Thursday, December 04, 2008

A fancy-pants dinner date (for less)

I put myself in a cholesterol-laden food coma last night, but it was a heavenly, chocolate and homemade marshmallow food coma. You see, Josh and I traded sitting with our neighbors (free babysitting!) and headed to the award-winning restaurant HotChocolate where we skipped beverages and appetizers, in order to best gorge ourselves on entrees and dessert.

HotChocolate isn't cheap; my burger, which, incidentally was made from hand-ground locally raised beef, artisanal cheddar and bacon on a brioche roll and was the best burger of my whole life, cost $13 and Josh's wild-mushroom lasagne was $16. But we had a free $25 gift certificate from Restaurant.com that I'd earned for filling out a survey or something, which lowered our $64 check (we got a $12 box of cookies to go) to just under $40 (plus a $12 tip).

I'd heard good things about Restaurant.com from WantNot and Shoplifting With Permission, but now I'm a believer. Go today and enter the promo code JOY and you can save 50%, meaning a $25 gift certificate to one of your favorite local restaurants is just $5. That's a good deal, but once it in a while it gets even better and they offer a code for 80% off!