The Nearby

Tonight Me, Holly, Sofie, & Mandy ate at Il Vicino's, a favorite pizza place of ours located downtown. Literally translated, it means The Nearby. When we decided to go there we didn't give any thought to how busy it would be because it's Tuesday night, a slow night for any establishment downtown or anywhere else around Colorado Springs for that matter. Except we didn't take into account that Tejon (pron Tay-hone) and the surrounding streets would be overrun (pun intended) with members of the Jack Quinn's Running Club, a local Irish Pub that apparently has quite a following. At first we made our order "to go" with the intention of going for a ride through the mountains while we ate in the car because the tiny restaurant was packed from wall to wall with hungry pizza lovers and even hungrier joggers. But a table opened up so we changed the order "for here". The manager seemed to think that our order was still "to go" so I tracked him down shaving Parmesan on some peoples food who had just gotten their plates. He changed our order, but neglected to do the same for Mandy so when we got our food me and Holly's came on a plate, but Mandy's came in a box. Which is important to the story because the box it came in was a tad bigger than the table we were sitting at so needless to say it needed to hang off the edge in order to make room for everything else on the table. Its important to note here that Il Vicino's is one of the tinier restaurants that we frequent, its not much bigger than a Starbucks as far as seating goes and the tables are very close together. That, tethered with a pizza box hanging over the table, and a paunchy waitress equals recipe for disaster and Mandy was barely two slices into her pizza when the waitress came by and successfully dumped her freshly baked pesto pie onto the floor. This was a blessing in disguise for Mandy, though, because they immediately sent back for another one and it was even more delicious than the first :) Here's the moral of the story and it"s directed to all of you restaurant mangers out there: when I change me & Holly's order from "to go" to "for here" and my sisters with us, you can pretty much guarantee that the change can be applied to her order as well. I wish I had pics to go along with this so you could see the devastation to the pizza and how tiny the place is and everything, but I got the idea for the blog after we got home so it was too late, but now that I have my new blog set up, I'll be ready to snap the events from now on. In the meantime I have a darling video of my beautiful Sofie to tide us all over until we meet again in a future blog :)