Sunday, November 07, 2004

Another restaurant bites the dust.

I have added another restaurant to my 'never return unless hell is freezing over' list.

The Colorado Steak House.

I hate sitting at a table in the middle of the room, in a restaurant. I absolutely hate it. I feel like I'm stuck in a public foyer with a klieg light pointed at me, while strangers watch me eat and comment when I spill French dressing on my chest. I much prefer a booth, where I can pretend I have privacy, and I can douse my steak with ketchup without having same said strangers stop in the aisles on both sides of me and comment on my crudeness.

Speaking of ketchup, what's the difference between dousing one's steak in ketchup and dousing same steak in A-1? Isn't the color and consistency pretty much the only difference? Back off my ketchup, or I'll hit you with my corncob pipe and sic one of my hound dogs on you.

And when the restaurant has three out of four walls lined with lovely cushy-looking booths, and you request any of those booths, and you are told that the booths are unavailable because all of those servers have gone on break, and you are seated at a table in the middle of Grand Central Station, with swarms of people walking to and fro on all four sides of you, to the point where you actually put your elbows on the table to keep them out of the way, well, let's say it made me sulky. My husband noticed.

"You don't like this place, do you." he said to me as I sharpened my butter knife on the edge of one of the interesting-looking biscuits that looked like a butter cookie gone berserk.

"I might like it better if I wasn't sitting in the middle of the busiest intersection in town," I replied.

"You are so picky. Just eat, and pretend they're not all staring and wondering if you're ever going to notice that piece of lettuce balanced on your left boob."

As I was sitting there in the spotlight eating my salad I couldn't help but notice that the booth-servers must have all come back from their break at once, because they were seating people in those booths like mad.

If they had let us have a booth, the content of this post would have been quite different.

All those customers, walking past us, bashing me with purses and folded newspapers, on their way to have dinner in a soft out-of-the-way booth, while there we sat in the center ring, eating stolidly away, whispering because our every word was, acoustically speaking, public domain, wishing we'd gone to the Outback. Or even McDonald's.

Plus, our bill was outrageous. Way more expensive than Outback.

I guess it all comes down to timing.

Such as, next time, we're going someplace else.