“What are you getting, my darling perfect angel?”
The number of times I have heard that phrase in my lifetime is identical to the number of times I have had the pleasure of dining out.
Because I’m often the male — or one of them — at the table, I am required by matrimonial and genderific mandate to tell the female closest to me either in marriage or proximity what it is I am planning to order from the menu during this wonderfully stress-free, enjoyable evening out, either heels-over-head romantically alone or with family and/or friends.
I’ve never been able to figure out why, exactly, the female set has to hear what everyone else at the table wants to eat before they can choose that upon which they will sup, with a pinky finger extended from delicate stemware; slurping their favorite fuzzy fruity frothy frozen fizz.
If I order the chicken tartare is she going to order it also? No. Never happens. So why is my decision so important?
Does she need to know so she can order an accompanying meal and then do the food sharing thing? (I order the steak, she orders the fish; she winds up with surf and turf and I wind up with half a steak?) I think this is more likely.
For the better part of five decades, I have been fortunate to have more than my fair share of opportunities to dine out. (I know. I hide it well.) Not once during those times can I remember a man at the table asking me what I am ordering.
Guys don’t care. About anything, really. This included. Women, on the other magnificently manicured porcelain-perfect hand, can’t breathe until they know everything that’s going on around them.
When a guy grabs the menu, he goes straight to the cattle page and makes his decision based on ounces, not dollars. Done in 2 seconds.
I blame the gender thing. That whole “Men Are From Bars; Women Hate Everything We Do” mentality. Books have been written about it.
Not that I’ve read one of them. But I’m sure they’re accurate. And fascinating.
(Sidebar: While I’m thinking of it, I have yet to hear a valid reason why restaurant patrons are considered impolite or sloppy or gigantic rubes if, after being seated, they don’t immediately place their napkin on their lap. And by “restaurant patrons” I mean “me.” I recently stopped doing this — almost out of protest to the very act itself — when I realized there is no good reason to place my drop cloth that far away from my pie hole. Am I supposed to bend under the table to use it? (No.) Is it to keep me from wiping my chin on a corner of the tablecloth? (Fail.) Is it to keep food from staining my lap? Because I gotta tell ya, all the food I drop hits my shirt long before it has a chance to enter the same ZIP code as my lap. Dumb idea. And no good reason for it.) I’m over it.
As I get older and more skilled in the field of husbanding, I have amended my menu-reading practices. No longer am I eating for one. I have crossed into the meal-sharing stage of adult marriagehood. Bye-bye dark food (meat, red sauce, burnt toast, more meat); hello beige (pasta, poultry, cream sauce, fish, white pizza). Pinky finger extended; napkin dabbing the corners of the mouth; both feet on the floor. No belching. Sheesh.
There was a time — I call it the Golden Age of Gluttony — when I knew what I wanted before I even entered the restaurant. “I’ll have the prime rib and the prime rib, please.” Standard order. Didn’t even need a menu.
Today, however, because I have grown smart (and because I really screwed up big time while on vacation in the late ’90s), I have begun to pay more attention to the same menu pages as my adoring better half. I figure that something from one of these pages is going to be placed in front of me in a half hour or so, give or take, so I had better be prepared. Give the taste buds a chance to git while the gittin’s good.
It (and by “it” I mean “everything, including this”) is my fault.
While reading the menus in a wonderful little place in San Diego we happened upon many years ago, Karen and I agreed that we’d each order meals we both might enjoy. Then, halfway through, we’d swap plates.
Sounded like a smart idea. To her. But, because I have the ability to mess up a one-car funeral (can’t figure out which car to put first), I suffered an epic husband fail.
The grievous marriage penalty I incurred came when my meal arrived: It looked and smelled and tasted incredible. Hers, less so.
Mine was kind of a gumbo-type arrangement. I know it had sausage — one of the Top 5 man foods on the Man Food Hot 100.
I don’t remember exactly what Karen ordered (although I bet she does). I think it had a boot sticking out of it. She couldn’t wait to get to the halfway point of her meal so she could pawn her slop off to me and then polish off my much-more-impressive offering. But I had switched gears without telling her. I really liked mine and didn’t want to give it up.
So I ate it all. While she continued to ask if I was ready to switch yet.
Fail.
And before those among you take out your fingers and start shaking them in my direction, I think it shows a great deal of maturity (and matrimonial mandate) that I can slouch here before you today and admit my error. Guilty.
But I have atoned. Today I slouch before you as a wiser husband. The wind beneath my wings would attest to this. If she ever read anything I wrote. Thankfully, not so much.
This all happened in 1998. It took me the better part of a decade to gain back Karen’s trust. I spent 10 quality years handing her half of my food, even though she didn’t want it.
“Nooooo, It’s OKayyyyyy,” she’d sigh in that high-pitched, wavy poor-poor-pitiful-me wife voice they can muster at the drop of a fork. Followed by a: Hhhhhhhhh.
Needless to say, I have since become a seasoned restaurant meal sharer. To the point at which I will listen as Karen reads every word on the menu (evvv-ry word) and checks off the entrees, whittling her decision down to the final two. I make note of the last one she finally eliminates.
And that’s the one I order. Then I force-share it.
Hah. Not gonna fall for the old “you’re always thinking of yourself when you’re thinking of the food you want to buy and eat and you’re never thinking of me when I might want to eat my meal and then yours” argument.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, still shame on me. The husband’s creed.
This, I share with you. Because I’m a sharing kind of guy.
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