The other day, I met a friend for dinner at a favorite restaurant in the city.  It’s a popular place, so we went at 7 o’clock on a weekday- hardly prime time.  The restaurant was bustling, but not slammed, in nice contrast to a few Saturdays ago, when I tried to go there with Sara and was told (at 9:30 pm!) that there would be a TWO HOUR wait.  Yipes.

My friend and I sat down and were chatting as we looked at the menu, when all of a sudden I felt a hand rest on my back, between my shoulder blades.

I looked up and saw our waiter.  “Ladies! Great to see you, I’ll be back in a second to tell you about my favorites.”

You might think from this that my friend and I are regulars at this restaurant, or that we knew this waiter.  Nein.

We peruse the cocktail menu.  A minute later, there’s a hand resting on my shoulder again.

“Well, what have we decided for drinkies?”

Drinkies?

It continued like this throughout the meal, as he read us the specials “people either love or hate beets but I love them like crazy and the beet salad is just the PERFECT little salad!”) when he brought out our food (“now, this is a rich burger, you might want to cut it in half and save half for lunch tomorrow so you don’t overdo it!”) and when we ordered dessert (“two desserts?  My kind of ladies!”)  And each and every time he came by the table, he placed his hand on my back or my shoulder.  Every time.

Now look, I’ve waited tables.  A lot.  I know that as a server part of the job is to figure out a way to connect with your tables, make them feel well-served.  This can be a challenge- people’s preferences for restaurant service are esoteric.  Where one person wants to hear the waiter’s favorites, another person thinks that’s inexcusable- why should what I order have anything to do with what you like, peon?  Where one person likes jokey banter with the server, another wants the server to be pretty much invisible so the table is free to conduct conversations undisturbed.  It’s a balancing act, I get it.

But when they say that you should “touch your tables” regularly to make sure everything’s going well with the meal, I’m pretty sure they don’t mean that literally.  I walked out of there feeling like I’d been on a bad first date.

(Apparently science doesn’t agree with me: this study indicates that people tip better when the server touches them slightly.  I can’t be alone in this though, can I?  Would you all like your restaurant meal with a side of stranger back rub?)

A part of an occasional series of food lists.  (Previous installments here and here.)

Foods Jamie Oliver would be ashamed of me for eating, but which I JUST CANNOT GIVE UP ENTIRELY, okay?  Some things are TOO DELICIOUS:

• Circus Peanuts
• Pizzeria Pretzel combos
• Green jello with mini marshmallows
• Cheddar sauce (a la Arbys) on french fries
• Circus animal cookies.
• Those rye chips in Gardettos snack mix
• Cool whip  (I’M SO ASHAMED.  I’ll go turn in my foodie street cred card now.)

What totally disgusting, chemical-laden, embarrassing-to-admit foods do you secretly love?

* Ten points to anyone who remembers this classic quote from an even more classic movie.

Age 8: My family and two others rent a house on a Caribbean island for spring break.  The house has a hosekeeper, who mostly cleans, but one day she makes a pan of shortbread and tells us kids that we can eat it.  It is mildly sweet and crumbly and amazing, nothing like the chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal scotchies my mom makes.  For the rest of the day I keep making excuses to sneak back into the kitchen for another piece.

Age 11: At a sleepover at a friend’s house, her mom serves us stuffed peppers for dinner.  “They’re my favorite!” she gushes.  As I cut into mine, one side of the pepper splits open and watery tomato sauce and gray ground beef squirt out.  I take one bite and spit it into my napkin.  I tell my friend’s mom I don’t eat meat, and for a month afterwards I don’t, trying to make my lie true by sticking to it.  I don’t eat another stuffed pepper for nineteen years.

Age 16: My boyfriend’s mother is a fabulous cook.  She makes an Italian feast- Bolognese and lasagna and eggplant parmigiana.  At this point I don’t eat meat for real, so I take a heaping portion of eggplant.  It tastes like heaven with the fried and the sauce and the cheese, but an hour later my mouth and throat itch and my tongue feels heavy.  It takes me years of suffering through earnest eggplant-heavy vegetarian entrees for me to realize I have a nightshade sensitivity.

