Early turd special
We'd never been to what was supposedly the best joint in the area. Very expensive you see. But when my inlaws were visiting they noticed there was a reasonable fixed price,, early bird special if you came in between 6 and 7. They offered to treat so why not.

I won't go into the non-existent "service", etc. Here, however, are the dishes we enjoyed.

Mother-in-law: Roasted pork chop on a bed of fall vegetables. The roasting must have been done with a blowtorch, as the meat in question had an almost supernatural quality being dehydrated and burnt on the outside and nearly raw on the interior. This effect is diffucult to achieve in a chop apparently sliced with a laser to a generous centimeter or so of thickness. The "bed" of vegetables could be found under this delicacy, with a bit of looking about.

My wife: Shrimp with penne pasta in a cream sauce. Oh look, theres the shrimp. He looks thin. Probably he lost all that weight during the cooking process, which must have been lengthy. Too bad they used all the energy on the shrimp, as the pasta might have used cooking too....

Father in law: Steak. Ahh, a simple man. You'd think with a simple order like that all would be well. He did better than the rest of us I suppose, enjoying what may have been a full ounce of something that you could actually chew. I think there may have been a potato as well.

Myself: carpaccio. In this case, three dried out bits of flesh rolled in an entire box of salt, carefully arranged on a wilted lettuce leaf and smothered in a whole can of remaindered capers apparently tinned in the 1920's.

For some reason we passed on dessert.
(Ennui Kissinger, Fri 28 Apr 2006, 1:44, Reply)