This year on New Years we arranged a night of dining with a few of my closest friends. It was lovely and I will show you my night through my eyes. We were having dinner at eight at The Melting Pot, which is spanish for "Awesome food that makes you scream.". We got on the road early and just had to stop at the wine store in order to seal the deal. We arrived at the wine store at 7:10, it was closed. Being New Years and all I felt this was a little offensive. I feel like
if you truly wanted to curb drunk driving there are plenty of other drinking demographics that I would punish first. So we set our course for the liquor store, which also carries wine. Closed. Damn, really? Whose idea was this? If you are gonna curb drunk driving why not close all the liquor stores from November to January. If you are going to do something don't half ass it.
Luckily, Whipple(Whipple is a person) had two bottles that he had purchased at the wine store prior to 7:10. Well that's certainly a start. We get to The Melting Pot early and they have a pretty small waiting area. On top of that the people eating at our future table are not done, so we have to wait. After about 20 minutes of sitting vertically Whipple (person) asks if the host will bring us a wine opener. This is why I like Whipple, you would have thought that wine glasses would have been in that sentence as well but no, lets just get the bottle open. Once that happens we can work out the other trivial items.
The host........the host. Real quick on the host. He has the type of mustache where you feel sexually violated just by having him talk to you. I just can't figure out how people wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and think in their mind "Oh ya, this looks good.". Who doesn't want to be secretly sexually violated on New Years? Anyway, the host informs Whipple that there is a restaurant bar that we could go hang out in. Wow, so nobody thought it appropriate to inform a group of people carrying wine that instead of sitting on each others laps we can go to THE BAR? I suspect the discreet molester just wanted us close.
Once we got comfortable in the bar things were looking up. The wine was flowing and we were busy catching up with our friends. Unfortunately I kept getting distracted by the TV in the bar. I really hate TVs in restaurants and bars cause even if I have no desire to watch television, it just kind of sucks you in. "Excuse me, Danny, I know you are excited about your new rifle but the mediocre movie Troy is playing just over your right shoulder. Can we talk about it later?" Which brings me to my next point, who plays TROY in a restaurant bar? I do not own a restaurant, I do not "officially" own a bar, but I have a pretty good idea about what types of television programs you should be playing. Espn and Cnn.
My friend Daniel decided the mood and setting was right, and he gave me my Christmas present. I display it to my left. That is me at the end of my High School career. It is moments like these that make me cherish my wife Annie more and more. Some people shouldn't be allowed to dress themselves or pick their hairstyle. I am one of those people and I accept that.
We finally are finally seated with our party of nine. The discreet molester gets one more chance to make us all uncomfortable and we sit down! Now, in my head I had kind of pictured us as being at the same table. Instead, we are sitting next to each other but in two different booths. So the two bench seats are essentially on the same plane but there is a divider separating the two booths. They remove the divider and we are kind of all one group. The group at the other table is just like four feet away from the closest member of the other group. Not very good for conversation, though it did keep Daniel a safe distance away, preventing any more incriminating photos from surfacing.
Bring on the fondue! Upon reviewing the menu I am immediately disappointed. Typically in your dinner options you choose what kind of lobster, steak etc. you want to dunk in your cooking......liquid. It is a nice restaurant and the lobster and steak is delicious. My favorite part of the menu in the past has been that no matter what you picked you always got ravioli on your plate as well. It was ridiculous. Nobody wants Chef Boyardi with dinner, that's something people do in the safety of their home when nobody is looking. On this special night the ravioli is missing from the menu, in it's place is chicken. Now I'm all for eating chicken but I don't know if a restaurant should take this kind of risk. Letting each person at the table decide how long to cook poultry seems like bad policy. I mean, what if the guy that put Troy on the bar television comes in for dinner? Actually, he'd probably deserve it. Troy on the bar television, seriously.
So we are sitting in our booth with five people, just close enough to a booth of four people containing the rest of our party to occasionally catch the end of a story. Which then requires that booth to retell the story to me and this cycle goes on and on. Very inefficient, I think we only had about two topics of conversation that was continually regurgitated to other members of other booths.
The cheese fondue was awesome. End paragraph.
If you didn't notice earlier my mind has spaced and I don't know what to call the dinner fondue. So the dinner juice shows up and we dig in, it's pretty good. Honestly I wasn't blown away like I have been in previous encounters, but it was definitely good.
There is one minor inconvenience about the boiling dinner juice. The steam from the pot of ramen broth isn't going straight up into the air. I think we might have messed with the airflow of the room when we removed the barrier between booth one and booth two. It is instead, flowing directly into my face. I have photo evidence which I will post below.
As you can see, I am clearly getting a facial of broth steam, which lead to steak in broth steam and shrimp and chicken in broth steam. At first it was funny, but after about thirty to forty minutes of this I am officially saturated to the pore in ramen. Not my finest moment.
Now I come to the part of the story where I realized I was spending New Years with the right people. Whipple was trying to fish out a piece of meat from the dinner juice. Whipple is really smart, studied in London, working on his second degree, reads a lot, not so good at fondue. He's good at other things. Something about keeping his meat on the stick (that's what she said) just didn't work for him. So he is doing this for like the fourth time and he pulls up a piece of meat and a piece of broccoli. I might mess the fine details up since I was late in the game of ramen facials. Anyway, this piece of broccoli has a hair about twelve to eighteen inches long wrapped around it.
Odds of that hair belonging to my wife, 95%.
This is a super strong hair too. It is easily holding the weight of the broccoli, and it just came out of our fondue pot. We all marvel at the strength of the hair, we set the broccoli/hair down, we all look at each other. We all grab our fondue sticks and proceed with dinner, having a good laugh as we do. The group decides to inform the waitress that we are eating hair fondue. She immediately goes to get the manager.
The manager shows up and Annie picks up the broccoli by the hair and shows him. His response is as follows, "Wow(laughing), I'm not laughing, I mean wow that is gross". We ended up getting a discount for eating steak and lobster fondue with a hint of Annie in it. It was sometime after we decided to continue eating the tainted fondue that I realized I was with the right people on New Years.
Happy New Year everybody and thanks for reading.
-Nick
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