Fire and a Rusty Pelican

This weeks theme in the Weekly Photo Challenge at Shutterboo's place was

Fire. 

I was hoping to find fire this past week.  I didn't want to have to make it or create it, but I wanted to literally just stumble upon it. 

While in Tampa this past weekend we went to this wonderful restaurant called the Rusty Pelican. Our waiter, Douglas, was so much fun.  Isn't it great when a server makes the dining experience even better than the fabulous food?!  He turned the fire on for us when we arrived and I  just laughed and thought - well, you certainly found fire! 

The restaurant wasn't very crowded, so we talked with Douglas quite a bit.  I even told him about my blog and asked if I could use his name.  He said No Way! and gave me his card.  Then I told him that I needed to take some photos of that fire he turned on for us.  I'm so glad I found that fire because I haven't seen any since.

I have to talk about this restaurant.  It was situated on Tampa Bay and I guess there is a beautiful view, but we were there at 9pm on New Years Day, so it was just dark dark water with some lights way off in the distance.  The menu was about half seafood and half steak, but they did have escargot and a table side Caesar salad on the menu, so I was definitely in love. 

I decided that since it was so late I was just going to get sides from the menu.  Tom and I shared escargot and we both had the Caesar salad.  (Douglas did a wonderful job making that for us...yum!) and then I knew I was going to be full by this point, but I still wanted to have something while Tom ate his dinner, so I got a side of asparagus and hollandaise sauce.  I've ordered this at other restaurants before and I typically receive 3 or 4 pieces of asparagus.  The Rusty Pelican does things very differently - they make their sides mean something!  I ate a dozen aspargus spears and still had a dozen left.  It was nice having a side last the entire time my husband was eating his dinner.  He ordered snapper with garlic mashed potatoes as I recall. 

So that's my Fire story for the Weekly Challenge.  If you'd like to more of the photos from the challenge you can go to the Flickr pool. I'm always amazed at the creativity.