Cellar & Loft

A couple of weeks ago, one of the teachers that I work with told me about a Groupon online for a cool winery/pizza place in the River Market called Cellar & Loft. I got online and looked over everything and decided to go ahead and buy one. For $17, you got an appetizer and an 18" pizza. On top of that, if you went Monday-Thursday, they threw in a bottle of house wine for no additional charge. Sounds like a plan to me!

I bought the Groupon on a Thursday. When I got home that night, Ben and I were not in the mood to cook anything, so we ended up deciding to go and use it right away that night. We try not to to decide to go out to eat on a whim like this, but it was just one of those days!

When we got to the restaurant (around 7:00p), they were pretty full. We were able to grab a seat on a couch downstairs, which added to the good/cool vibe of the experience. We ordered Garlic-Cheese bread for our appetizer, and decided on the house bottle of Chardonnay.

  

While we enjoyed our appetizer, we took some time to check out the cellar that we were sitting it. They give beer and wine tours (there was one going on), and there were HUNDREDS of types of wine displayed by country throughout the whole place. We saw a number of people come in just to buy wine and leave. When our food came, we were not disappointed. We decided on their meat pizza for dinner. It had Spicy Italian sausage, pepperoni, and regular sausage. I'm not usually a huge fan of thin crust pizza (Ben loves it!), but surprisingly enough, this pizza was delicious!!

  

In addition to the food being good, we were really impressed with the service. Even though they were really busy, every person who worked there made sure to say hello and check on how we were doing. The man who was re-stocking the wine had a full conversation with us while he worked. Good service always makes food seem so much better.

BONUS:
After dinner we decided we weren't quite ready to go home yet, so we headed down to Balsano's Gelato Cafe in Power & Light. We had never been there before, but I've been wanting to try it since I enjoyed my experiences with gelato so much when I was in Italy. When we got there, we were surprised to find out that Balsano's is owned and operated by ONE person - no employees! The hours are sort of funky for the reason, but his recipes make it SO worth working around that. I had cheesecake gelato, and Ben had a mixture of a couple different types. We both really enjoyed what we got, and we will definitely be making time to go back!