Quote:
Originally Posted by eco74
That's the strangest post I've read in awhile.
It was a strange dining experience. Anyway, to continue:
After a while the bartender said that the reason why he couldn't serve us was that he was only making drinks for the tables and that the bartender who makes drinks for those at the bar would be around shortly. This made me feel a little bit better that it wasn't simply because we were clearly not card-carrying members of the Italian American Social Club.
The bar bartender eventually showed up and I got a gin and tonic. It tasted, unsurprisingly, exactly like a gin and tonic. My friend ordered some drink, but I can't remember what. He didn't complain, so I assume it was acceptable. We asked the bar bartender for menus. He, interestingly, brought us menus. We, as you'd suspect, perused the menus. You probably didn't immediately suspect that we'd settle on Caprese salad, meatballs and sautéed calamari since I did no foreshadowing that would make you suspect such a thing, but that is exactly what we did.
The Caprese Salad was well-constructed. Clearly they paid attention to presentation. If it weren't for the under-ripe tomatoes and excessively sharp onions, it would have been an excellent dish.
The meatballs tasted like meatballs. Maybe a little bit under-seasoned, but tender. Given that the clientele was, on average, not exactly spring chickens, this was not unexpected. Definitely no plot twist here. The sauce was definitely not made in-house, unless they also have an in-house Prego or Ragu factory. Upon tasting the dish, you'd likely excitedly exclaim (on the inside, since you are presumably not the sort of person to just excitedly exclaim things out loud in a restaurant), "just like Mom used to make!" if you were raised in a single-parent household and Mom had to work two full-time jobs to make ends meet.
The sautéed calamari, when it was brought out appeared (we couldn't see it before it was brought out, of course) to be what most people would call "fried calamari swimming in some sort of sauce." Definitely breaded. Definitely fried. Definitely in some sort of sauce. Possibly sautéed in said sauce, but definitely not what you'd expect after ordering something called "sautéed calamari" unless you had never had sautéed calamari. In that particular case, you'd have no expectations at all. After my friend insisted to one bartender (the bar bartender, not the table bartender) that it was "not sautéed calamari," the bartender brought over the other bartender and they retorted with "it is sautéed calamari." This argument of contradiction went on for quite a while.
This would seem unfair since there were two of them and only one of my friend, but he is a ferocious arguer. To avoid you thinking that I made a new paragraph simply because the last one was getting too long, think of a jaguar, and then imagine that instead of ferociously biting a gazelle on the neck until it dies, it instead keeps contradicting the bartenders who are saying that the calamari is indeed sautéed. The bartenders, for their part, just kept contradicting the reality of it not being even remotely a dish that could possibly be called sautéed calamari, and by extension, my friend. Like all chess games between gazelle and jaguar it ended in a stalemate.
After my friend made it abundantly clear that we did not want fried calamari that had then possibly been sautéed, the bartenders took the dish a few feet away down the bar and ate it aggressively in our general direction while making yummy noises at us. Unlike an argumentative jaguar (since they do not have thumbs and cannot work a smart phone properly), my friend spent the next 20 minutes googling pictures of sautéed calamari to show the bartenders, but they were not particularly interested. The bartenders declined to acknowledge that we existed from that point forth, which was probably best for everyone.
Overall, a ten out of ten experience.