Bandera is the place where the beautiful people used to meet, greet, wine and dine in Southern California. You know, a pick-up spot. It even had a dress code. Now you can show up in your sweat pants, but the only thing you can bring home is take-out. How times have changed.

In order to get rid of excess inventory, they are selling their wine supply just outside of the restaurant. Things really are different now.

They make their rotisserie chickens outside. Everyone who walks by gets to see and more importantly, smell, even with a face mask on. That’s excellent marketing.

We ordered pickup for 5:30PM (they get busy after 6PM) and it was ready at about 5:35. We didn’t eat for another hour, and stuck our entree in the Breville toaster oven (my father loves this thing!) for a short reheat. Behold, the chicken and ribs combo.

After smelling the chicken, you must order the chicken. It’s a nice, thick chunk of chicken breast and a leg. The ribs are very tender and eat like pot roast. One of the beef short ribs is a bit skimpy. You might have spied an order of cornbread in the upper right of the reheat tray.

The cornbread is the best thing on the menu at Bandera. You could just order this, butter it up, and be perfectly happy. We don’t normally eat green chiles, but something about them in this cornbread actually makes it better.

We get a couple of sides, the broccoli and creamed corn.

The corn has peppers in it too, which gives it a bit of a kick. I was expecting some indigestion from this meal, but it never happened. Plated, everything looks great together.

A delicious meal, although a bit expensive, but this is coastal Southern California, where restaurant prices tend to run high.

Rom-Com of the Week

This week we watched two rom-coms. One was funny, the other was more of a rom-dram and didn’t have a lot of laughs. First up, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past on Netflix.

Wait, Jennifer Garner, a young Emma Stone playing a middle school teenager, and that Lincoln Continental guy (Matthew McConaughey) in the same movie? Yes, please. I’ll even throw in a smarmy Michael Douglas. They just don’t make them like this any more, and this one is only ten years old. It’s a funny romp about dating and what happens if you break up with too many people.

Our friends Bill and Stefanie recommended Hope Floats on Netflix as a rom-com.

It must be because Sandra Bullock is the queen of 1990’s rom-coms. Although she is adorable in this movie and Harry Connick Jr. shines as her love interest, there was not a lot of comedy in this almost two-hour movie. Unless you think that phony Hollywood southern accents are funny. Then you will be very pleased. Anyway, watch it for the performances, not for the laughs.

Film Noir of the Week

This week’s freebie from the Strand Marietta channel on YouTube (don’t worry, we have contributed lots of $$$ to the Strand during this period in history) is And Then There Were None.

The movie is based on Agatha Christie’s 1939 book Ten Little Indians, which is the biggest selling mystery novel of all time. See what you learn here on Date Night? (For those who don’t know, a book is something made out of paper that people held in their hands and read before they went to the movie version.) The movie has been remade a million times it seems. The original 1945 version really isn’t a film noir. It’s more of a British murder mystery, which makes perfectly good sense, since that’s what the book is. Once you figure out the jolly good English accents, it’s entertaining, but not really a classic film that you must see. Cheerio!