My Restaurant Experience

I haven’t written anything recently, because I have been sick. Very sick. MAJOR props to the MATH for putting up with me waking him up at 3 a.m. to tell him that I was sick all over the bathroom.

Anyway, so, tonight we went out to a restaurant in Headingley. And of course on a Friday night in Headingley, there are approximately a thousand students doing a pub crawl, and there must be some rule that you must dress up, so there were like, a hundred “Dorothy-from-the-wizard-of-Oz” look-alikes stumbling drunk up the road. Except for the fact that many of them took their costume decisions very lightly and just wore some red shoes. Or a hat. Or a ski jacket.

Now, the restaurant we went to had a lot of reviews in its window, and all the reviews promised something really good. Apparently the reviewer doesn’t meet many people who aren’t restaurant reviewers, because he had written “There are all sorts of people here; you might sit next to students, or old people, or even families!” Wow. There is so much diversity in the world, and I had no idea.

So we order, and I should say firstly that the food was very nice, so I can be negative and critical for the rest of this piece of writing. Anyway, the MATH ordered a glass of wine, and when it came, we noticed that there were flies floating in it. Yes, that’s plural. Flies. As in, 5 of them. I mean, seriously! That’s just gross. So we spent a considerable amount of time picking the flies out and staring at them, and the restaurant was pretty empty, so the staff were just standing around, and I’m sure that they could see what we were doing, but they didn’t really seem to care. I mean, did they think that we were looking to see if the grapes had indeed been squashed correctly? I don’t know. Perhaps they thought that we were weird people who got sexually aroused by picking interesting fauna out of our alcoholic beverages. Whatever the reason is, you guys suck.

So, when I finally pointed out the problem, the chick just got him a new glass of wine. And buy “new glass of wine”, I mean that it could have been the same glass, and the same wine, and she just carried it away and then brought it back again. Or it could have been a new glass with the old wine poured into it. Or, it could have been the old glass with some more wine poured into it. I don’t know.

And then, when we got our food, the staff kept coming up and wanting to put cracked pepper on our food. You know those novelty, oversized pepper grinders? I hate those. And I hate people who come up to me mid-meal, with my mouth bulging with food and ask “Are you enjoying your meal? Is there anything else I can get you? What do you think of the Blunkett tapes? Is Tony Blair doing a good thing by not naming the exact date he’ll resign? Talk, dammit, TALK.”

And after some yummy, yummy food and dessert, we got the bill, and it was about twelve pounds short of what it should be.

Which is 22 US Dollars/17.8 Euro/29 Australian Dollars/34 Bulgarian Leva/173 Hong Kong Dollars.

Yeah, you can see how bored I am that I actually spent that much time researching. If my arts degree has taught me anything, it’s how to research useless crap in an effort to waste time.

And we politely, smilingly, told the girl and she went and brought us our proper bill.

So, in the end, there was no discount for the fact that the wine had bugs in it, and we actually told the restaurant how much more money we owed them. But the trouble was that the food was very, very good. I think I’ll just steal their recipes and cook the food myself. Yes.