Good Times, Scenic Envy in Middletown

After our donut date in Manchester, we made our way to Middletown, a mythical village where the firetrucks are yellow - how droll.

We were greeted immediately by an public display of kitsch.

How twee. Actually, Mommy Scenic has always maintained that The Giving Tree is a fucked up story - about a maternal figure who gives and gives and gives... to death. Good point, mom!

Our intended destination was It's Only Natural famous vegetarian restaurant but it was a lovely day for touring so we decided to take a stroll down Main Street and see what there was to see. We saw about a zillion "ethnic" cuisine spots we'd love to try... if only we could have afforded it (and if Katie Scenic still had the physiological ability to throw up), we would have taken a bulemic tour of Middletown and tried one of everything! (Just kidding.) We were impressed by the wealth of outdoor dining (and the width of the sidewalk!), and admired various antiques and other unfortunately closed storefronts that call for further investigation. We thought, this town is what you'd get if Northampton and New Haven got gay married and had a baby (with a little help from an unnamed donor). We decided that we could afford to whet our appetites with a taste of Tschudin chocolate, which was pricey (like $2.25 per piece), but tasty. Jackie had something called a Johnny Depp, and Katie tried an Irish Ginger. That sounds a little naughty, doesn't it? Tschudin was good, but not as good as West Hartford's similarly pricey Bridgewater Chocolates, which are just ridiculous (buy us some, please).

Dinner at It's Only Natural was pretty much brilliant. We shared a sweet potato enchilada (a standard menu item) and a tofu and vegetable curry from the specials menu. The food tasted exquisite, and proved totally photogenic, so we'll let the pictures do the talking so we can get back to making dumb jokes:

Right, so...we're pretty much "always blogging," like even when we're doing other stuff, we're thinking and talking about blogging it up. So as the sun set and darkness fell we were composing this post, waxing poetic about "basking in the warm satanic glow of the neon carrot."

LOL. We were also very impressed with the art on display by people we totally know from the Libertine Collective:

(Joe Dinunzio)

(H.L. Groen)

After dinner we hit up some local drinking spots with some lady friends from the area. We started out at Hair of the Dog Saloon, which we regret to announce had little redeeming value. Pretty divey, obnoxious jukebox, nary a hipster to be seen. It did have these amusing deer heads mounted over the bar though:

We moved along as soon as we met the credit card minimum (lame-o). We went just down the block and across the street (Main Street, duh) to Eli Cannon's, a joint we have visited before, but quite neglectfully so, as on our previous outing we did not explore their epic beer garden (or ho-garden, as we hilariously dubbed it once we had enough bitches there drinking Belgian brews...). Epic:

At this point we were basically full and broke, so we mostly just watched other people eat and drink, and flirted with the waiter, who made sure to show us pics of his kid so we would know it was just waiterly charm he was putting on. We observed that Eli's has some fine looking salads and serves up monstrous portions of dishes like their fish and chips.

We drove home with belly's full of wholesome chyme and heads of scenic envy. Middletown: we're not finished with you.