Business Trip in Chicago

The day after Halloween, I snuck off with Bryan to Chicago for one of his business trips. We were only there for 48 hours but I had the best time! I really wish I could sneak off with him more often but the girls keep me so busy. We flew out on Wednesday morning & were there right after lunch. We literally caught a ride into the city, dropped Bryan off at a meeting & I went straight to our hotel:

I was so excited, I literally dropped off our luggage & headed out. Surprisingly, the city was prettier than I expected. It was not decorated for Christmas yet, but instead the trees had changing leaves & the streets were decorated for fall:

We have been to Chicago several times together so I have already done most of the touristy things, including the architecture tour (which we loved, by the way!) so this time I just had fun roaming the city, going down to Navy Pier but mostly shopping on Michigan Avenue. The city may have looked like fall, but every single store was decorated for Christmas & I may have done a little Christmas shopping.

Bryan worked most of the time & had meetings, but we went to brunch together & dinner together. In fact, one night I got to go to dinner with him & a few of his clients. We ate at Asador Bastian and it was amazing! It is actually located in a row home & you would never even know it is a restaurant:

That is the only picture I have of the 2 of us on this trip. Ha! The rest are scenery or food. That's the way it is when you are by yourself most of the time. This night, we had the chef's table inside the kitchen & our meal was delicious. We didn't even order off of a menu, instead they did a tasting course for us. They were even able to accommodate my dairy & gluten free diet, even better!

Speaking of, when I left the hotel for the first time, this was the first billboard I saw:

 I thought it was ironic since I just went dairy free a month or so ago and I have really been struggling with it. I hope this billboard lives up to its message! Ironically, I was on my way to go get a donut, my first stop in the city (after the hotel) which was not dairy free. Ha! I had read about these gluten free donuts that I was dying to try because gf donuts are hard to find. Unfortunately, they were made with dairy but I can take a dairy supplement to help me if I do decide to eat something with dairy, but I try not to. But I made an exception for this:

They only had 3 flavors, cinnamon sugar, vanilla & chocolate and honestly, the vanilla with the icing was my favorite!

If you don't care about my meals, feel free to stop reading now! I honestly like to document our dining when traveling so I can come back & reference it later. Our first night, I met Bryan for dinner later after he had happy hour with a client. I wanted something close that we could walk to that had tv's so he could watch the World Series baseball game. Our concierge recommended:

It was the perfect place to watch the Rangers win & have one of my favorite meals! They had gf pizza & pasta, which was delicious, but no dessert:

Afterwards, we headed to Jeni's based on the recommendation from our server. They have several around the city but let me tell you, I was shocked when I got there because they have a lot of great flavors & almost all of them are gluten free. WHAT?! I mean ice cream with cake & cookies inside of it are hard to find. They even had dairy free ice cream as well, so I was in heaven:

I tried the Gooey Butter Cake & the Salted Peanut Butter with Chocolate Flakes:

Besides dessert, brunch is my favorite meal of the day & we found a few great places close to the hotel where we could walk. First morning we tried Egg Harbor Cafe & I was pleasantly surprised to see they had their own GF menu:

I started with an egg scramble & finished with a cinnamon roll. Yep, a gf cinnamon roll, which is another hard thing to find:

On our way to the airport, we walked to Cupitol, which is really a coffee shop that serves a full breakfast as well. Here I enjoyed an amazing nutella banana waffle & it was worth every bite!

It was a great way to sneak off for a few days. I loved being in the city, holiday shopping & all of the food! Cheers to Chicago!