We reached for our cameras before we reached for our forks.
My friend Becky Murphy took me to lunch at Hotel Indigo's Brazos Bar & Bistro on Friday. It was a nice change of pace after subsisting on greasy hamburgers all week for Burger Week. She ordered the crab martini and I chose the stuffed avocado. We were happy with our selections and, then, jubilant when our food arrived.
Our server put two aesthetically pleasing trays in front of us and we had the same reaction. We needed pictures. It should be noted that both of us have nicer cameras than the ones on our smart phones. But we were caught by surprise.
Like me, Becky is always thinking about web logging her experiences, which is one thing that makes her website chipperthings.com so fantastic. Just one thing. Another is her series I'd Rather be Short, a concept which I can fully support. You should check it out. Right now.
All of that to explain that it's no surprise that she needed to immediately snap a photo of her pretty crab martini. And I had to capture all of it.
For those who haven't heard, the Hotel Indigo is a new upscale hotel in the downtown area. It features the Brazos Bar & Bistro, which has caught the attention of Waco's progressive dining class.
Seems like one thing folks commonly say about Brazos Bar & Bistro is that it doesn't feel like Waco. It's true that it's pretty swanky and easy for a person to pretend he or she is sitting in upscale Dallas or Austin.
Perhaps that's kind of the point and good for our town. It's a hotel, so if visitors come to town and find big-city atmosphere then that's appropriate and good for us.
But I also think we need to give ourselves a little more credit.
Oh sure, we have our share of delightful dives where any attire, down to flip flops and gym shorts, would be acceptable. But if a person has the urge to put on some nice clothes, sip on a fancy beverage and raise the elegance bar without sticking out, then we're not completely in the desert.
Brazos Bar & Bistro is just the newest contribution to that class of restaurant.
One more bite: I honestly didn't anticipate taking a picture at lunch, which is why I used my iPhone camera. But the presentation was just too nice to pass up. Some will say that the iPhone caused me to take a blurry photo. A few weeks ago, I took a photo with my iPhone in the same bar and it came out blurry. But let me submit that the indigo, gray and beige tones in the restaurant just make things seem blurry. Case in point, near the end of our lunch, I thought for a moment that I had lost a contact lens. After an embarrassingly long period of searching for the lens, I realized it was still on my eye. So maybe it's just blurry in there.
