Wine whine

Last night was a girls night/guys night. I went to dinner and then to see "Juno" with Meg, Betsy and Lauren R. while Matt and the boys played poker. ("Juno" is the best movie I've seen in a long time. I HIGHLY recommend it. In fact, I liked it so much that Matt and I saw it again at today's matinee. I think that's the first time we went to the movies just the two of us in years -- we always wait for the video.)

After the movie it was not even 10 p.m. so we came back to our house to see how poker was going and have a drink or two. It turned out the games had just begun -- preceded by making dinner, which apparently took a long time: The guys had some trouble cooking canned corn(?) and ended up microwaving it. (They also grilled barbecue chicken.)

Since they were going to be awhile we decided to go back out to a new restaurant/wine bar. We had thought about going there for dinner but decided not to because we were in a slight time crunch to get to the movie on time. Meg had checked out its Web site before we met up and it said Fridays were half-price wine nights.

This was the first time I had been there and I can't decide whether I should count it as one of my 10 new local restaurants (for my list). It does serve food, but I didn't eat any. What do y'all think?

We got seated at a table right at the live music, but it ended at 11 and after that we could talk and hear each other. Eventually the place was kind of shutting down so we got our check and saw that they had not given us half off our wine. I was nominated to ask the waitress about it, and I did so very nicely.

NOT nicely, she told me that that was an old special and a new one had been in place for a month now. I asked her if she could do anything for us anyway since it was still advertised on their Web site. She told me, "Our Web site hasn't even been working lately." I told her it had been working that afternoon, one of us had looked it up and seen the half-price-wine-on-Fridays deal and that was, in fact, the reason we decided to go there. After leaning forward to confer with another employee? the owner? three feet away from me, the waitress told me she'd take care of it and re-ring the check.

So a minute later she comes back to the table saying "The owner would only agree to take $2 off each glass." What? Paying full price for a glass of wine isn't going to break anyone, but what about the principle?

All we could do was pay and leave. But as soon as we got back to the house we looked up the Web site just to see if we were right. The Web site was working fine, and lo and behold, it advertised "1/2-price wine by the glass all day Fridays." Grrr. I printed it out in case I decide to write them a letter (but I think this post is probably enough venting).

But that was just a minor annoyance and I had a great time hanging out with those girls somewhere besides Bible study. And even though we were overcharged, we came out ahead on the evening because Matt won $40 in poker. My husband is a stud!