A familiar restaurant can still be the start of a good date. Give the evening one other thing you both enjoy: choose a book for each other, defend a childhood snack, or add a live show to dinner. Keep the part that works and give yourselves something new to talk about.
4. Choose each other an alternate life
For two people who enjoy bookshops, add a short browse before dinner somewhere nearby.
Each chooses a book for the other person's entirely different life: lighthouse keeper, beekeeper, person who finally learns to make decent bread.
Meet up and explain your selections. You might leave with a book, a future trip idea or a newly appointed household lighthouse keeper.
This works best when browsing together already sounds enjoyable. Let that interest choose the activity.
3. Turn the grocery run into a snack exchange
Each person chooses one snack they think the other has been unfairly overlooking. Agree on a spending limit and dietary requirements first.
Back home, reveal the choices and make the case for them. Childhood favorite, strange flavor, packaging that deserves an award: all valid arguments.
The entertainment may be discovering that someone you know well has been quietly devoted to an extremely questionable cracker.
2. Keep dinner. Add a little Poe.
For dinner in Old Pasadena on a Saturday, build the evening around Parson's Nose Theater.
"A Nightmare on Poe Street," a live Edgar Allan Poe adaptation staged in a 1922 former funeral home, plays Saturday, October 17 and 24, at 7 p.m. The theater is at 95 N. Marengo Avenue. It's ticketed, and the stories are properly dark, so leave the kids at home.
Eat early nearby, catch the show, then see how the familiar streets feel on the walk back. One extra stop gives dinner a different ending.
Free to try — no signup needed to make a plan.