Tag Archives: restaurants

The Food After the Fan Expo Chicago 2023 End Credits

August 24, 2023 By in Mundane, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Closeup of a fish sandwich over half the size of Anne's head.

Incredibly, Anne ate this entire head-sized sandwich herself and did not win a free T-shirt.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the second edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. Last year they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times and whose already-shaky financial standings didn’t fare any better during the pandemic. Fan Expo threw such a great inauguration party, and invited such a staggering guest list this time that we agreed an encore was in order…

Much as other convention-goers have their traditions, so do we here at MCC. One such tradition is waiting till our site traffic dies down — and other aspects of our lives are caught up — before we share some of the bonus ephemera that can bore wider audiences. Sometimes that includes food photos, in cases where we’ve found sustenance that left an impression on us within reasonable distance of a given show. We don’t indulge in all the classic blogging tropes here, but on occasion we still brake for food photos. They’re a fun memory, a quick excuse for posting something during busy or preoccupied times, and an even quicker scroll-through for You, The Viewers at Home. If you read all 6300+ words of our Fan Expo Chicago actor-meetup recap, this is the opposite of that.

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Doughnuts & Dragons Sails Into the West

July 29, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Six donuts in a white box. See caption.

Our last breakfast, as it were: chocolate long john, cinnamon braid, key lime pie, white chocolate raspberry, strawberry shortcake, and Butterbeer (vanilla and cream soda cake donut with butterscotch icing).

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: this isn’t officially a foodie blog, but restaurants are among the many and varied subjects we touch upon, as we refuse to focus on a singular topic and don’t care one bit about the damage done to our SEO standings. Whether they’ve enlivened our annual road trips, featured in our wedding anniversary celebrations, given us something to do on Super Bowl Sunday, or simply welcomed us in for one-time tryouts, restaurants are a treasured aspect of our travel experiences, in other states as well as around our own hometown of Indianapolis. This weekend we bade farewell to another creative establishment from a past entry.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #30: The Cleveland Wahlbergs

May 28, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne with a huge smile hoisting a mug of orange Creamsicle. On the table is a Wahlburgers menu.

After a long week Anne enjoys the refreshing taste of an orange Creamsicle float. (Nonalcoholic, natch.)

Once we again we’re winding down another travelogue with chapters nowhere near as exciting as the ones in the middle. The very design of our vacations and my insistence on chronological storytelling together mean pretty much every MCC miniseries ends anticlimactically. Not once have we driven 4-to-20 hours out of town and scheduled the biggest and best attraction as the very last thing we do on our way home. If you’ve remained a longtime reader, I trust you understand the nature of the pastime.

Cleveland first appeared in our lives in 2004, when my car broke down on our way home from Niagara Falls. C-Town had a stronger costarring role in our 2013 adventures, replete with stops at a rockin’ museum, a Christmas movie house, an iconic comic-book legend’s house, the second-tallest Presidential burial site we’ve seen to date, and a memorial statue I helped fund. That was a good set of experiences.

This year, Cleveland was an anticlimax again. In some ways it wasn’t their fault. Some ways.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #28: Utica’s Golden

April 30, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A shiny gold dome amid several tall buildings on a cloudless day.

New York has a cool gold dome like numerous other states, but it’s neither in their capital nor on their capitol.

Fun trivia: billboards have been banned in Vermont since 1968 — one of four states to do so, along with Maine, Alaska and Hawaii. Among other benefits, their lawmakers’ efforts definitely helped improve all those Green Mountains pics we’ve posted throughout this series. Alas, not long after we crossed the border back into the east end of New York State, we found ourselves in the middle of another batch of mountains covered in lush forests from peak to base, but with one (1) great big Denny’s ad in the middle, jutting out like a zit newly erupting on a teenage forehead an hour before prom night.

Moving past that, upstate New York had more sights we actually wanted to see, including a return engagement with a city that got short shrift on one of our previous road trips.

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The Ex-Capital Birthday Weekend, Part 10 of 10: An Epilogue of Film, Fowl, and Facades

April 21, 2023 By in Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Several dishes on a wood table in a hardwood restaurant. Meal details are described later in the entry.

