Friday, June 17, 2011

Adventures in Lunching


I’ve mentioned before that I recently started a full time job. One of my favorite parts of this full time job is lunchtime. Being able to eat without sticky little hands grabbing my food and slobbering all over my straw is such a joyous occasion for me. I sometimes even eat in my car and it too is bliss. I live for lunch. If I can’t have lunch, or I get too busy and it gets put off until later in the afternoon, I turn into a crabby bitch. My belly must be fed on time. Every day. Or my head will start doing a 360 degree turn. With the pea soup not far behind. I do not joke.

So today I decided to go out to lunch with 3 of my co-workers (one of them is my older sister).  We were all set on Bob Evans. The only stipulation one of us had was that Bob Evans have salads. Yep, they sure do. It was settled. On the way to Bob Evans we saw a Mediterranean Café/Marketplace. One of us inquired about the place, and my sister who had eaten there before said, “Oh their food is wonderful. The place is never busy, but the food is great, I loved it the last time I was there.”
Intrigued, my driving coworker made a last second turn, and we entered the empty parking lot to try this “wonderful” little hole in the wall. I mean let’s face it, there are some real gems out there that many of us miss out on because we may think empty parking lot = bad food.

We walked in and you could hear an echo it was so desolate. I’m not gonna lie, I was nervous. I’ve seen bad horror movies start out like this and the last thing I needed today was to end up the middle rung of the human centipede. No thanks. But I wanted to give a small business a chance. I think it’s important to support your local restaurants. And it came with a nice recommendation.

So the first thing we did was ask about the buffet. This place advertises a $7.99 lunch buffet. There was a little potato salad on the buffet. That’s all. Well for $7.99 that potato salad better do a Shakespearean soliloquy, a 2 minute comedy routine and a magic trick. Maybe it did do a magic trick, it made the rest of the buffet food disappear. No problem though, it made the decision to not order the lunch buffet that much easier. In fairness to this establishment, they said the buffet would be ready at noon. We just got there too early. It was quarter til noon.

Okay, moving on. A gentleman came to take our order. I ordered the beef something. (some beef and veggies in a pita pocket). Sorry no beef. Not until 1:00. Uh okay. No buffet until 12:00, no beef until 1:00. Whatever. I will take the chicken. But first I wanted to start off with some hummus as an appetizer. Our waiter said, “you want just hummus?” “I want the hummus appetizer, doesn’t it come with pita bread?” How many people do you know who want just the hummus? I’ve never seen a person eat hummus with a spoon but maybe I am a clueless individual. I do know though that hummus is nothing without an edible little triangle of some sort to dip into it.

We finished placing our orders. We all ended up ordering the same thing, the chicken sandwich meal that comes with fries (rice for my sis). My co-worker sitting across from me even pointed to the photo of the chicken sandwich that had fries surrounding it. (I bet you can’t guess where I’m going with that little tidbit of information.) I’ll get to that later.

We waited patiently for our drinks. They never came. I saw a soda machine next to the empty buffet, so I went over to make my own drink. Bonus. They had to-go cups so I could take my diet Coke back to work with me. Maybe this place wasn’t so bad after all. Crap they have Pepsi products. No big deal. I can substitute. Crap. No ice. No big deal, I really just need the soda. Thankfully, a man did go get a bag of ice after he saw me struggling with the ice dispenser. I was hoping that if I just held it down a little bit longer, ice would magically appear. So he filled the ice tank, and I put my cup under the diet Pepsi dispenser. Only it was clear. Yay. Carbonated water. Yummy! At this point I couldn’t be bothered and took the lemonade. However, we were going to have to stop at a gas station on the way back to work so I could get a proper drink dammit! (My driving co-worker wanted a Coke slushy more than anything anyway, so I knew there would be no trouble in asking her to stop.)

My sister walked around looking for the Iced Tea container but never found it, so she settled for Pepsi. After about 10 minutes of laughing to ourselves, wondering what the heck would transpire over the next half hour, our food came. Well some of it came. 3 sandwiches came. And a nice little kid came over to inform us that they had no tea. Thanks little dude. We sort of figured it out. You don’t have any diet Pepsi either but I’ll just keep that to myself. The kid serving our food said he had to go get more and would be right back. Good. We assumed he’d come back with my sandwich, all of our fries, my sister’s rice, and my hummus. He came back with hummus that had something on top of it. What the hell is that? Turns out it was chicken. The waiter clearly had trouble with my order. I did get some pita bread and a little bit of lettuce with tomatoes, cucumbers and pickles though. But, no fries, no sandwich, no rice. My sister let him know we ordered the meals with fries, we were still missing a sandwich and she was missing her rice. So he said, “Oh. Do you want it?” “Yeah I want it.” Poor naïve older sister, she was convinced our young waiter was going to bring us all back the food we ordered. No way sis. You are getting your rice and I am having some pita and hummus for lunch. Pita bread that had hummus already spread all over it on the inside (which was kind of weird).

The young man brought back only the rice, just as the rest of us knew he would and we never heard from him again. AND we were STILL the only people in this joint. A couple of us just picked at our food because it was so unsatisfactory. Then we had to practically beg to pay our bills. The thing was, we weren’t angry about any of this. We felt really bad that this little place was being run like this. No wonder it was empty. It was the worst service we’ve ever had. Our young waiter rang us up, and when he tried to charge me for the sandwich I never had, I reminded him that I only received the appetizer. He actually didn’t charge us for any of our drinks, which was fair because well 1) 2 of us didn’t get the drinks we ordered, and 2) drinks were included in the meal deal that we ordered but didn’t get. Oh my gosh! This is all just so confusing!

We left hungry. (One half picked at sandwich just isn’t going to cut it. Nor is a little hummus with rubber chicken sprinkled on top.) We laughed at our experience, then stopped at not one, but two gas station food marts to finish the job this restaurant couldn’t. Ahhh. It turned out to be a great lunch after all: Coke slushy, diet Coke, pretzels, bbq chips, more chips, yogurt covered pretzels and a Mrs. Fields M&M cookie. Who needs a Mediterranean lunch when you can lunch at the Marathon and Speedway for half the headache?

3 comments:

  1. I can only envision your growing tension during this experience! I would have walked.

    Thanks again for the laughs!!!

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  2. I about fell off the couch when I read about the potato salad. You're too funny! Thank goodness for Marathon and Speedway, right! See you in 13 days. Whoo Hoo!

    ReplyDelete