NSA Dinner

Imagine you are in a disney movie.

Specifically, imagine that you are the title character in Aladdin. You have just found the magic lamp. You feel compelled to rub the magic lamp, so you do. The big, blue genie pops out of the lamp and he dances for you and sings and makes a big show of all the things you can wish for, and then he offers one wish (I am taking poetic license; go with me). You think for a minute and you blurt out “I wish to go to the Broadway Grill!” Within a second you are whisked through time and space and you find yourself sitting at a table in that Capitol Hill institution and almost immediately you are hit with fierce, rushing waves of regret and stupidity and ignorance. You want to go home. You wish this had never happened to you in the first place. You don’t even like lamps. You curse yourself for being such an idiot.

You have just imagined my Thursday night.

My date tonight let me choose the restaurant and I picked the Broadway Grill. For readers who don’t live on Capitol Hill (or readers who don’t ever go to restaurants), this is the equivalent of asking to go to T.G.I Friday’s, except the Broadway Grill charges four times as much and there are no pieces of flair.

The worst part is that none of this is a surprise. I know the Broadway Grill is terrible. They have nothing to hide; the Broadway Grill flaunts its sub-par food, its schizophrenic menu and its chefs who can’t make half of the items on it. Why? It can do this because the Broadway Grill is open really, really late. Every city, every neighborhood has a place like Broadway Grill. Shitty, expensive food, awful service, no ambiance, and uncomfortable chairs in exchange for being able to get nachos at two in the morning.

Why, then, did I pick Broadway Grill? I wasn’t drunk and it wasn’t two in the morning; it was 6:30 on a weeknight. There are thousands of restaurants in Seattle and I could have had a free meal at any one of them. Clearly I need to have my head examined.

I asked to be taken to Broadway Grill because you should know what the shitty food options in your neighborhood are. You need to know where you live. For my own edification, I needed to go to Broadway Grill. I needed to check it off my list. I imagine that going to Broadway Grill is a lot like going to Belgium on a backpacking trip across Europe; when you get home and you’re looking at a map with a friend, or they’re talking about going to Europe, you can swagger and declare “Oh, yeah, Belgium. Been there. Blah.” You need to go so you can speak firsthand about how much you didn’t care for Belgium, so you can sound well-informed and sexy when you tell your friends to never go there. That is why I am going to Broadway Grill.

Note: is it clear that I never fit in as a child and this whole venture is a pathetic attempt to be able to marginally participate in normal people discourse? Good.

So I am walking up Broadway, trying very hard to keep my dejected face at bay. I am miraculously exactly on time and my date is approaching from the other direction at the same time. I told her I would be wearing a big brown coat (my friends say it makes me look like a potato; i prefer to think of myself as a tootsie roll), and she is wearing an absurd green, furry number that she said she would. She has black hair and thick plastic glasses and that DIY riot grrrl aesthetic. Cute. Too bad I look like a starch. She does not seem pleased to see me. It is raining, so we keep the “are you who I think you are?” banter to a minimum and head inside.

We are waiting for the hostess to appear at the hostess stand with the “please wait to be seated sign” and no hostess appears to be in the building. The woman I am with does not think this is funny. I am thinking about how silly Seattle is and how funny this will look in my blog and this woman looks bored and mildly perturbed. Efforts to cajole her fall flat.

Eventually we realize no hostess is coming and we seat ourselves in a table by a window. There are a few families sitting around us with young children and babies; my date tells me that she hates it when people bring their children and babies into restaurants.

I am getting tired of this. This is NSA dinner number four or five, and I am getting very sick of making conversation with strangers, especially ones like my date, who sweat bad ju-ju. I need a free meal. I do not need your bad energy. I catch myself thinking this and I feel selfish. A waiter notices that we have sat down.

The waiter makes his way over to us with water and attempts to take our drink order, but we only want water. He is visibly confused by this request. As his confusion turns to aggravation, he then realizes that we do not have menus, ie we sat ourselves without the hostess. He lectures us for a solid minute about how in this restaurant you need to wait to be seated and he gives us an extra big huff before getting us a couple of menus.

We ignore each other for the requisite amount of time, heads hidden behind gigantic menu books. I don’t know what she’s thinking (probably something about her dislike of this typeface), and I am scanning the items for something vegetarian that won’t challenge the chef. The silence during this part of the meal, the reading of the menus, initially bothered me a lot and drove me crazy on the first couple of NSA dates– I would try to make conversation and make eye contact and read the menu at the same time. That era is behind me now. Silence rocks.

