Supporting local businesses

With my youngest sister in town this week on spring break, we've spent some time together, including a belated birthday dinner out last night and a trip to one of our local sugar bushes today. Dinner last night was at a new place in my end of the city which featured stone grilling. For the uninitiated (which included me until yesterday), stone grilling is what happens when a raw steak (or whatever meat/seafood you order) is brought to your table along with a slice of lava rock heated to 750 degrees, and you sear it to your liking. I cooked mine all at once and put it on a plate because I had also ordered seasonal veggies, and they needed to be cooked as well. Everyone else cooked a bite at a time, and that way the meat was always hot and fresh. We all found our steaks to be incredibly delicious! Our server was a lot of fun, too- he was actually a patient of my dad's. Also, we got there before my dad (who took his bike) and, having been told by Rachel that it was Middle Name Appreciation Day, we decided to go by our middle names for dinner; when we told our server, he was right on board and immediately told us his middle name (Michael) and asked to know ours. (It was a bit tricky that Rachel and baby D have the same middle name, but we worked it out.) All in all, it was an amazing dining experience.

Here's the thing: the restaurant was about as expensive as your average chain steakhouse (i.e. the Keg, Baton Rouge), but it was an unfranchised local business. This really surprised me, because my part of town is a more recently developed suburb, and almost all we have are chains. I probably wouldn't have thought to go there, but knowing that now, I'd be more likely to go again or recommend it to friends. The only snafu was that the hostesses were really inappropriately dressed, even more so than the ones at Moxie's.

On the flip side, Rachel, her boyfriend and I (with baby D in tow) took to a sugar bush about 45 minutes outside of town. After walking one of the trails, we were going to go for a sleigh ride when we saw a sign that said it cost 2$ for adults and 2$ for children (not redundant at all). So 8$ for all of us to hop on a 15-minute sleigh ride? Even my 5-month-old daughter? We decided against it and went in to the restaurant to get some food. I remembered from my last visit there (granted, a couple of years ago) that the meal prices were pretty outrageous. You'd be paying about 10$ including tax for a pancake, a sausage and a beverage. We decided against that, too. Here's what we did instead: we bought maple syrup from the gift shop, stopped to pick up breakfast sausages on the way home (oops, not a shopping week, but I did refrain from buying anything else, which was a personal victory). We cooked up our own breakfast at home (at 3pm, but really, when is breakfast ever not a good idea?).

Here's the thing: I'm happy to support local businesses, but I had a hard time with the sugar bush charging so much for meals when nearly everything else there costs money, too: taffy on the snow, sleigh rides, face painting. For a family of four, it would cost upwards of 60$ for the day, including the gas to get out there. A similar outing won't be possible for our family in a few years. All the same, I was pleased with our modified trip there, and we certainly got some cute pictures out of it!