Speaking of food, overeating reminds me of an experience I had a little over a year ago. I’m not sure if it’s because of our busy work schedules or our apathy when it comes to food preparation, but my wife and I tend to dine out a lot. In the four years we’ve both been in the area, I think we’ve eaten at just about every restaurant in a ten mile radius, many of them dozens of times. So when a new restaurant opens up, we try to go as soon as we can to discover if this new establishment will enter into our current dining out rotation.
There’s an area about 100 yards from our condo development that’s referred to as “restaurant hill”. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out restaurant hill is a group of restaurants on a large hill. It’s a mix of chain restaurants (Outback, Longhorn, TGI Friday’s), and independent restaurants (Japanese Steakhouse, authentic Mexican). One thing about the restaurants on restaurant hill is that many of them don’t last too long. Restaurant hill is like the Menudo of restaurants – once one gets too old, a newer, updated version takes its place. When I first moved here, the restaurant selection was completely different than it is now. There was a Thirsty Dog Brewery, which was replaced by Bennigan’s. Last year, not surprisingly, Bennigan’s went out of business, and now an unknown new restaurant is in the process of moving in. Side note: Bennigan’s along with Ruby Tuesday, are the worst chain restaurants in existence. It’s high school cafeteria quality food with a bar. A friend and I once ate at Ruby Tuesday and it felt like a funeral parlor, complete with the dim lighting, sad music, and depressed people. After 10 minutes there, I had the excitement level of an actual corpse, and was only awakened from my near comatose state by a waitress ramming a vacuum cleaner into my feet. That’s right, she literally hit my foot with the vacuum. There were 6 other people in the restaurant at the time, which means she didn’t have that much to clean up. Either she was farsighted, or the only way she could revive me enough for me to wake up and calculate her tip was to hit me with the first cleaning appliance she could find.
As you travelled up the hill, a few years ago there used to be a Damon’s. Damon’s soon went out of business and became a Japanese steakhouse, which is still around today. That’s great for me, because I’ll take sushi/hibachi over pork any day. There was also a Don Pablo’s and Amazon Trail restaurant. Amazon Trail went out of business, and was replaced by an authentic Mexican restaurant. Since authentic Mexican is ten times better than fake Mexican (Don Pablo’s), soon enough Don Pablo’s went out of business, and was replaced by the worst restaurant I’ve even been to.
How to spot an authentic versus fake Mexican restaurant:
Authentic: All the servers, cooks, and hosts are actual Mexican people.
Fake: Staff made up entirely of castoff servers from Applebee’s and Chili’s.
Authentic: Servers speak Spanish, can only say “Check” and “Refill” in English.
Fake: Servers speak English, can only say “Hola” and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” in Spanish.
Authentic: Telemundo is playing on TV at the bar when you go for lunch.
Fake: Frasier is playing on the bar TV when you go for lunch (Spanish subtitles).
Authentic: Your food arrives within 3 minutes after ordering it.
Fake: Food takes 20 minutes to arrive, and they try to hold you over with store-bought Tostitos chips and salsa.
Authentic: A margarita is called “Margarita”.
Fake: A margarita is called “Crazy Loco Salsarita”.
Authentic: Bathrooms doors say “Hombres” and “Mujeres”.
Fake: Bathroom doors say “Guys” and “Gals”.
Authentic: A burro is somewhere on the premises.
Fake: A pack of stray cats sometimes hangs around the dumpster.
Now back to the story. Don Pablo’s was replaced by a new restaurant called Steak On A Stone, and the couple we were going to dinner with agreed to try it with us. We were not completely aware of the concept of Steak On A Stone until we arrived. I had the pre-conceived belief that you ordered a steak, it was prepared to your liking in the kitchen, and kept warm for you on a heated stone. Wrong. We found out quickly Steak On A Stone’s goal is to make you feel like a prehistoric cave man. After reading the disclaimer that children 12 and under are not allowed to eat here due to safety concerns, your first step on the menu is to choose a meat. The waitress informed us that the meat you select is actually a hunk of rare, unseasoned meat, similar to if you bought it in a butcher shop, or cut it off an animal you just killed on a hunt with your tribe. After making your selection, your meat it is brought out to you (still in a bloody rare state) on a volcanic rock that is heated up to 750 degrees. It also includes 2 sides and a seasoning sauce. This combination of items is a bad idea for so many reasons.
First of all, our foursome all had several drinks while we were waiting at the bar before dinner, and now you’re bringing a 750-degree rock to put right in front of me. That’s like giving scissors to a blind man – someone is going to get hurt. Not to mention the table that the four of us were sitting at was actually almost the size of a 2-person table, so now I have to maneuver around 3 other burning stones to grab anything else on the table. Maybe I should have been informed of this before I worsened my reflexes with 3 Tanqueray and tonics an hour ago.
So the four of us order food (guys ordered steaks, girls ordered scallops), and more drinks. Before the waitress left my wife asked how she would know the scallops were done, since she has never cooked anything, let alone possibly salmonella filled seafood, on a stone before. “You’ll just know”, is how the waitress responded. Ok, so now she had to balance handling her buzz and not undercooking her seafood. Not a very relaxing meal so far. I was starting to feel like I went to spring break with Habitat for Humanity. “Great, it’s spring break, but I’m going to a poverty stricken third world country, paying for my transportation and meals, and then once I get there I do manual labor the entire time. Why the hell didn’t I just go to Panama City again?” Well, in this case my Panama City would have been Fleming’s.
So finally our food comes, and the searing hot rocks are placed before us. Our dumbass waitress leaves without clearing our empty glasses, so now we literally have 6 square inches of tablecloth that can be seen under all of our rocks, sides, and glasses. That’s when the real work began. I quickly realized how important time management would be during this meal. Since the steaks are so large, we were unable to cook the entire slab of meat at once on the stone. The waitress recommended cooking it a few pieces at a time. So we had to develop a system where we cut a few pieces off the steak, let them cook, eat those pieces and while doing so cut off more pieces and let them cook so that when you’re done eating, the next batch is ready. In between all of this, you have to skillfully avoid touching the rock while reaching for your side dishes or getting your drink. I felt like my hand was playing “Assault” on American Gladiators, but instead of dodging speeding tennis balls I was avoiding disfigurement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyenKCEJ8i4&feature=fvsr
Oh yes, and did I mention everyone was about 5 drinks deep at this point?
So after a little while our glasses were cleared, the cooking system is in place, and everyone is getting the hang of this experience. All of my sudden, my wife yells “Ouch!”. The butter sauce for her scallops somehow got onto the scalding hot rock, and shot up like sizzling bacon grease onto her arm. Our table had now turned into a war zone, and our food was rebelling against us. As my red-armed wife was sliding her chair away from the table, I finally wondered why anyone would ever pay to go out and cook their own food. The reason you go to dinner is to eat well-prepared food and be taken care of by your server, not to put your life on the line and stress yourself out cooking possibly undercooked meat and eating cold sides and bad sauces. I felt like the biggest sucker in the world. It’s like if I paid for a day at the spa and gave a massage to my masseuse, or paid to go to the chiropractor and cracked his back. What the hell were we doing here?
We finished our meals and laughed about the experience. We all agreed this novelty dining idea was destined for failure, and would be the next Ricky Martin in the Menudo of restaurant hill. We were so sure of its failure we vowed to return exactly one year later if this place could somehow stay in business. Well, somehow that shithole is still open. I guess for the same reason that Kid Rock has had a #1 single and The Real Housewives series is still on TV – Americans have shitty taste and are generally stupid.
I’ll let you know how my steak was after next weekend.
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