Life’s Too Short To Eat Bad Food
**You don’t make friends with salad, you don’t make friends with salad. - Bart (Nancy Cartwright) and Homer (Dan Castellaneta), The Simpsons**
This past Saturday night the mother decided that it would be just spiffy if we were all to have another one of our hideously awkward family meals; initially I tried to get out of it by psychically-wishing that someone I know would fall down the stairs and break a leg so I could use that as a valid excuse, but I gave that up because if someone did fall down the stairs and break their leg then yay! psychic powers, but ouch! broken leg and I didn’t want that on my conscious. So being the ever dutiful daughter, I sucked it up and went along with it, how bad could an evening at the Aussie gastro-pub be? But no! It wasn’t to be, family-meal favourite the Aussie gastro-pub [where the food is above average but the decor is t.a.c.k.y.] was eschewed for in favour of the kitschy Italian restaurant I go to with my friends when we want to make fun of the less culinary sophisticated. How very dare they?!
The kitschy Italian restaurant, of course, it isn’t supposed to be kitschy, but since the owners haven’t changed a single thing bar their prices since 1978 then, alas, it is overwhelmingly kitsch: think combed Artex walls and plastic yukka plants, think skinny-mustachioed waiters a’la Manuel and exuberant, indecipherable shoutings in Italian from the kitchen. Its regular clientele is split between ladies in tweed jackets who’ve been going since 1978 and people like me and my friends who want to revel in the whole kitschy atmosphere. And then there was my mother who found it in the Yellow Pages. Here’s a tip: never get your restaurant recommendations from the Yellow Pages.
The food is just as retro as everything else about the place and every dish on the menu comes with the aforementioned mustachioed waiter hovering over you with the little dish of Parmesan, which if you decline he takes offence at. Now, I hate Parmesan for a triad of reasons: (1) if the chef hasn’t got the dish to taste the way he wants before it leaves the kitchen then, for my money, he’s not much of a chef; (2) if hours upon hours of cooking shows fronted by Jamie Oliver have taught me anything it’s that Parmesan should be thin strips shaved delicately over the plate and not dry, powdery feet scrapings ladled atop a bowl of pasta; and (3) it tastes exactly like feet [and yes, I have tasted feet, TMI warning: I had an ex with a thing for toe-sucking].
Add to the decidedly below-average food and vinegary wine, the fact that the restaurant is situated on Aberdeen’s pedestrianised pub street and thus in the hundred metres or so that we had to walk from the car we met a shrieking group of slapper girls who knew me so hooted and hollered across the street in my direction and a shrieking group of ‘mos who knew me so hooted and hollered across the street in my direction, the evening was less than pleasant; needless to say, the less said about the conversation resulting from my “choice of friends” the better. By the end of the evening I was wishing I was the one I’d psychically being pushing down the stairs.
On Sunday I lay in bed and watched the Hollyoaks omnibus and eating cheese on toast, which was a vast improvement.
Tags: family meal, food, kitsch, Parmesan
