April 2004

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Service: *

Food: *1/2

Ambience: * *

Babe Count: * *

Ouch!

Because of last night’s chat with Kate, the woman who’ll be managing the Spur when the new owners take over, I’ve persuaded Steve, my editor at Memar, the Ethiopian educational tv project, to come have lunch with me here.

Our waitress duly took our drinks order, and then disappeared for twenty minutes. So we flagged someone down and asked if we could order.

“Well, I’m the manager,” says J.J. “Of COURSE you can order through me!”

Steve and I are both eating the same meal today. “Special request,” I say to J.J. “Two things. Both burgers must be ULTRA well done. NO pink bits. NO blood. So well done that your chef is embarrassed to put them on the rolls. Is that cool?”

“No problem,” says J.J.

I’ve learned in my life never to trust anyone saying, ‘No problem.’ The alarm bells should be ringing. But hey. He’s the manager. What could he possibly get wrong?

“Number two,” I say, “please can you ask them to toast the insides of the rolls?”

He repeats the order back to us. “Two pepper burgers, both ultra well done, no blood, rolls toasted on the inside. No problem.”

He disappears. Five minutes later the drinks arrive. I’ve foolishly ordered the fruit cocktail. Rule number one, Roy. DON’T ORDER FRUIT JUICE IN A SPUR! It’s got a preservative in it that I’m allergic to. Wonderful. So I get a coughing fit four sips down and have to abandon the stuff.

Twenty minutes later, the waitress brings our food. Steve and I are by this time sawing at our fake-leather Spur placemats we’re so hungry. We’re even contemplating eating Morrie and Edna and Beulah and Clyde at the table next door. They’re VERY loud geriatrics. Octogenarians, by the look of things. Morrie has a stroller. We know their names because they have to look at the person they’re speaking to and bellow that name first to get their attention.

“Hold on,” I say to the waitress, who has basically dumped the food on our placemats and is starting to flee. “I just want to check this.” It’s basically luck of the draw that I happen to cut into the well-done burger of the two. I slice open my pattie, and it’s perfectly well done. “But hang on,” I say, pointing my knife at the roll. “They were supposed to toast the insides of the roll. They haven’t done that.”

Steve’s examining my pattie, and he’s satisfied that if they’re gotten it right with mine, his will be fine too. BIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGG mistake, it turns out.

The waitress offers to toast the rolls. “Nah,” I say. “I’m really hungry, and now we’re late for work.”

We eat.

Steve’s eating with long teeth. At some point, I catch sight of his pattie. Bloody hell. I’m almost completely through with mine, but he’s only about a third of the way through. Oh man. This is disgusting.

Even to a rare-meat-eater, Steve’s pattie would have been too rare. Escaping past the pepper sauce is a tiny trickle of blood, and a little bit of icy water.

“Steve,” I say. “Don’t look now.”

He looks. Folds his knife and fork together. Calls a waiter.

“Please find my waitress.”

She arrives ten minutes later. And I’m NOT exaggerating about these times!

“I’m sending this burger back,” he says. “It’s completely raw. And I asked for it to be well done. Take it off the bill. I’m not paying for it.”

“No,” says the waitress, “don’t worry, I’ll ask them to put it on the grill.”

“No,” says Steve. “I’m not eating another bite. I don’t WANT the burger. I want you to take it off the bill. I refuse to pay for this.”

“Okay,” says the waitress, and she takes our plates away.

“Please bring the bill,” I say.

It’s now five minutes to two o’clock. We’ve been here for around an hour and a bit, and work is beckoning. Steve and I have to turn out 14 half-hour chemistry episodes every week, and the pressure is enormous. Long lunches are definitely not the norm.

The bill arrives at ten-past two. The waitress flees before we open it. I open it. Full charge. Two burgers and two drinks.

I flag a waiter. “Please call the manager,” I say. “We need him here right now please.”

Our waitress arrives from nowhere and whisks the bill away from us. Goes to the cash register, where J.J., the so-called manager, whips out a calculator. We see him do a calculation. He smiles in our direction, and the bill comes back. It’s now twenty-past two.

He’s given Steve a discount off the price of his hamburger. Instead of R28, Steve only has to pay R14.29. J.J. must have figured that Steve ate slightly more than half of the burger.

“Steve,” I say. “This is outrageous. I’m refusing to pay ANYTHING on this bill. They’ve now just crossed the line.”

We get up and go to the cash register. But now J.J.’s not there anymore. “Call the manager,” I say to someone there. He goes to the back. J.J. arrives exactly ten minutes later, just as Steve and I are leaving.

“J.J.,” I say. “Are you actually the manager here?”

“One of them,” he says.

“Well, J.J., you’ve now kept us waiting on this query for more than twenty minutes, and you’ve charged Steve half-price for a raw burger. I placed the order with you personally. Do you recall?”

“What’s the problem?” he says, smirking. “You ate half the burger, so you pay for half the burger.”

“No, not at all,” I say. “You messed us around with the most appalling service I’ve encountered in a restaurant, and we’re not paying ANYTHING of this bill.”

“What? You’re paying nothing? After I’ve given you a half off the price of one burger out of the goodness of my HEART? I’ll tell you what… you pay nothing, and don’t bother coming back here ever again, okay???” An aggressive rugby-player stance.

“Who’s the owner?” I say, notebook out, pen open, the black blood flowing onto the page.

“Ashley,” he says.

“Phone number,” I say.

