This past week, my wife and I had dinner at an area restaurant that had an excellent Chicken Cordon Bleu and a salad with scratch made dressing for just $9.95.
Earlier in the week, I had gotten the craving for steak quesadillas. Carolyn remembered getting an email that you could print out and get free chips and salsa with the purchase of two meals at Chilis. We started to head out to Chilis and then decided to buy local and went to Estella’s downtown instead. Image our pleasant surprise when we realized that the chips and salsa are included with all the meals at Estellas.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a business lunch at Boulevard Beef and Ale and the food there was both attractive and delicious. I need to go back over to try out the steak & shrimp dish that the other two businessmen had there.
Three different downtown restaurants, three different meals, three amazingly good choices. The next time you are tempted to eat carnival / food truck food at an event in Sims Park, walk a couple of blocks and get real food at a real sit down restaurant.
Sometimes we forget that we aren’t limited to eating fast food or visiting large national chain restaurants.
I dropped by Sims Park Saturday evening to see what sort of crowd we had attracted for the movie “Mr. Peabody and Sherman”. The park had a nice crowd, with all the parking in the Gloria Swanson lot, the Spoonbills lot, and even cars 
parked around the lake to the old Baptist Church lot. Kristen King commented to me that we needed to come up with ways to encourage folks who come to events in the park to visit the downtown merchants. I agree. Getting info about our local restaurants out to the hundreds of families who showed up for the move would be an excellent start.
I’ll still buy my deep fried Twinkies and funnel cakes from our local non-profits at Chasco, but those will be the exceptions rather than the rule. We simply have too many good choices for real food within a few blocks of the park.
It is worth noting that, once again, we managed to fill Sims Park Saturday night without a single beer truck in sight. What we had instead was good, clean, family fun at a very affordable price. (unlimited use of the water slides for just $5.) The same thing happened last month when the Rec Center showed “The Croods” in Sims Park. Maybe we are seeing the start of a trend… family friendly events that you don’t have to be drunk to enjoy.
There will be another movie in the park next month. It will be on Saturday, August 16th. Given that this is the night after the “Night In The Tropics” street party, it may be worth going to both events, comparing them, and deciding which sort of event we need to see more of in New Port Richey.
For the record, the Chicken Cordon Bleu special that we ordered was served up, not by a new French restaurant, but rather by Mezzaluna Pizzeria and Ristorante. It was excellent.
Rob Marlowe, Mayor
City of New Port Richey