Age 17: The letter arrives in a small envelope, so I’m sure I’ve been rejected.  But when I open it, it says “congratulations on your admission!”  My dad, ecstatic that I’ve chosen his alma mater, breaks open a dusty bottle of champagne, pours a glass for all of us, even my 15 year old sister.  A picture from that night still sits on his desk, me holding a crystal champagne glass from my parents’ wedding, hair in a sloppy ponytail, wearing jeans and a college tshirt from a different college.

Age 18: After a scholastic bowl meet (shut up), my friends go to Panda Express to pick up dinner.   The restaurant’s about to close, so they give my friends whole trays of food they were going to throw out, charging $10 for enough to feed dozens.   My mom’s allergic to MSG so I’ve never had Chinese food, and I mow through half a pan of lo mein noodles, unable to get enough of the new flavor.

Age 20: Once a term, our house hosts “special dinner,” where the house chef cooks nicer food, with a theme.  There is also booze.  After a contentious vote, the house has decided on sushi, so the chef makes dozens of rolls, including many for the house’s few vegetarians, carrot and cucumber and avocado and sweet potato.  I eat a few bites, but the vinegar-y rice tastes odd to me, and I don’t like the warm sake, and I complain bitterly about what a waste of a special dinner it was.  A year later, when I try sushi again and fall in love with it, I kick myself for not gorging that night.

Age 25: Twice a week, after teaching all day, I go to a science classroom in a nearby middle school and suffer through teaching certification classes from 6-10 pm with 20 other new teachers.  We get a 30 minute break for dinner, too short to go anywhere far, but someone discovers Lee’s sandwiches in the adjacent Vietnamese mini mall.  The sandwich with tofu is entirely foreign and entirely delicious, salty and sweet and hot, and for the rest of the year every Monday and Wednesday for dinner I have a $2 sandwich and a strawberry smoothie made with sweetened condensed milk and boba.  I feel profound loss when I move away two years later and for months am unable to find decent banh mi or bubble tea in Chicago.

This weekend: For a friend’s birthday, we go to dim sum. Her husband has researched online all the crazy dishes he wants, and orders for the table.  Dishes start arriving quickly, one after another, and no longer vegetarian, I take some of everything.  Including the pig’s ear.  It was chewy.

I realize that I’m writing about television for the second time this week, but this simply could not be ignored:

Tonight on Iron Chef (the Japanese version) the challenger was “Japan’s only chef trained in Mexico,” who runs a Mexican restaurant in Tokyo.

“Well!” said the announcer, “in order to make this a true, mano-a-mano Latin challenge, we shall choose for him to face…Iron Chef Italian!”

Thus began several minutes of commentary talking about how similar Italian and Mexican foods are! How much alike! Because they’re both Latin!

And John and I are sitting on the couch, mouths agape, like “really? Is there perhaps some fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of foods were talking about here?”  It is true that both the Italian and Spanish languages derived from Latin, but…well, so is French. And Romanian.  It just doesn’t seem like “language of origin” is a terrifically precise mechanism for identifying similarity in foods.

Watching an entirely foreign culture address two cuisines that are very familiar to Americans was a hoot.  The trash talk from the Iron Chef Italian was HILARIOUS.  (“That’s tortellini, and tortellini is better than tortilla!”  “Italian food has complexity and nuance, unlike Mexican food!” “Our flags may look similar but Italian food is light years better than Mexican!”)

The commentary of the Japanese commentators/judges as they watched the chefs prepare was even better. “Is he making pasta?” “No, that’s a tortilla, it’s like the Mexican version of pasta, it’s just sort of…there.” “That’s a mole sauce, it’s used pretty much the same way as chicken broth is used in Western cooking.”  “What is THAT?”  “That’s a chili.”  “But it’s so BIG, how on earth could someone use THAT in cooking?”

This from a culture that considers highly poisonous blowfish a delicacy.

I’ve always eaten a lot of vegetables (recovering 10-year vegetarian over here), but recently I’ve been trying to eat more fruit.  I have a wicked sweet tooth, and I decided a few months ago that I should try, at least every once in a while, to satisfy it with a banana instead of a brownie.  This has been a qualified success, but has given rise to some very pressing questions about fruit.

