My brother, Danny, brought my mom and dad from their farm in southwestern Minnesota to the Twin Cities last weekend to visit with us city-kids.  My brother, Pete, came down from Brainerd and my brothers, Steve, Bob and Jeff met up at Steve's house.  I also got to see a sister-in-law and a nephew who didn't stop talking the whole time we were together.  Turns out, I'm his favorite aunt and he wanted to sit next to me in the car and the restaurant!  I gave him a dollar, but he still kept talking.

The first thing on the itinerary was a stop at an airplane hangar where Steve has been working on a prototype for a gyro copter.  This has been going on for some years, but the boys had to see a fancy-shmancy new compressor that'll add some extra poop for take-off.

They stood around quite a while discussing its qualities until mom finally asked "is anyone hungry?"  Well, of course we were.  So, we piled into three cars and made our way to Buca's in Maple Grove.  I was afraid the atmosphere wouldn't be as stimulating as the Minneapolis Buca's, because it was in a new building, but it was as wonderfully gaudy as I had hoped.

We had a great time and my old dad thoroughly enjoyed himself.  It was wonderful having huge platters of food delivered to our table for family-style dining.  It goes without saying that my mom was thrilled to be out of the kitchen.  When you're having dinner with five brothers, four of whom are engineers and the fifth a technician, you do a lot of listening.  For the record, two of the brothers are older than me, two are younger, and one is the same age - give or take a few minutes.  There are also a couple older brothers who couldn't make it. Oh, jeesh.  Let's not forget my crazy sister Annie who actually visited a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't contribute much to the conversation, but every once in a while, I grasped what the boys were talking about and I could ask them to clarify some technical point.  That was about it.  Mom and I mostly just smiled across the table at one another and ate a lot.  My brother, Pete (who my old dad happens to think is practically a genious), appeared to be diagramming some vital point for the others, but upon close inspection, I realized he was coloring the cartoon images on a place mat left there for my nephew.  He's good at coloring inside the lines,  It turns out I am not.  But at least I'm smart enough to know it.

I recommend Buca's for an completely different kind of dining experience.  The trick is to be good at sharing, which we learned how to do a long time ago.