Restaurant: Volare

Restaurant: Volare
Web Site: http://www.volarerestaurant.com/
Address: 201 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60611
Phone: (312) 410-9900

Great, old school Italian restaurant in the heart of Chicago. Good, professional service staff. Was not overpriced, although if you go crazy on the wine and courses you could get there. Noise was off-the-hook loud with the room packed.

Only had a glass of wine with dinner, but list seemed full and lots of reasonable bottles. Had a nice house salad, and the fresh bread was awesome - crusty on the outside, warm and delicious on the inside. Had a sea bass special, that was with some white wine sauce with olives and spinach. My colleague had the risotto, which was probably the best I had ever had, although super hot - you needed to wait for it to cool off before you could eat it (not unexpected).

A good choice when in downtown Chicago.


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Southwest to Milwaukee

It’s never fun having to get up for an early morning flight, especially when you forgot to print out the boarding pass 24 hours before the flight - missing that important chance to board in the “A” section. But after getting “B-1” you know there can’t be many people on the flight, so not so bad. Had the budget first class seat - a whole row to myself, and no person in front of me to lean back and crush my computer.

I used to hate flying Southwest because of the old boarding process (“Ready...BOARD!”) when you had to get there two hours before the flight to line up and then sprint down the jetway as fast as you could. The numbered process is much, much better and a good compromise between reserved seats and the chaos of the old method.

Southwest has a different business model than most of the others. Since they only fly 737’s, you always know what the plane will be like and no surprises like small storage (its all small storage) or a seat behind the bulkhead. And, they do seem to be on time more than most. Perhaps this is because they can swap equipment around more easily with the common aircraft throughout the fleet?