On Fancy Restaurants - #23 - 2/20/2020
Intro!
None this week. Ah nobody a brewin'.
My Take in One Take
On Fancy Restaurants
I remember when I was in an Olive Garden with a table full of family - grandma, mom, brother, grandpa, cousin, cousins?, maybe plural, I don't know - and a guy came over to us and said, "How are you all enjoying the food?" "All great," we replied. "Can I get a refill of Dr. Pepper?" I asked. His smile disappeared. Without a word, he picked up my cup and left. My grandma turns to me and goes, "Sweetheart, that was the chef." How was I, an 8 year old, supposed to know that? I find it interesting that out of all the times I entered an Olive Garden, I never left thinking, "Well that was a memorable meal. I'm going to remember that Chicken Alfredo forever." No. That has never happened. But telling the head chef to refill my drink? Oddly stuck with me.
I want to go to a super fine restaurant, order the most popular item on the menu, and then take the ketchup bottle out of my back pocket and squirt that sh*t all over my beef wellington. F*ck lamb sauce, get the Heinz. Well, knowing that it can fit in my back pocket, it must be McDonald's ketchup packets. That or it's some sort of ketchup gizmo that is taped to my thigh and a tube runs up pants into my shirt and out into my arm where it's attached to a makeshift perfume bottle mini blimp that I squeeze. But then you don't get the authentic ketchup bottle fart, so what to do? Anyways, I would then finish the meal, leave the restaurant, and give it 3 out of 5 stars. "Too much ketchup. Not enough food."
Growing up, anytime I was with extended family that wanted to go out to a nice restaurant, the go-to was always Red Lobster. Living in Dallas, Texas, we weren't exactly near the coast for seafood - and that proof was tasted in the freezer-burned lobster. Every. Time. "Gosh, I don't know why we keep coming here," they always said. And yet you have that feeling that the 2nd time around is going to be different. "Maybe they cleaned up?" And yet, you were wrong. Every. Time.
I came to a realization that I'm not enjoying the exquisite cuisines of the world. I've thought about going to all the Michelin starred restaurants in Los Angeles. The problem is that all the meals are a full week's paycheck and involves guessing if I'm going to be hungry at 7pm on Friday April 29th, 2022.
I could always apply to be a Michelin secret inspector and eat at restaurants for free. Yeah, but that'd suck after a while, cracking crab legs, forking a foie gras, sipping on sirloin soup through a straw. I don't know what rich people do with food. What I do know about rich people food, based on my various viewings of Gordon Ramsay YouTube clips, is that: 1) Don't mess with the head chef, 2) Eat the meal in the way that the chef intended it to be eaten, and 3) Don't complain to the chef directly, that's why the waiter is there.
News.Video.Poem
Boiling Point - Gordon Ramsay documentary (1999) - the first introduction of Gordon Ramsay to a television audience in the UK. I really admire Gordon for his intense passion for cooking. We should all be passionate about things we love.
Below is a poem from Vladimir Nabokov. May 15, 1943. Published in The New Yorker. I recently watched an entire VHS-ripped 1989 documentary on YouTube on how he wrote "Lolita". He started as a poet and published his poems in magazine while drifting through motels and lodges in America catching butterflies. He's definitely one of my influences (as you can all sometimes tell by my constant use of alliteration).
