demands more parmesan.

The food itself was just okay, definitely not worth the price point.  I was pretty pissed off about the whole affair and it took leaving and getting a beer somewhere else for me to calm back down.

Group pic in front of the wine selection before we headed out for the next stop.

After over two hours at Gratzi's - and very little of that time actually eating our meals - we started strolling down Main St. for our next stop: Brinstar Beer and Arcade.

This place is brand new, which you could tell because the walls were bare and there was little decor to speak of.  Still, the selection of drinks and the prices were good.

. . . and, better yet, the place was stocked with about two dozen old arcade games, each costing the old school 25 cents per game.  Erik said this used to be a bike shop back in the '80s and '90s, but I don't remember it.

The Pac Man table, as you can see, was incredibly popular.

This was never one of my favorites, I'm so-so at it.

The Dads spent most of our time there at the shooting games, which you'll see here for yourself.

Ryan takes this shit seriously.

Baby Driver

Erik the Red

After playing Hogan's Alley for a bit we graduated on to machine guns. . .

Meanwhile, back at the Pac Man table. . .

A loooooong, creepy hallway to the bathrooms.

Mees and Kris

The bar itself was pretty cool, back-lit with all these old circuit boards on top of it.

Finishing up drinks and ready to call it a night.

Downtown usually has a crap-ton of lights hanging up - you know, the trendy Edison-style bulbs everybody and their brother strings up in their backyard these days - but half of the block was inexplicably out.  We decided to voice our displeasure.

The other half was still good, though. . . so it wasn't a total loss I guess.

- Brian