What a night!

Some nights, living in Chicago is the same as living anywhere else. I'll go to the gym, cook dinner, maybe run to Target or take a walk around the neighborhood. It's a good life, and I'm quite happy with it. But other nights, I have random, amazing experiences that would only happen living in a large city like this. I'm talking "buy a dress after work, and eat things like lobster with shaved truffles for dinner" kind of amazing. Oh, and also free amazing, even though tickets for other people were $95 a pop.



Check out those shaved truffles!

 Thanks to my wonderful, rewarding, fun job at Whole Foods Market, I got the chance to attend the Taste of the Nation event at Navy Pier last night. Our company was a sponsor of the event, which meant there were a few sets of tickets that became available for us the day of the event. I'm not an important person in the company, and only recently got my own shiny new email address. I was just really lucky, and happened to be sitting at a computer reading emails at the moment when the email offering free tickets was sent. You know I responded to that email approximately one second later. Score! Free tickets for me and the husband!

My job is pretty casual (ok, that might be an understatement!), so I was wearing scruffy jeans and a casual top that day at work. No time to go home, so I hit up some shops on State Street when I got off work. Cute little cinched t-shirt dress, purple cork wedges, and a necklace later, I was ready to party!



The view looking down from the VIP lounge

 The food was amazing, and there were tons of fun drinks, too. We tasted about a million things, ranging from Goat Cheese Soup to short rib tacos. There was seared tuna, rabbit rubens, and lamb meatballs. Great deserts, too, although I waited too long and some of the ones I'd been eying earlier were already gone! Dale and Stephanie from previous Top Chef seasons were there to represent, plus chefs from L2O, Tru, Blackbird, Paris Club, and every other top name in the Chicago food scene.

What an amazing night! Keep an eye out for this event next year, to support a worthy cause and have a delicious night out.

Oh, and there were fireworks! Navy Pier does fireworks all summer, on Wednesday and Saturday nights. We had never seen the show before, since we generally try to avoid Navy Pier, but I have to say that it was quite an impressive show!

Sorry for the crappy pictures. Last minute nights out usually mean having your iphone as the only means of documentation!