I went for a meal at the Buckatree Hotel. It is quite a posh dining place. I can tell this because the food I ordered was a “Seafood-something-or-other”. I had to say, “I’ll have the seafood dish please and point in the general area of the menu where it was located, because I’d not heard the other word used in the dishes’ name before so I was paranoid about making an incorrect pronunciation that the waiter would go back into the kitchen and laugh with the other staff about. I consider myself to have a reasonable grasp of vocabulary so my ignorance seemed rather tragic. Not tragic for me, but for the restaurant itself, because as far as I can tell, a menu’s primary function is to describe the food an establishment sells, so this menu had failed its very purpose of being. The dish itself was a pot of seafood in some sort of white sauce, with two discs of pastry sitting on top. In other words, it was like a seafood pie.
So as you can see, it was all rather grandiose. The waiters did that thing where they pour a little bit of the drink in the glass for my convenience even though it was only a little bottle of Tonic Water. They draped one of those folded up tablecloths across my lap (presumably in case I become inconvenienced by a sudden erection when I saw the beautiful majesty of the food). You have to understand I am used to Sunday dinners where you have to order at the bar and go and collect your own condiments. I am used to napkins that are small squares of tissue, which if draped over your lap area, would actually draw rather than detract attention to any stirrings of the groin. Oh - and the other reason I knew this restaurant was posh was due to the weighty price of the food. Maybe that should have been the main clue.
I cannot deny, the scram was lovely. But it seems no matter how grandiose you might try to be, there are always people who want to act more grandiose than you. Take the husband and wife on the next table for instance. They were eating a traditional Sunday lunch, but they were unhappy. The roast potatoes were not to their liking. And the perceived failings of these roast potatoes was simply unacceptable, and they would call the waiter over to tell him as much.
“They’re just too soft. And potatoes shouldn’t be this sweet.” The husband snottily declared, “What sort of potato is this supposed to be anyway?”
The bewildered waiter had not expected this potato chagrin and scrambled back to the kitchen to humour the man’s carbohydrate query, returning to apologetically inform his critic, “All we know is that they’re from our supplier, ’Swallow’”
But the customer was not appeased by this in the slightest. In fact, it had enraged him into a declaration of starch warfare.
“I’d like to speak to the manager”, he demanded.
Now admittedly, I am a big fan of the roast potato, but I could not understand the level of hullaballoo. Maybe my standards are too low, but I kind of come to expect that maybe one part of an overall meal might not be prepared in a manner which suits my taste, and provided I am not poisoned or nauseated, or that loads of other stuff on my plate is also not to my satisfaction, I will generally just leave the offensive item to one side and move on. Probably to carrots or something, or maybe head straight to the meat if I really felt the need to compensate my potato disappointment. At most, I would expel any petty annoyances via a diary entry, and then just get on with my life. It is reasonable to assume I will consume plenty more roast potatoes in the future, unless my life comes to some sort of abrupt ending. But then, I imagine my last thoughts will probably be too occupied by the cause of my impending demise to lend too much concern to potatoes. Yet to his credit, the manager came down to indulge the snotty couple’s potato slating.
“This potato isn’t right” he went on again. “It’s too soft and sweet.” The manager said something quietly which I didn’t quite catch, but which had once again failed to appease the man.
“I know my potatoes!” he barked.
His wife suddenly chirped up in support of her husband: “Yes, he does know his potatoes. He’s potato mad!”
Those last three words were the most sensible thing that had been said so far. But this was sanity by luck not judgment. The wife would also prove herself unbalanced. She started wading in, trying to offer the potatoes to the manager, and even more bizarrely, when he declined, she started inviting him to their house so she could show him what a roast potato actually was. Then her husband raised the lunacy another level, by starting to question whether what they had been served was actually a potato at all! The debate was getting more and more surreal the further it went, and there was nothing the manager could do but sit their patiently and allow them to air their ridiculous proclamations. In the end, the wife requested a doggy bag, so they could take the ‘so-called potato’ home. Why they would want a momento from a meal which they hated is anyone’s guess.
Don’t get me wrong, I can understand why people might draw attention to their dissatisfaction when the waiter comes over and asks how the food is. Maybe a passing comment might even be constructive to the establishment in the long run. Personally, I’d tell the waiting staff it’s great, even if I’d previously whispered to everyone else on the table about how it tasted like gravel. But that’s just me. It is not necessarily the correct approach and maybe so much suppression is unnatural, and will eventually lead to my inevitable breakdown. But comparatively speaking, couldn’t taking a potato home in a paper bag to see whether it is actually a potato or evidence of some sort of bizarre ”potato matrix”, be seen as a bit of breakdown in itself?
Surely there’s got to be a happy medium.
