I like eating at the bar. You get faster service, you can read a book if you want to and if you get bored, you can have a talk to the bartender. You can also eavesdrop on people eating at nearby tables.
The table directly behind me was worth listening to. I had seen this group as they came into the restaurant. They had parked their SUV outside and came through the door dressed from head to toe in LL Bean clothes and making "Ooh-isn't-this-a-cute-little-place" squeals. The men had compared features on their Palm Pilots and the women had exchanged war stories about trying to find a decent manicurist. They were openly scornful that the restaurant only had one type of mineral water.
Their waitress is my new hero. I don't know if anyone else on Earth could have gotten through their ordering process without slapping someone. Between the four of them, the people at the table ordered everything on the menu at least once, changing their minds continuously. One woman in particular had trouble in choosing between pasta and salmon.
"I like salmon," she sighed, "but you can never be sure that it's good salmon." She turned to the waitress, who had obviously long since lost the will to live. "Do you know," the woman asked, "if this is farm-raised salmon or is it from Canada?" (I had never realized that the two qualities were mutually exclusive.)
The waitress did not know.
"On the other hand," the woman said, "the pasta sounds really good."
The waitress brightened. It looked as if she might actually be able to get an order from this woman.
"Althoughhhhh...," she went on, plunging her waitress back into despair, "you never know - they might overcook it and then it would be mushy. It isn't mushy, is it?"
The waitress assured her that it was not mushy. In fact, she promised, she would make certain the chef paid special attention to make sure it was perfectly cooked. At this point, I suspect she would have promised her paycheck, her virtue or her first-born child to get an order from this woman.
"Well..., okay," the woman said after a moment's thought, making it very clear that she was being a good sport about things and was taking a risk.
The waitress rushed through the rest of the orders and escaped as quickly as possible. She went into the kitchen to give the chef his special instructions. The bar in this particular restaurant is located next to the door to the kitchen, so I was able to hear the muffled profanity that greeted the pasta order. It made me smile, because I had decided early on to hate these people and I was glad to have company in that opinion.
A moment later however, there was a disturbance at the table behind me. It seemed that after some sober consideration, the Pasta Lady had decided that she didn't want to risk the fettuccini after all. She whispered some urgent instructions to her husband who got up and walked into the kitchen to tell the chef of the change in plans.
Never, never do this.
Yuppie-boy came hurrying out of the kitchen a few seconds later, obviously lucky to have escaped with his manhood intact. After meeting the chef under those conditions, he thought it might be safer to give the change in his wife's order to the bartender and have him place it. The bartender however, was nobody's fool and knew better than to do that. He waited a moment until the waitress came up to place a drink order and told her to handle it.
"The lady over there wants to change to the salmon," he told her. This did not seem to phase her - she had obviously expected something of the sort. With remarkable aplomb, she went back into the kitchen and sweet-talked the chef. (I fervently hoped that the two of them were planning to spit in the woman's food.)
I turned to the bartender. "You know," I said, "that would be a pretty good superpower."
"What would?" he asked.
"Being able to change to a salmon" I said.
He laughed, then thought for a moment.
"Yes," he said finally, "but there'd be a big drawback."
"Oh, what's that?" I asked.
"You'd only be able to swim upstream to fight evil once, then you'd die," he explained.
