Eating Deadly Culinary Delights
The very act of eating at a restaurant has gotten dangerous
I confess. I’m neither a big fan of eating bait — sushi — for dinner nor one to enjoy the delicacy of blowfish, which can render you paralyzed until you die of asphyxiation if not correctly prepared. What most people call caviar, I call fish eggs. I’ve never eaten Kobe beef, or brains, or tongue no matter how deep-fried they are. My tastes are simple, almost mundane, but that’s okay with me. Needless to say, my selections of restaurants closely mirror my pedestrian food choices.
The missus and I were talking about how we missed the “good old days” of going out to our hole-in-the-wall restaurants on the weekends. Commonly referred to around our house as Pre-COVID culinary events. What’s bothering us is the fact a lot of restaurants in our town are opening back up.
And we both aren’t about to visit them anytime soon.
My beloved most times has a wicked sense of humor, and so she quickly offered me a few scenarios of what type of deadly delicacies might be served at one of our fav restaurants along with the food.
- You order a chimichanga, and the waiter returns with a ventilator stating the longer we sit there, the better our chances are one of us will need to use it.
- Our chicken fried steak comes served in a box resembling a coffin complete with a 10% off coupon to the platinum burial package at David’s Funeral homes.
- After ordering two footlong coneys, fries, and tater tots, the waitress rolls up and serves us then asks if we prefer cremation and offers us a 10% off coupon to David’s Funeral homes. Who knew they also had a crematorium?
- After finishing a great meal of chicken and dumplings, we order our pie ala mode, and the waiter brings us the pie and applications for adjoining gravesites at the local pauper cemetery. Supposedly it’s where all the COVID victims are currently being buried, so if we don’t want to be dumped into a mass grave, we better pick our spots out now.
- We pick our favorite hamburger joint and order, and the waitress brings our food and pictures of tombstones they’re currently selling today 50% off if we purchase two within the next thirty days. We’re told the sale won’t last much longer than that, because they don’t expect us to last much longer either.
- We’re served lobster and shrimp with clarified butter and those wonderful tasting garlic biscuits, and as we’re eating, the manager comes out from his office and pronounces us winners of the restaurant’s latest contest. Our prize? Top row berths in one of the refrigerated trucks behind the hospital of our choice. Or the hospital the EMT driver drops our lifeless bodies off at because all the hospitals are filled to capacity, and we died at home. Anyway, they usually move the bodies on the top row last.
Needless to say, after my wife rattled off a few of these gems, I stopped talking about the old restaurant days and asked a simple question.
“So baby, what’s for dinner?”
Her reply?
“Whatever you make for yourself I suppose. After all that I’m not hungry anymore.”
At which point I promptly went out…
To the garage freezer and pulled me out a frozen pizza. No more thoughts on going out to eat anymore at least for a couple of years.
Or decades.
Now, where did I put that Ubereats coupon?
Thank you so much for reading. You didn’t have to, but I’m certainly glad you did.
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© P.G. Barnett, 2020. All Rights Reserved.