Welcome to The Eagle! That’s the name of the restaurant, not the main dish.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do…

Thanks very much to those of you who’ve followed along with my eight previous, glacially posted galleries that comprised our October journey around Indiana’s original state capital Corydon. Whereas the first chapter was a prologue about a donut shop we tried along the way, so too is our epilogue connected to the main storyline only by our timing and our desire to add still more festivities to Anne’s autumn birthday weekend. As a capper, we spent Saturday on Massachusetts Avenue, downtown Indianapolis’ premier upscale restaurant hub. On one end of Mass Ave we planned for lunch; on the other, a film for a special occasion. All told, the meal was better than the movie.

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Our C2E2 2023 Epilogue: Chicago!

April 9, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Piles and piles of baked goods on a restaurant counter behind glass.

A plethora of pretty pastries yearning to be free at Goddess and the Baker.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

My wife Anne and I just got home from the latest edition of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition (“C2E2″), a three-day extravaganza of comic books, actors, creators, toys, props, publishers, freebies, Funko Pops, anime we don’t recognize, and walking and walking and walking and walking. After its 2010 inception, we attended every year from 2011 to 2019, then took a break due partly to the pandemic and partly due to guest lists outside our circles of interest. This year’s strong lineup lured us back in, much to our delight…

…and speaking of delight, it was great to be back in the Windy City once more after Fan Expo Chicago last July. That show was up in Rosemont and didn’t lend itself to a lot of new extracurricular activities away from the exhibit hall. For our C2E2 experience we arranged our accommodations with an eye toward offsite exploration….partly because the hotels near McCormick Place were either sold out or priced beyond what we felt like paying this time. Up in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, we found a suitable compromise and a variety of dining options surrounding us on all sides.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #23: Moseying Around Montpelier

March 24, 2023 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Downtown Montpelier as seen from the highway bridge coming into town. An above-average number of steeples poke upward.

We’d had plans to get a better view of Montpelier, but that didn’t work out.

We’re not high-end shoppers who get caught anywhere near boutiques, jewelers, perfumeries, fashion trendsetters, or home decor artisans unless they happen to be next door to the retailers we’d rather visit. And by “we” I especially mean “I”. Anne’s collecting habits are modest bordering on spartan, whereas I’m the one on the lookout for brick-and-mortar purveyors who cater to my hobbies and pop culture interests. Fortunately Montpelier had just the district for us.

Apropos of Vermont, that entire paragraph is recycled from the downtown Burlington chapter from the day before. The sentiments nonetheless apply here. If it ain’t broke, and so on.

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The Ex-Capital Birthday Weekend, Part 6 of 10: Cozy Corydon Cuisine

January 10, 2023 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Open-faced meatloaf sandwich on a wooden table in noonday sunlight. See caption.

An open-faced meat loaf sandwich made from ground beef and duck, wrapped in bacon, served on sourdough, doused in bourbon brown gravy, and topped with white American cheese, greens, and fried leeks a la Skyrim.

Of course there’s a chapter for the good foods we found. The gallery is a quickie that could’ve been squeezed into one of the other chapters, but then that chapter would’ve been too long, you wouldn’t have clicked on it, and you’d have missed more cute pics of my wife who’s perfectly happy being 52 now.

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“The Menu”: Tonight’s Special is a 10-Course Massacre

December 26, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes face off as diner and chef in "The Menu".

“No, miss, I will not recite today’s specials in Voldemort’s voice.”

Speaking as someone who’s been in customer service for 34years and counting: when everything goes well, the symbiosis between a service team and their customer — whether a singular exchange or a recurring relationship — makes for a heartening occasion that both sides can appreciate. They pull off the quid pro quo between creator/provider and receiver/consumer, and everybody wins.

When things go wrong between the two parties, the results can be anywhere from mild disappointment to small-scale war. The customer gets full of themselves, or the employees show up in a foul mood, or there’s a miscommunication between the sides that could be resolved with some calm negotiation, yet isn’t. No one wins, everyone’s miserable, and it’s another round of cringing when they look back on That One Time years later.

