Opinionated About Dining

At Home with Ideas in Food

I always found New Years to be a funny occasion to celebrate. Unlike other holidays, it isn't associated with a singular person like George Washington or Martin Luther King's birthday where it makes sense to close our schools and offices in order to recognize their profound contribution to society. Nor does it celebrate the result of a historical or social event like Independence or Labor Day. It simply celebrates the turning of a page of a calender that was artificially constructed by a bunch of Romans a few thousand years ago. And updated, arbitrarily, we might add, over the centuries. In fact to show you how lacking in reason the whole thing is, it doesn't even take place on what would be the logical date for the beginning of the new year which would be the first day after the Winter solstice.

Making matters worse, is that it costs more to celebrate this non-holiday/holiday than celebrations on other dates which can stake a better claim to adding value to a night out. For some reason that escapes me it costs more to go out to dinner or a concert on New Years Eve than it costs on other more important nights, like my birthday. For example, if I wanted to hire the private dining room at Per Se for New Years Eve, it would cost more than it would on my birthday, a clear example of how society has gotten their priorities all mixed up.

                                                                                                          

Tasting Menus That Divide Us

April 20, 2005

In response to my post on a number of different Internet discussion forums requesting that readers send in their stories of unusual dining experiences, by far this week's best story comes from Mikhail Lipyanskiy of Rego Park, Queens, who shared the following:

"Steven - me, my wife, and another couple had dinner at Aquavit half a year ago or so. We wanted the 7-course menu and the other couple wanted the 5-course. They told us we couldn't sit together, and they sat us at different tables. The point of the dinner was to have dinner together - I do not understand why this was done. We were told that the chef feels that it is improper to have different meal schedules or something of the sort. It ruined a perfect evening and truly took a good (and expensive) experience and shattered it. No matter how good the food was, all we remember is having to move into separate - not even consecutive - tables and talk over a wooden divider that was between us and them ... ridiculous."

I have to say that everyone I've told the story to has laughed out loud, including yours truly. In fact, I still laugh when reading it. Maybe restaurant employees should take college courses in abstract theory? Then they can realize that you can treat four people at the same table as if they were at two tables for two, and the scheduling issues for the kitchen are exactly the same.

The one thing that bothers me about it is that poor Mikhail accepted this solution (though I know in this instance it was by choice because he and his wife didn't want to make a scene in this social situation). Before I accepted it, I would have contacted the Swedish government and asked them to denounce Marcus Samuelsson. But seriously, when these things happen, either people should leave and go to a different restaurant, if possible, or hold their ground and insist that the restaurant bring them what they want. Eventually, restaurants who impose these arbitrary and silly rules on diners will hopefully realize that they are there to provide service, not to make people unhappy, especially when it takes absolutely no effort on their part to make them happy. As I did with last week's article on L'Impero and Tabla, I will send this piece off to Aquavit and I hope they take the time to respond.

If anybody out there has their own funny, infuriating, or unusual story about dining out, please feel free to share it. Just click on the email contact link in the right hand column and tell us about it.