“083 283 5418,” he says.

Just then Morrie and Edna and Beulah and Clyde arrive, the stroller clanging against the floor. “EDNA!” says Morrie. “THERE’S J.J.!!! EDNA!!!”

“OKAY MORRIE, OKAY ALREADY!!!!! NO NEED TO SHOUT!!!! HEY, J.J.!!!! COME HERE YOUNG MAN!!!!!”

J.J. puts his hand on Edna’s shoulder. She presses a fifty buck note into his other hand.

“FOR OUTSTANDING SERVICE!!!” she says.

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Monday, April 26, 2004

Service: * * *1/2

Food: * * *1/2

Ambience: * * *

Babe Count: * * * *

I’ve been watching this blonde two tables away for the last twenty minutes or so. She’s having an earnest conversation with an older woman. She fumbles around in her handbag, and pulls out a pen. Scouts around the table, and starts writing stuff down on something.

I’m not certain what she’s writing on, but it seems as though it’s a paper napkin.

Now I’m here cos I’ve taken half a day off work cos of yesterday’s food poisoning still being in my system, and I’ve got four Ethiopian educational scripts to get through by tomorrow morning, regardless of what poisons line my stomach. So I’ve got my notebooks and a pad of writing paper. Tons to spare.

Now the blonde has walked past my table earlier, so I’ve scoped out her figure. And she’s a good looking babe. Nice curves. Very interesting face. Very smiley. With extremely long hair. Below the bottom of her buttocks.

So I reckon it’ll be nice and gentlemanly to scoot over to her table and offer her some paper.

Which I do. I simply tear off a couple of sheets, walk over, hand her the pages, and say, “You look like you could use a few of these.” I smile. She smiles. Says thanks very enthusiastically. And I go back to checking my scripts. The good deed has been done. And I didn’t even slip her my Coffee-Shop Schmuck business card.

And she wasn’t writing on a napkin. It was the back of an old slip. Crammed to the brim with tiny tiny handwriting.

My potato gratinee bake arrives, and I start plowing through it. I’m really not very hungry, and the food poisoning really feels like it’s ready for a resurgence any minute now. But I do need sustenance, and there’s nothing at all in my house except for some soup I cooked two winters ago and froze in Tupperware. I haven’t dared look inside the Tupperware. Contrary to popular belief, frozen food DOES go off. It just takes longer to do so. In fact, two winters should just about do the trick.

So while I eat what would ordinarily be a delicious gratinee, I leave the scripts for later and observe the snivelling humanity sitting at the next table.

It’s one of those families people flinch to see.

The man. Beak nose. Hair in a crest over one eyebrow. When he was young, he must have been a neat stiff-arm dancer. Unbearable vomit coloured jacket, the colour made up of a sort of blue-ish wool, cross-woven with a light-gray-brown wool. Ugh!!! People spend thousands of rands on this stuff.

The woman. No chin. None. Whatsoever. Just a bottom lip joined by a long sloping piece of pink skin tucked into a black collar with tiny white polka dots. Very wide collar. Visible above a pinky-red cashmere cardigan. A sprinkle of gold drizzled around her necklessness.

Two daughters. The young one around six. Wearing a pink pajama top with flowers embroidered on it. Still young and innocent.

The other around eight or nine. As soon as I see her, I start mouthing a word silently in her direction. “Escape!” I say. “Escape!!!” But it’s too late. She’s already trapped. This little madam has a blue and white striped polo-neck top in varying shades of blue, with glitter wool. She’s wearing knee-high boots over skin-tight black slacks. Her nails have been shaped, and they’ve got clear pearl varnish on. And she’s wearing dark pink lipstick. Not slap dash. Expertly applied.

She stares at me. “Escape!” I say again, exaggerating my mouth shape. She frowns, looks past me, turns away and doesn’t look back. Will never look back.

I finish half my meal, and resume script checking. I’m almost through the fourth one when the smiley blonde with the extreme hair comes to my table. It would be reallllllly nice right now to have her hair spread out over my pillow. Or cascading down past her breasts, to stroke my cheek.

She says, “I just want to say thank you so much for your act of kindness earlier. You took the trouble to notice my need. Not many people would do a thing like that. Thank you so very much.”

She gives me a dazzling smile. And I WANT to give her my card. But that’ll dash the purity of the moment. So I just smile back and say, “Thank you!”

She smiles again, turns, and her hair catches me in its wake, and I watch her walk away from me.

Later, the manageress, Kate, comes and chats to me. I’ve paid with my Master Card, and Mugg & Bean has a special on at the moment where you get a free coffee voucher every time you use the card. So she’s come to give me mine.

I wheedle some info out of her. I find that she’s on her last few days at Mugg & Bean, and that the Spur in Balfour Park has just been bought by new owners, and that she’s about to move over there and manage that place.

“Sheesh,” I tell her. “That’s going to be a challenge. I work across the road from it, and there are only three places in Balfour Park to eat at… the Mugg & Bean, which is TERRRRRRIBLE!, the chicken place next door, and the Spur, which is worse than the Mugg & Bean.

“I know,” she says. “But the new owners are going to make a huge difference.”

“Maybe I’ll try it out tomorrow,” I say.

“Let me know. I’m sure things can improve there,” she says.

We yack a bit more, and it’s time for me to go home and sleep off the rest of this food poisoning. I check my jersey for long blonde hairs, but nothing’s caught. I’ll just have to imagine.

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