The Menu falls in the latter column as an extreme worst-case scenario. An evening gone wrong becomes no mere comedy of errors, but an all-out class-war ambush where no one is innocent.

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GalaxyCon Columbus 2022 Photos, Part 4 of 4: Columbus Is Our New Chicago

December 9, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A bunch of toys glued to a car roof; downtown Columbus is hazy in the distant background.

A toy army prepared to march the streets of downtown Columbus.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Each year when there isn’t a pandemic fully raging, my wife Anne and I love attending entertainment and comic conventions throughout the Midwest and occasionally a bit beyond. We’re fascinated by the spectacle of each and every in-person nexus of geek cultures that presents a confluence of comics, artists, cosplayers, hobby artifacts, rare collectibles, IP-inspired handicrafts, talented performers and celebrity guests with fandom connections of varying levels of dedication and/or awesomeness.

This past weekend’s inaugural GalaxyCon Columbus (the one in Ohio) set out more than enough bait within reasonable road-trip range that the two of us were lured out of the house once more after previous 2022 outings to Star Trek: Mission Chicago, Indiana Comic Con, and Fan Expo Chicago. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

We’ve already shared all our stories from the Convention Center grounds apart from a few photo outtakes, but we’d be remiss to neglect the fun times we had in and around the neighborhood. Our third stop in town this year was at least as stimulating as the first two. Longtime MCC readers will recall when we used to find ourselves at Chicago cons a few times every year, up until the pandemic ruined everything for a while. This year Columbus has gone above and beyond in catching our straying eyes and luring us eastward instead of northward.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #18: Champlain Happy

October 21, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Champy and Anne!

Anne meets Champy, the local celebrity mythical water monster.

By the time we reached Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, we’d seen Lake Champlain from a mountaintop, from the roadside, and from a small pier jutting into the middle of it. At lunchtime on Day Four, we were okay with seeing it yet again, but tried slowing down long enough to traipse around it and bask for a while.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #14: A Night at the Old “Newhart” Place

October 9, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Waybury Inn west side!

Some ’80s kids saw the front of this place on TV, though the owners have had new windows installed since then.

Vermont! At last! Naturally our first stop was a pop culture reference from our childhoods.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #8: Stylin’ Syracuse Sustenance

September 17, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Korean Breakfast Corn Dog!

These treats were billed as Korean Breakfast Corn Dogs — dipped in Cinnamon Toast Crunch pancake batter, drizzled with a hot honey ‘n’ sweet cream sauce,

Not all the food we had on this trip need to be raised on their own commemorative pedestals, but Syracuse, NY, earned bonus points for providing us with not one, but two of the best meals of the week. That’s worth a single-entry shout-out.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #1: The Accidental Convention

August 26, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Schwarzenegger and Anne!

Dey are Arnie und Anne, und dey are going to pump [*CLAP*] you up!

Since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip each year to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. We grew up in families that couldn’t afford annual out-of-state vacations. We’re geeks more accustomed to vicarious life through the windows of pop culture than through in-person adventures. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any surrounding areas that also had comics and toy shops, we chucked some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own, from the horizons of nature to the limits of imagination, from history’s greatest hits to humanity’s deepest regrets and the sometimes quotidian, sometimes quirky stopovers in between.

We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.

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The Road to Dragon Con 2021, Part 7 of 8: The Atlanta Outtakes

August 14, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Atlanta light pollution!

New adventures in Atlanta light pollution.

Last time in Atlanta we allowed a full-length vacation for the opportunity to explore its major institutions, roadside attractions, and grade-A restaurants. The encore presentation was scheduled on a much more compressed timeline for the sake of saving money and conserving our vacation days. That meant seeing less of the city outside our Dragon Con experience, but we caught new glimpses here and there.

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The Road to Dragon Con 2021, Part 6 of 8: A Taste of Tennessee

August 12, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Goat burger!

A most righteous burger alongside a side dish that looks like a sandwich that got mugged and had its bread stolen. It tasted better than it looks.

