The five of us – Marie, Nicole, Lynn, Holiday and myself – wanted a badass meal tonight so we went over to Number 5 (33 S. Washington Street, Binghamton) for steaks.  Number 5 was fire station #5 for 75 years before becoming a restaurant, so there is ambiance aplenty.  Service was good if a bit pretentious:  this is clearly a place that thinks much of itself.  The server, for example, was explaining to us what a “wine flight” was, as if the five of us had just fallen off a turnip truck and Number 5 had invented the wheel.  I wanted to say, “We know what a wine flight is.  We are restaurant people.  I’m from California, for chrissake!”  Lynn ordered a wine flight that later showed up on the check as “sweet white flight.”  Interesting.  Anyhow, the French onion soups tasted good and so did the steaks, which were cooked properly.  Since I wanted USDA Prime tonight I had the cowboy cut, my only complaint being that the caramelized onions were too sweet — as if they had added sugar — which you never do unless you are in too much of a rush to go the normal caramelization route.  And there were so many of those damned things they infused the whole plate.  One person ordered salmon, which was dry.  If I wanted dry salmon I’d overcook it myself at home for a third of the price, so I almost never order it out, and held back my “coulda toldya so.”  The chocolate decadence cake, not made in-house, was in no way decadent, unless you get off on dry cakes.  The bill, including drinks, one appetizer, three soups, three coffees and two deserts was $254 before tip.  There was plenty of leftover steak to haul out for later, too.  After the meal we went out to a bar for a few drinks.  Nicole did not want to go and we pretty much dragged her along despite protest.  Marie and I would have gone on drinking and partying and playing bar trivia all night.  We were laughing and carrying on and tried to ignore the look on Nicole’s face, since she had about had it hours before and was not amused.  We made a last ditch attempt in the parking lot to go to another bar, but this never panned out, for obvious reasons.  We were forced into Nicole’s SUV and promptly escorted home.