What would you say if I told you that it really is possible to have a date night filled with food, drinks, and entertainment (and yes love and laughter and happiness of course) with spending less than $30? Let me guess, you’re thinking….

“Wow, you guys are amazing, date night really doesn’t have to be a luxury!”

This week we wanted to start out by eliminating those excuses that date nights are limited to extravagant evenings and sometimes it’s the simple “let’s just go eat and drink beer” times that truly allow you to relax and enjoy togetherness. Now don’t get me wrong, your girl loves her a steakhouse and we will get to those soon but for tonight we are going to show you where the $30 in our pocket got us.

Crockett Row at West 7th in Fort Worth, Texas is one of my favorite places in the Metroplex, they have everything from art installations and galleries, outdoor seating areas and duh food and drinks. One of my “go to” locations in this area is the recently opened Food Hall – think food court but on a much classier scale; some of my favorite vendors include Aina Poke Co., Knife Burger & Bar, and Val’s Cheesecakes (more on these later).

Side story – did anyone else as a kid just love going to the mall food court?! I remember as a kid my family would go to the mall just for the food court…anyone else….no? okay.

Food Hall also offers a variety of events throughout the week and weekend. Every Friday and Saturday they offer live music and during the week they have partnered with Geeks who Drink for open to the public and free trivia nights from 7pm – 9pm! Which brings us to our date night….

Our goal this week was go spend no more than $30 for our date night; this means that food, drinks and any sort of entertainment all had to stay within our budget. We pulled into Crockett Row and parked in one of the 5 parking garages making sure to mentally note to get our ticket validated (if not, it’s $20 – we are on a budget remember? and who wants to pays for parking when validation is an option anyways?!) Walking into the Food Hall we navigated our way to the open seating section next to the bar and promptly grabbed our Trivia answer book.

Realizing we had a few minutes to spare before trivia started we split up to get food (THE best part about a food court – you each can get exactly what you want!) I landed on Aina Poke Co. which allows you to build your own poke (marinated fish) bowl, the concept is simple, delicious and bowls start at $12 – within budget! George headed over to Knife Burger & Bar for a double cheeseburger and some fries (girlfriends, who else loves it when your boo gets a side of fries?! Free snacks!) Lastly George grabbed a beer at the bar. All in, dinner was $28.97 – ahhh yyyeaahhh $1.03 under budget.

The 5 minute warning was given for the start of trivia and candidly George and I started to get a little nervous. It appears that the evenings “theme” was current events/random trivia questions – I mean we are hip and cool but on a trivia level…not so much. The rules were pretty simple though: 8 rounds – 5 rounds of questions asked by the Quizmaster (yes, that is the official title), 2 rounds of audio, and 1 round where you are given a piece of paper with clues and you have to give the answers based on the visual clues. Each team is also granted one “Joker” usage which allows for the team to double the points received for the round they opt to use it. Finally, a few of the rounds offers a bonus question allowing each team an opportunity to gain a few extra points.

Round 1 entailed current events – small note about George and I, we rarely watch the news… our present ingest of “current events” include subscription email blasts we read in the mornings and Saturday/Sunday game day programming. I think our point total for this first round was 3-4 points and rounds 2-3 were not much better. Round 4 was my favorite though which was the first audio round of the evening. The gist of the audio round was to guess the name of the song and the artist by listening to covers of songs. Covers – was a loosely based description, these songs musically matched the song but the vocals sounded like Beaker from the muppets was singing, we had many of great laughs this round. As this round ended we were informed of the current rankings….The George’s current standing…dead last!

Heading into the final 3 rounds we had accepted the fact we were not going to be the winners of the trivia game but we both had laughed and talked about so many random things prompted by trivia questions that we still felt like the night was a winner.

Then IT happened…the last bonus question round winners were announced – one of which was going to be chosen at random to win a Bonus Question Token. The question was: What was Nellie Bly able to do in 72 days that took Magellan and his team 3 years to do? Our answer: sailing an ocean – sounded like a good guess to us. Not only did this answer get us in the bonus question winner bracket but random draw elected us as the winner of the Bonus Question Token aka free item at the Food Hall!

Queue George and I quietly singing “we are champions my friends…..” at our table.

Wrapping up the game we actually ended up winning the dead last ranking!! Go team Georges! We agreed that this would be a fun evening with a group of people but all in all we got out of the house, ate some good food, and did something together that we would not have regularly done – all under $30 also!

Parting Trivia Question: Which George had to walk back into Food Hall due to forgetting to get the parking ticket validated?