Chapters 6 and 8 are short, easy ones to scroll through by design. This one’s meant to celebrate The Second-Best Meal We Had on This Trip. Longtime MCC readers who followed our last two Dragon Con trips — or, for that matter, anyone who’s been to D*C themselves — knows full well no one tops Aviva by Kameel. Anne suggests I should call this micro-mini-gallery The Best Meal We Had on This Trip at a Place We’d Never Been to Before, but that’s just too awkward, even by my standards.

My secondary objective was to highlight the nice place we found in Tennessee. Hence the title. However, I made the mistake of fact-checking a few minutes ago and discovered it’s part of a small chain, not the local independent stalwart we’d assumed it was. And the chain isn’t even based in Tennessee. Clearly this entry was never meant to be a winner, but I maintain it is meant at least to exist. On we go, then.

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The Road to Dragon Con 2021, Part 4 of 8: Louisville Sluggish

August 2, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Louisville view nighttime!

The nighttime view from our hotel, facing away from all their obstructive skyscrapers.

When I was a kid, Louisville was the first city I ever visited outside Indiana that wasn’t an amusement park. My family and I ate lunch and wandered around aimlessly. When we ducked inside a hotel to use the restrooms, I took it upon myself to borrow a Yellow Pages from one of their phone booths and look up the nearest comic shop. It was called the Great Escape (and survives to this day! Nice!), but it was miles east of downtown and shared a dual storefront with a record shop. Fun times for me, not so much for the non-comics collectors in the car who begrudgingly let me have the one perk in that otherwise forgettable outing.

Now that I’m an adult, Louisville is an easy two-hour drive from home. We could drop in virtually anytime if motive struck. It was the site of the worst convention we’ve ever attended, a far better convention that is sadly no longer welcome back in town, and the last convention we attended before the pandemic. We’ve driven through it on a few of our annual road trips. And yet we’d never actually spent a night in Louisville.

Louisville is on the way to Atlanta. We figured why not give it a try.

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Not Put Asunder, 18 Years and Counting

July 18, 2022 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Thanos and Us!

Anne and me and an intergalactic madman makes three.

It’s that time again! Another year of shockingly blissful marriage to the amazing Anne, another anniversary dinner to celebrate, and another completely unrelated lead image.

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Happy Birthday, Captain Janeway: A Fantabulous 50s Coda

June 23, 2022 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne and Captain Janeway!

Anne wasn’t born in May, but she gets to be the lead photo because she’s cuter.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

I’ve just now lived to see 50, and after weeks of research and indecision, we planned an overnight journey to the next state over, to the capital city of Columbus, Ohio, which had cool stuff that this now-fiftysomething geek wanted to see. Columbus, then, would be the setting for our first outing together as quintagenarians…

…and then we returned home and all lived happily ever after. But the birthday celebration didn’t quite stop there as it should’ve. The following weekend, we took my mom down to southern Indiana to visit family, a semiannual jaunt for us because long drives are no longer her thing. Due to scheduling issues, Mom and I hadn’t made time to hang out for my birthday as we normally do. So we made that time — we did the visiting, we treated her to dinner, and we crossed a high-priority geek sightseeing item off our to-do list, which gave her a rare chance to tag along for one of these weird little jaunts she sees us posting about sometimes on Facebook.

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The Fantabulous 50s Weekend, Part 10: Sir, This is a Wendy’s

June 22, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Wendy's Way!

Every icon has to start somewhere.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our respective birthdays together traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

I’ve just now lived to see 50, and after weeks of research and indecision, we planned an overnight journey to the next state over, to the capital city of Columbus, Ohio, which had cool stuff that this now-fiftysomething geek wanted to see. Columbus, then, would be the setting for our first outing together as quintagenarians…

We saw comics and art in museums, and we had food in a museum, so why not make our logical final stop in Columbus a food museum? Well, technically, in a way, kindasorta? There’s only one small exhibit room, but the subject is rather large.

After the record store we returned to Dublin, home of the Wendy’s flagship store, which was opened in 2013 and built with an extra side room to house numerous artifacts and souvenirs from the company’s 52-year history. So they’re only a few months older than we are.

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