Down and Out in Denver

How many times — and it seems like it’s increasing — does one get asked this question at a restaurant? My normal inclination is to answer honestly, as I do to most questions.  But considering what the server will say if I answer in the negative, this is what I would like to say:

No, I haven’t.  But let me guess what’s going to happen here.  You’re just about to hand me a piece of paper, maybe even a very fancy one, that will have a list of food items and prices on it.  They might even be divided up into different groups: some smaller and less expensive; some larger and more expensive.  There might be a list of beverages as well.

Then I get to pick one or two of these food items from the list, tell you what they are, and in due time you (or some minion) will deliver them to my table where I will be able to eat them.  I may not have dined here before but I have been to a restaurant and 99.9% of them work exactly the same way, so stop pretending that your little twist on dining out is so remarkably special.  Your food may well be delicious (and I hope it is!) but it’s still coming to my table on a plate.

One is most often asked the question, it seems to me, at two places, one of which might have a more legitimate reason to ask it in the first place.  Category One, without reason to ask the question, is the Alice Waters type of restaurant where all ingredients are grown locally and the menu changes regularly.  Potager (which we here at DOD otherwise adore) is such a restaurant and, before they recognized us as regulars, the servers always asked us if we had been before.  If we had said no they would have launched into a long (and boring) spiel about local produce.  Unnecessary.  It’s still food.  Category Two, with a somewhat legitimate claim to ask the question, is the restaurant with unusual serving sizes: either’s it’s family style or it’s all tapas-style small plates.  I try to avoid both of these kinds of restaurants but most readers will probably agree with me that neither option is so bizarre that it necessarily requires an entire explanation apart from what is usually made quite clear on the menu to begin with.

In sum, I ask restaurants — which as a genre of place in the world might well be equivalent to a secular version of the Church of DOD; in other words, we love them — to get over themselves just a little bit.  You serve food.  We get it.