At the Italian restaurant: a 5-year FLASHBACK blog!

(Originally posted July 15, 2008)

We went out to a moderately-priced Italian restaurant (not Olive Garden) and there were some problems.  First of all I was the best-dressed guy in the place, which is always a bad sign.  I don't always have the best fashion sense but I at least know that if you're out somewhere eating pasta you should not be wearing flip-flops.  Save that for the home.  Also I think a school for kids with A.D.D. was there on a field trip or something because they were everywhere.

NOW LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED.

When you go out to eat the waitress will always tell you about the soup of the day, and on this day she said it was seafood chowder.  I declared that I would eat some of that and she immediately started backtracking, like, "Well, uh, we might be out."  She said that she would have to check, and if they were in fact out she wanted to know if I would like the minestrone instead.  So I said "yeah, fine" because I am an easy-going cat like that.

So of course two seconds later she comes back with the minestrone all, "Yeah, we were out.  Sorry."  Not that big a deal.  But then five minutes later another waitress was mentioning the soups to some people at the next table and she was still pitching the seafood chowder.  I guess maybe no one had told her they were out of it.

THEN AGAIN, WAIT A MINUTE!

I began to realize how I had screwed myself.  The waitress hadn't initially told me that they were out of seafood chowder, she said that they MIGHT be out of seafood chowder, and IF that was the case she asked if I would take the minestrone instead.  So of course what I had not realized was that there were two pots of soup in the back, a 3/4 empty pot of the popular seafood chowder and a completely full pot of their ghetto minestrone.  So somebody in the kitchen decided "We gotta move this minestrone!" and instructed the staff to find some poor rubes that could be tricked into eating it.

Now how could I prove that there was still some seafood chowder back there?  You can't rush into the kitchen and start looking in the pots all like "A-HA!" when you are out at a restaurant, you might get arrested.  So instead I thought about spying on people to see if anybody was still being served the chowder, but I couldn't decide what I would do if I caught someone.  "Hey how did that person get chowder?"  "Oh, they ordered it way before."

Anyway then the real food came and soup was immediately relegated to an afterthought.  It was a radical shift in priorities, like if two kids were fighting over a whistle and then Santa Claus showed up and started passing out $50 bills.  One minute I was thinking of resorting to espionage to verify that a pot of soup in a bad Italian kitchen was not quite empty, and then suddenly my whole world became about rationing the dipping sauces for my combo platter.  (I'm big on dipping sauces if you didn't know.)

Is that what A.D.D. is like?  Something must be wrong with me at any rate because I should not be feeling like the victim of a crime or conspiracy every time I go to a family restaurant.  Nothing like that ever happens at Applebee's.


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