Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

And now for something completely different . . .

I decided that it's been too long since I posted a food photo here. On this day, my best girl friend and I went out to lunch together at our favorite local Italian restaurant, a place called Brother's, on Benner Pike near the Nittany Mall. It provided a lovely chance to play catch-up with my friend, as well as a great opportunity to photograph some of my favorite food.

We both always order the same thing every time we go there. She orders a tuna salad with no mayo, ranch dressing on the side, and a Diet Pepsi, no ice. I order the chef salad with house dressing, an ice water with lemon. My friend doesn't like olives, so the first thing she does is that she removes all of hers and puts them on my salad, so this salad is showing about double the normal amount of olives. They bring us bread and pats of butter to accompany our salads, most of which I usually take home. And we eat and talk, and eat and talk, until our lunch time runs out and we have to go back to work!

The contents of the salad are: lettuce, tomato, ham, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, bits of sliced yellow peppers, thinly sliced purple onions, and olives. The house dressing (Italian, of course) is delectable. Well, the whole thing is! And on this day, as on every other day, I ate Every. Single. Bite. NOM! Oh, I'll meet you anytime you want . . . in our Italian restaurant.

The soundtrack . . . you guessed it before you got this far, right? :-) Billy Joel, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. It was originally released on the album, The Stranger, in September 1977 (which is just a marvelous piece of work - every single song on it is outstanding). This particular performance was recorded live at Wembley Stadium in June of 1984.