we love bad dinners, turns out
2005-01-27, 9:30 p.m.

I just got back from dinner with my friend Bella and we were reminiscing. A month or two ago, I had an epiphany regarding our occasional dinners together. We have THE most fun when we have a BAD dinner experience. Really, we have the best time. Every time one more thing goes wrong or comes out of the kitchen and tastes horrible, we look at each other and silently laugh. Or sometimes, not so silently. The funny thing is, sometimes, when we're trying to decide where to go, Bella will say "somewhere good." Well, at least four times we've completely failed to narrow down "good."

Which would you like to hear? The would-be upscale steakhouse? The Brazilian steakhouse? Or the Korean place? The Korean one? Okay then.

So, we read about this place and get excited to go on an adventure to a part of town we don't usually frequent. We barely find it, and walk in and ask for a table for two. We're seated in a room separate from where everyone else is sitting. Everyone else being Asian and we being two white chicks. It may have been because we're non-smokers, but, I don't know, it was weird; the room we were in was barely finished. And barely furnished.

So there we are, and the hostess/server really won't help us choose what to order and seems pretty irritated with us, though I promise we aren't being impolite or disrespectful or anything. We're no Paris and Nicole or nothin'. So then we proceed to order what turns out to be a hugely immense amount of food because we want to "try" several things. At some point, we bond over the fact that we each had a best friend who was Korean when we were growing up and we're pretty excited to be trying the groovy new Korean place, which came so highly recommended by our weekly local paper's food critic. Now whenever we speak of her we always say "she can steer us very very wrong, remember." Well, our table eventually gets covered with several different dishes, and... we don't care for a one of 'em. But, you see, there's so much left, and we don't want to be rude, so we ask for most of it to go. Well, we have several huge plastic containers of -- whatever we had -- Monkfish stew and things like that. We're walking out to Bella's car and she looks at me and she scrunches up her nose and says: can we leave it here in the parking lot? And I say: if it would be rude to leave it on the table it's more rude to leave it here after we made them box it up; they'll see it! And she agreed (thank you Bella) and I tell her we'll stop at the first trash can we see. So we drive to the gas station RIGHT NEXT DOOR and she pulls up to a pump, and right in front of a customer pumping gas, I start pulling out all this food, some still steaming hot, and throwing it in the trash, and he just looks at us like we're crazy. Which, of course, we are. So by this time we're openly laughing (you know, the real kind of laughing - with tears coming down and arms clutching cramping stomachs and sides) and as we're trying to find our way back to the interstate, we see at another gas station just a block away: cop cars everywhere and police cuffing and arresting people in the parking lot and we're just looking at each other wondering what next.

One of the funnest nights ever.