Feasting

I enjoy eating out. It’s one of the luxuries in my life that has remained constant despite my changing tastes. I have tried most all places, upscale to hole in the wall to experimental. I’ll eat just about anything once, and twice if it’s good.
I have to wonder about those places that serve tiny portions of food in a pool of sauce. They pour the sauce on the plate, not on the food, drizzle in another colored sauce, and then scribble on your plate. Then they put a pea in the middle, garnish it with a stick, and send it out to you. Maybe there’s a subliminal message written in the sauce that says, “You’re not feeling hungry.” Maybe the stick garnish is so that you can write back.
They have to write the sauce names in French because we lose so much in translation (and comprehension.) Who wants a red butter sauce? But buerre rouge sounds much more mysterious. Besides, you don’t have to sit and figure out what they used to make it red. In Germany, a Chinese restaurant had to double translate to get to English, so I ended up ordering something called “dead chicken with black fungus.” I just had to see what it looked like, even if I never took a bite. It was chicken chow mein.
The more upscale steak houses give quite a presentation. They wheel a cart of vegetables to your table, to show you the evening’s selection of side dishes. Nevermind that you just paid for a fifty acre cattle ranch in the desert Southwest by ordering their smallest steak, you still need to eat your vegetables. For eight dollars a spear, you can get asparagus on the side. And so it goes. You can choose from potatoes large enough to serve Ireland (and at about the same outlay as the whole country), carrots charged to make you squint, and beans priced per.
Some of the pomp is pretty hard to swallow. At times like those, I find myself fondly remembering my last corn dog and lemonade.
Waiting tables is a challenging job. Think multitasking on steroids. I always feel a bit apologetic about asking someone to wait on me, until I remember that it’s their paying job. I suppose the tradition started back when people had servants. In our buffet and self-service world, being waited on sometimes feels a little strange. But if it helps somebody to get their bills paid, well then alright. As they said in Maid in Manhattan, we are trained to serve, but we aren’t servants.
My husband and I generally share a meal. Portions in most mid-range restaurants are plenty for two, especially with dessert. That way, we can afford to eat out twice as often, and we have room for dessert.
When I’m completely hungry, there’s nothing like a good mix plate. Talk about a meal to leave no room for dessert. These are the places to go if you are facing or just came from a hard day’s work.
Family feasting is the best, of course. My brother and his wife buy disposable plastic containers before they host a pot-luck. Then everyone gets a take-home buffet after the event.
When my hunger is small, I butter a tortilla and warm it. I’m pretty sure that it just doesn’t get much better than that. Since a buttered tortilla can be so satisfying, I get a better perspective on upscale fussiness. We get hungry for novelty and search for more and more, and fancier and fancier, without remembering the wisdom of the ages that less is more. Remember how it is to bite into a really good apple?