The Lady of the House and I went road trippin’ to a town off
to the north of us in the vast open-ness that is Harding County.
One of
the things we wanted to do was eat at a small restaurant we liked in the “downtown”
section of this little burg.
The
place was out of business.
A bit
later at a nearby shop I asked the woman behind the counter about the
restaurant.
“Oh,
the Health Department shut them down a few months ago,” she said.
“Why?”
I asked.
The
woman looked from side to side.
“I’m
not the gossip police, really, I’m just curious,” I said.
“I
can’t say,” she said. I had failed to
win her confidence.
People
get weird about stuff in their food.
Some of the wariness is
deserved. A good friend got his tooth
cracked from a piece of broken coffee cup that had ended up in his salad.
Twenty-or-so
years ago a fast food joint in an Arizona border town was totally shut down and
boarded up after an employee used poop as a filling for a bean burrito sold to a Border Patrol officer.
And yet
some folks use the “something in my food” as a way to call attention to
themselves or hassle the people at food joints.
For
instance, there was that time I was at a submarine sandwich place in town. I was waiting behind some chick who suddenly
blurted out at the sandwich maker.
“Throw
that away,” she said pointing at the sandwich in progress. “I just saw a fly land on it.”
Oh I so
wanted to say something like, “Don’t go out on many picnics or cookouts, do
you.”
But I
didn’t.
But
then, on the other hand…
I was
at a fast food joint in Sierra Vista, Arizona a few years ago and I got a
burger and a small salad. I pulled the
top off the salad and started to pour dressing over the greens while I
stirred…and there was a big ol’ cold cockroach.
I know
it was cold because it was moving real slow.
I
laughed to myself. I took it back up to
the counter.
“Yes?”
said the young counterette.
I just
held out my salad and pointed to the roach.
“You
want your money back?” she asked.
I
did. There was just something about the
counterette’s nonchalant attitude that made me think that roaches in the
joint’s food was a regular occurrence.
I
reckon I shoulda grabbed the roach and tossed it out into the warm Sun but it
didn’t cross my mind then.
I went
from that memory back to the present, road trippin’ with The Lady of the House
in this small New Mexico town and it’s restaurant that had been shut down by
the health department.
“Was it
a cockroach in the soup?” I asked. “You know, I found a cockroach in my soup one
time.”
The
woman’s eyes opened wide and she did this twisty thing with her mouth.
“Yeah,
it was at this Chinese buffet restaurant back east. I had a bowl of Won-ton soup. I love Won-ton soup. So I went back for seconds. I stirred the stuff up to try and get more
won-tons from the bottom and up comes this big cockroach, legs folded, dead as
can be.”
“I
started laughing,” I continued. “I mean
I’d just had this whole bowl of soup with essence of cockroach in it so it
didn’t matter. I went and got the owner
and with a smile on my face I stirred up the cockroach for him to see.”
“OH!”
The guy jerked his head back at the sight.
“Your lunch on the house!”
“Well,”
I said. “I’ll take you up on that.”
“So the
guy grabs the soup tureen, walks fast back in the kitchen and starts yelling in
Mandarin, Cantonese or something at somebody in there.”
The
woman behind the counter just stared at me.
“So it
wasn’t a cockroach in the soup that got this restaurant closed?” I asked again.
“I-I
really can’t say,” she said.
I
suppose I’ll never know why that little restaurant got shut down.
Maybe
it wasn’t a cockroach, maybe it was a hair.
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