Cookaholics Bulletin Board

At Swiss restaurants you always have to specify that you are there to eat. I am always tempted to tell them I have come to shave my corns.

Mary

PS I don't have corns.

I have to admit that the full wine glass thing in fancy places bugs me. DH is a wine guzzler and I tend to be slow. So in the end, he gets 90% of the bottle, and I get very little, unless I engage in competitive wine drinking strategies to compensate.

Carey,

Well, the solution to that is for you to order separate bottles.

or bring a hip flask...

I ate at a slightly upscale place last night (Spoon River, pretty good, run by a female chef who used to have a vegetarian restaurant, but this one also has local meat offerings), and the server asked if "how does everything taste so far?" Apparently using some variation of the word "taste" in the query has spread across the country like an STD with no visible symptoms.

The food was pretty darn good, but there was a hair in my pumpkin soup. I didn't mention it to the server because I decided to believe that it was sterilized by the hot soup.

Paul, I also hate the water question.

Darcie,

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about the hair thing myself. As you can imagine, when I was a baker I had to be super-paranoid about beard-combing and hairnets. Thankfully, only once did one of my hairs make it into a baked good.

I wish I could get restaurants to replace something with a hair (or a garden bug, for that matter), without making a big deal about it. It happens, I'm not freaked out as a diner, I just want a replacement dish, that's all. But if I bring it up at all, it has to be apologies and a chat with the manager, etc. Or worse, denials and dirty looks.

I also seldom bring up hairs in things because it's hard to be sure they don't belong to me or Kris.

Mary,

Any idea of the origins of that? Did a lot of swiss restaurants used to be bars as well? Or meeting houses?

Actually, people tend to meet up at local restaurants to have a drink or play cards rather than at private houses. Lots of meeting up for coffee as well.

Mary

I attended a memorial service last Friday for a friend. After, we all went to Red Lobster and sure enough, the phrase used was "How is everything tasting".

Is not the answer, with my tongue?

cc