Pink Candles at Ridgemont High: Fat City Steakhouse and San Diego by night..

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Fat City Steakhouse and San Diego by night..

[Update - Closed since late 2011]

Last weekend, before my actual birthday, I wanted to take advantage of an ad I saw from Fat City Steakhouse. If your birthday was in March or April, you were welcome to a free dinner (worth up to $18) anytime in April. Well, well...Now although I've lived in San Diego for practically my whole life and had seen this landmark pink art deco buildng everytime we'd go to the airport, I'd never eaten here. One of our friends, Ms. Lollipop used to work here when we were in college. I remember we convinced her to call in "sick" so we could all take a roadtrip up to San Francisco! Ha ha.

It was also a good excuse to get semi-dressed up. I really like the iconic look of this pink building. I imagine women dressed like Betty Page or early Brenda Starr (yes, I used to read that comic strip!) and men dressed like Ricky Ricardo having dinner here. Reading an informational placard at the restaurant, I found that itwas even featured in some scenes in the old tv show, "Simon and Simon" (a show that I've never watched despite its San Diego connection).

It was very dark in here but the ceilings and Tiffany style lamps were amazing! Lots of dark wood. Lots of old people too. No offense, but there were a lot of elderly people here. We were the youngest ones there. Before we left for the night, there was another family waiting to get seated and they had three young kids.

Our server was really nice. In fact, all of the wait staff were very attentive. The manager was also circulating making sure everyone was enjoying their meal.

The restaurant was crowded and it was only 6:30 pm.

For starters, they gave us bread rolls with pats of butter (not shown). TC was already drawing on the butcher paper (all tables are covered with butcher paper here) and practicing drawing that damned Disney rodent, Mickey Mouse.

My iced tea and Bert's beer, the Airedale Pale Ale by the same local brewery that does the "Imperial Stout - Dark and Stormy" (which isn't offered here).

I thought I was being "good" by ordered Seafood Linguini. Turns out that was hardly any seafood, which consisted of a few small piece of salmon, maybe 5 or 6 squid rings (oops, I mean, "calamari") and the same number of tail on shrimp. The pasta sauce was pesto, which had a lot of olive oil in it. There were way more noodles than seafood and I ended up taking most of it home. TC liked my pasta better than hers.

TC ordered from the kid's menu, which seemed decent. Plus, we figured the portion would suitable for her rather than an adult entree. She ordered the pasta with marinara sauce and chicken breast. The portion was actually quite a bit but we ended up taking it home as leftovers. Her chicken was too salty in my opinion, but maybe that is because I've been used to eating non-salted foods this past month and my tolerance for salt has gone down.

Bert's steak with a side of steamed veggies. This was the best dish of the night. I probably should have ordered steak but no, I had to get the linguine with hardly any seafood. Bert gave me a few bis of his steak (the edges with the fat!) and man, was it good!