After much pressure from our good friend, Reimer, Scottie and I put together the first annual or semi-annual Birmingham Progressive Dinner. While my experience with progressives was from back in high school when we hosted French Exchange students. We arranged a progressive dinner then because it was something that traditionally Americans do and something different for our French friends. In this progressive, each successive meal was prepared at a different house as someone hosted appetizers, someone else hosted the salad, and so on. For our Birmingham Progressive, instead of hosting courses at different houses (since Scottie and I are the only locals), we ate a different course at a different
Birmingham restaurant.
Scottie and I agonized (well, we only spent about 15 minutes figuring it out) one evening over our picks for each course trying to highlight the best of
Birmingham. Thus, here was our line-up....
While the night didn't go exactly as planned, we still made our best effort of showing Reimer a good time in Birmingham (maybe next time, we'll advertise the progressive a little more). The actual progressive looked more like this:
In hindsight, we probably were being a little aggressive thinking that we could hit 6 places on a cold, snowy night in
Birmingham. Plus since it was just the three of us, we got a late start to our first stop of the night, but we did successfully squeeze ourselves in
Luxe to thaw out from the "long" walk that Reimer would have preferred us driving the .7 mile. There probably are better cocktail lists in
Birmingham; however, we chose
Luxe because of their atmosphere and beer menu.
After spending about an hour at
Luxe, we stopped in at
Social, but there weren't any tables available and at 8pm, it was probably hard to really ask them to give us a table for just appetizers. Since we were all pretty hungry by then, we decided to double down at
Forest Grill for both appetizers and dinner. Unfortunately, since we weren't sure who would show, we didn't have a reservation at
Forest Grill leaving us waiting at the bar for a few minutes. Luckily, three seats opened up and we ponied up to the bar for some drinks, a prosciutto appetizer, and a Veal Cheeks with Parsnip Puree appetizer.
We have been to
Forest Grill many
times throughout our "
Life in Birmingham" (we even dined here last week for Restaurant Week!), thus, we knew it wouldn't disappoint. While the menu seemed limited most likely
due to their transition to a new chef, everything that we ordered came out with their beautiful presentation and endless amount of taste. Some highlights included the Veal Cheeks with Parsnip Puree (glad to see these back on the menu but slightly disappointing only as an appetizer) and Reimer's Farm Egg that literally was an egg smothered in a sauce with crisp julienne bric pastry and mushrooms.
With full stomachs, we now moved the evening over to
Cameron's Steakhouse, where things certainly got interesting. I never properly documented our first experience at
Cameron's, but let's just say it was not memorable and I didn't even blog about it. But I suppose what we did remember was that the service was patronizing and the steaks were a bit on the salty side. Regardless, we only picked this establishment because it had a decent list of cocktails and
desserts to offer. The meal went sour from the start, but here's a list of some of our encounters at
Cameron's.
- Reimer was grumpy that his cocktail was nowhere close to how it's done in New Orleans
- Something went wrong with the Creme Brulees so I had to order a different dessert
- Scottie waited forever for a glass of water
- The fire alarm went off and they acted as if this happens frequently
- Firemen even walked through the restaurant but everyone just kept going about their day
- Natalie joined us mid-way through but had a hard time getting her order in
- Scottie waited forever a cup of coffee
- I received a very, very big piece of Carrot Cake
While our waiter did apologize profusely for the odd set of circumstances even giving Reimer a free bourbon and us a free dessert, let's just say this is probably the last time we venture to
Cameron's.
After that disaster, we migrated over to
Dick O' Dows, where we ended the evening with one last drink. So to recap, we missed out on the "appetizer" stop, we experienced one disaster after another
Cameron's, we relished our meal at
Forest Grill, and we covered (walked) at least 2.4 miles of Birmingham. Good work!
For next time, we'll remember to make reservations, to start earlier in the evening, to expand our invitee list, to avoid Cameron's, to ensure warmer weather, and maybe even arrange for transportation. Only kidding on the latter.
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