When I get shitty service in Seattle, my favorite joke to make/thing to think about is the irate server in particular going home at the end of their shift and ranting and raving to their innocent significant other about how hard it is to seem disaffected, aloof, and bitchy all night long to customers. I imagine my server feeling marginally depressed about having to go into work the next day and try so hard to be someone they’re not, someone who actually doesn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything, when really they are Seattle born and bred and they care a lot. About everything. And everyone. And you just can’t show that at the Broadway Grill.

My date, Miss Anthropic, does not think I am funny. She is already over it. She doesn’t want to make long, involved jokes about the service. She tells me that she hates Broadway Grill, that she only comes here once a year to remember how much she hates it, she prefers The Deluxe, blah blah blah. I have stopped comprehending. If you didn’t like this restaurant, why didn’t you say so? When I e-mailed her, I suggested Broadway Grill or Annapurna. Annapurna might have been a better choice (Nepalese food? They do not have this in upstate New York), or you could have e-mailed me back telling me I suggested the two worst restaurants on Broadway. Maybe she wanted to be nice and honor my request. Still, you would think after my disclosure that I had been to barely a handful of eateries in Seattle since moving here, that she would have taken my request as charming, but ultimately worthless.

I order the fish and chips and she orders some kind of grilled, glazed salmon. I have been fantasizing about french fries all week. When I was at Squid and Ink, I ordered the soup instead of the french fries as a side and regretted it throughout the whole meal. I know better now. Soup is for bitches. Bring on the patatas.

We make the same conversation I make with every date: jobs, liking/loathing seattle, travel, music, passions in life. I am beginning to realize how similar these conversations are to each other and how to draw people out by asking the right questions in the right way. I get her to talk about her job, working in a hospital doing some kind of medical data entry thing. She’s pretty reticent about it. It sounds boring. She mentions that she is a valuable commodity because she is trained to do something special in this field; she is worth money. Whatever. This is not interesting and we both know it. I’ve spent my fair share of time in hospitals, and they make me want to stick my head in an oven, so I ask her if it’s a depressing job. Bingo! She is off and running, talking animatedly about how awful it is to work in a hospital with sick people and sick children all the time and from there we talk about other things that make her feel sad: growing up poor, declaring bankruptcy, taking care of her ailing parent, her ex. I nod and say encouraging words until the food comes. I can be interested in other people’s misery so long as they’re interested in it, too.

For a half empty restaurant, the food comes late, but we’re not surprised. By now we’ve moved onto music she thinks sucks and why she hates Seattle. Our waiter plunks down our plates and disappears– he won’t return for nearly an hour, to drop off a check and grudgingly wrap my leftovers.

I am given a very large amount of food; a portion size fit for a very patriotic American. There are three long pieces of deep fried fish, enough french fries sprinkled over, under, and in between the fish to satisfy someone the size of Michael Strahan, and a large scoop of cheerful, brightly colored coleslaw laying out on the side on my absurdly oversized plate. My date’s salmon does not look nearly as exciting as my fried symphony, but she says she is on a diet, morosely digs in, and I pretend to understand.

The fish is fine. The fries are okay. The coleslaw is pretty good, though there are giant, inedible hunks of cabbage core in it. Fish and chips is the English equivalent of Thai yellow curry. Has anyone ever had bad fish and chips? Even the bowling alley I worked at when I was sixteen had decent fish and chips. Have you ever heard of gourmet fish and chips? Of course not. They don’t make gourmet things that are deep fried; it all tastes the same. People tell me I make fantastic potato latkes and squash fritter, but the secret is that everything deep fried tastes great. Yes, that’s the taste of the free radicals from the too-hot oil fucking up your internal organs irreparably. Everything is going to be okay. Keep eating.

Miss Anthropic makes yucky faces as she eats her salmon. It’s an oversized portion also (apparently quantity can cover up for quality in these parts), and it’s served on top of some rice with some vegetables. It is completely unexciting and she scrapes the best part, the glaze, off of the salmon. She mutters something about being on a diet. I offer a taste of my fish and chips; she declines.

We move on to music and we talk about the venues and shows she hates and why she hates Seattle but will never leave. I do not ask to see the dessert menu. I realize that I’ve been very lucky; our waiter did eventually return and I didn’t order any of the pseudo-fancy pasta dishes that my fish and chips would have put to shame. This woman offers to buy me another dinner sometime and I nod and smile and say something forgettable and stupid about that being nice. I have received enough charity for a lifetime. We part ways and head off into the night and I am thankful that I only have two of these dinners left; all this charity is starting to take its toll on me.

This is how my leftovers came back. Everyone else I saw in the restaurant carrying out food got little boxes. I think this was our waiter sharing his disgust with us, but maybe this is how they always do it. In the background is my elusive torso.