I was taken out to lunch yesterday at Timpone’s. I don’t know if this is just a local place or what.
It’s one of these restaurants where a dish isn’t finished until there’s something weird on it. “This is pasta in a white sauce with RACCOON.” Or “This is broiled fish and rice covered with our special MINTY PEAR sauce.”
Now, I’m a man of simple tastes. For me, Quiznos is gourmet food. Eating is no special thing to me. So I ordered the burger, which seemed to be the easiest thing to get in non-weird form, since I could ask them to leave off the “caramelized onions” it normally features. Whatever those are.
This is the kind of place that puts a slice of lemon in the water glasses. I got nothing against lemon, but you know they only do it because it kills them to send something to the table without something extra crammed in it. And the only reason it’s lemon is because they ran out of Guava or whatever the hell other weirdo california fruit is hip now.
Which reminds me - anyone remember when drinks didn’t have guava, mango, or kiwi in them? Nowadays you can’t buy any kind of fruit-flavored drinks without one of these in it. Remember when you could just get “orange”? When did orange become not good enough? For that matter, who decided that a drink needed to be a combination of two flavors, if not more, to be acceptable?
Take your weird-ass food back. Just bring me a burger and a Coke. Not a Chutney Coke or a Banana Coke or whatever else strange thing you’ve done to it to hip it up, just a plain old Coke, from a can if you’ve got it handy. And some fries made of potatoes, not yams or goats or whatever you’re
making fries out of.
Maybe this should have been in the pit. I was unaware of all the pent-up hostility I had here.
Eh. I, for one, celebrate the new variety. Sure, some chefs don’t know what to do with it, but there have always been no-talent cooks around. I am old enough to remember when fancy cookin’ meant rubber steak and lobster or duck with fake-o orange sauce. American food is better than ever.
You want a cheeseburger and a Coke. Shut your eyes, throw a brick and you’ll still hit a McDonald’s or a Burger King.
Lego, you sound very down to earth, and that’s great,
but for God’s sake, man, if you like onions, dont EVER
turn down caramelized onions! Trust me, they are not
made with caramel!
Look, the next time somebody says “I have a BIG TREAT for you today, Lego…I’m’a gonna take you out to TIMPONE’S for lunch!” say, “I appreciate the gesture, but how about if we go to the Grizzle Steakhouse or Lulu’s Burgers instead? I’m not fond of Timpone’s’ cuisine.”
If it’s a gift lunch, though, don’t look it in the mouth.
…scredle’s right, too. Just think of them as “fried onions,” and you’ll be calling for seconds.
I quite like Chutney Coke and Goat Fries, but then again, I’m another one of those weird Californians that likes lemon in her water and drinks guava-mango-kiwi juice.
Trust us on the caramelized onions, though. Caramelized onions–onions that are pan-fried until they’re all tender and browned–very good on burgers.
Mr. S and I love to cook and eat all kinds of ethnic and interesting foods. For my mom, on the other hand, if it’s not meat and potatoes, it might as well be a fried turd for the likelihood that she’ll eat it.
Several months ago we went to a party at the home of a Bangladeshi friend. There was a buffet spread out on every flat surface in the kitchen. The only item I could identify was the rice, but it all smelled heavenly. And it was as delicious as it smelled.
I know it’s hard, but just try some of that “weird” food sometime. You might be pleasantly surprised!
My wife successfully defender her PhD dissertation yesterday. Her professor treated her to lunch, to which I was also invited. My wife likes Timpone’s, so she chose it. I do not, but I’m not going to tell my wife what to do ever, much less on her day. So I went along. And I looked at the menu for something that didn’t have to have special cheese in it to make it sufficiently exotic. And I didn’t say anything, I just ordered a burger they happen to have without the carmelized onions because I don’t like onions much to begin with.
Now. Here’s an alternative story, for those that still want to ride me about bitching about a free lunch:
So the other day a kindly old lady, in a complete show of kindness offers to treat me to lunch. I decide to go Timpone’s, even though I don’t like the food there, just so I could complain about it, even though it was a treat. So I look at the menu, and there’s weird stuff on it, so I stand on the table and yell “HOW DO I GET A FRICKIN BURGER IN THIS PLACE?” When the waitress, an orphan trying to earn money to buy shoes, brought me a glass of water with a slice of lemon in it, I threw it in her face and yelled “FIE ON YOUR EXPERIMENTAL FOOD! BRING ME THE EXACT SAME THING I EAT EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE, FOR NOTHING ELSE WILL DO!”
Okay, with the two versions of my story out of the way, all I’m saying is, it won’t kill a restaurant to put something on the menu for people like me who don’t need to have unusual stuff in their meal to enjoy it. And in the interest of fairness, I think Burger King should introduce a mango-chutney burger with platypus cheese for all you folks.
Sheesh.
