Ruby River Rocks!

Admittedly, I've never been to Ruby River Steakhouse until tonight. If you have small kids, you know how hard (and sometimes how embarrasing) it is to eat out of the house. Especially when those small kids are 8 months old and almost 3 years old.

We, at work, had visitors from out of town teaching us how to use our new texting service. Thinking about places to eat, Ruby River was brought up and I brought up the notion that I've never been there myself. The original plan for the evening was Autumn and my wife were going to watch America's Next Top Model. I figured 'why not invite my wife... and Autumn... and my kids... and her kids so their table of 2 quickly became a table of 8 (with our 9 month old in the car seat on the floor sleeping).

The Food? Outstanding! I'm all about the appetizers so we got the hot wings and artichoke dip. The hot wings were good... wish they were a little spicier, but still really good. Probably extremely good for people who've always wanted buffalo wings but can never eat'em because they're too spicy. The artichoke dip... My wife and I always use the spinach/artichoke dip from Red Robin at the measuring stick and this was right up there, but in a different way. It was more of a delicious cheesey salsa (like a mango salsa, but minus the mango) - but, like the wings, phenominal in their own right.

I had to get the ribs and steak to try out a little of everything, the yam (I'm not a french fry guy) and the steak soup instead of the salad (as seen in the picture above.) My only complaint is I couldn't eat everything - which is a good thing because now I know what I'm having for lunch tomorrow. My wife got a different kind of steak - she grew up raising cattle so she can tell the difference between steak cuts. My palate doesn't care which part of the body it came from - if it's delicious, it's worth eating. I can't tell you which cut I got and which cut she got but I can say they were both worth it. She did wish, however, they sold hamburgers there, too. I bet those would rock the house.

We don't normally do desserts at restaurants, but they had something called 'THE chocolate chip cookie' which was a cookie baked in a skillet with a scoop of ice cream on top. That one cookie was big enough for 8 of us to share and was soooooo good.

Naturally, if I'm going to a 'steakhouse', I gotta try the steak and it was definitely worth trying. I don't have a "thumbs up" or numerical scale of rating system, but I will say I'll definitely be going there again - hopefully sooner than later.