• Bananas.  I’be been buying them in bunches of 5 and eating one sliced over my cereal every morning.  Several times now, as the week has progressed, instead of turning the normal mottled yellow and black as the fruit ripens, the skins have taken on a uniform gray color.  They look kind of sickly, and it seems like the fruit inside doesn’t seem to ripen as much.  What gives?  Banana blight?  Are the bananas still okay to eat?  (More specifically: am I going to die from the one I ate just now?)
• Apples.  For a while, I was bringing apples to work to replace my usual mid-morning snack of rice cakes with peanut butter.  But I noticed that often, when I ate an apple on a near-empty stomach, I would get a rush of intense and terrifically unpleasant nausea 5 to 10 minutes later.  (The first time it happened, I actually emailed a friend in a panic, thinking that such sudden onset nausea must mean I was pregnant.  True story.  (I’m not.  Pregnant.  Phew.)) Am I the only one who experiences this?  Do I have strange sort of temporary apple allergy, or is this a normal apple thing?
• Grapefruit.  So delicious, yet so labor intensive.  I’m considering buying a grapefruit knife.  Should I?

Now, let’s see if I can keep this up on the long winter slog through citrusville until the stone fruits come into season again.  Outlook not so good.

As I may have mentioned oh, a few dozen times, I recently started a new job.  New office is across the street from my absolute favorite coffee shop in the city.  Like, it’s less than 50 steps away.  This new proximity to such caffeinated bliss is becoming a problem.  See, I am powerless in the face of precisely pulled espresso and perfectly steamed milk.  Couple that with the fact that new office does not have a coffeemaker (wha? How is that possible, you ask?  Beats me!) and I’ve been going to Coffeeshop Heaven probably 3 times a week.

Now, anyone who has ever read a personal finance article will tell you that “those daily lattes really add up,” and “if you just stopped getting your daily Starbucks you’d save hundreds of dollars a year.”  I’m sure this is technically true: I’m just having a hard time deciding if I care.

Some days, when I’m buying my third cafe au lait of the week, I feel a tinge of guilt.  I should be saving this $2.68!  Don’t I want to retire someday?  But just as often, I think to myself: if I refrain from buying a new sweater this winter, I have just earned myself 20 coffees!  Like, doesn’t it seem supremely inefficient to save for retirement in two dollar and sixty-eight cent increments?  Wouldn’t it be better to enjoy your thrice-weekly coffee and save money by making smarter purchases on, or foregoing entirely, bigger-ticket items, like cars, or plane tickets, or elective plastic surgery?

I also rationalize by noting that I save money in many other ways.  I pack my lunch virtually every day.  We only own one car.  I buy the $5 bottles of wine for everyday drinking.  But what it comes down to is this: I derive a lot of pleasure from those coffees, and I think small daily comforts and pleasures are worth something.  I know I’m not the only one who really enjoys a morning espresso drink.  I’d be willing to bet the personal finance advice columnists who scold everyone about drinking coffee probably drink it themselves.  Most of us have neither the time nor the equipment to brew coffeeshop-quality lattes at home.  And while I am all for curbing mindless, unnecessary spending, I am only going to be working across the street from this coffeeshop for a year, and if I want to go there three times a week, I’m going to do it, goddammit.

Worth the calories:

• extra sharp cheddar cheese and triscuits
• english toffee
• fresh tortilla chips and guacamole
• an entire pan of rice krispie treats
• sauvignon blanc
• lemon bars
• mashed potatoes made with lots of cream and butter
• dark chocolate m&ms
• a hot dog at a baseball game
• warm chocolate chip cookies
• gingerbread lattes

Not worth the calories:

• cheesecake
• white sauces on pasta
• Kahlua/Baileys
• KitKats
• potato chips
• sweet and sour chicken
• big sweet muffins at the coffeeshop
• Italian beef sandwiches
• american cheese
• mochas

As with the others, I imagine these are highly personalized lists.  What are yours?

I woke up this morning, looked on the counter, and realized to my horror that in the course of the weekend I had eaten an ENTIRE PAN of rice krispie treats, save for one small corner I saved for John.  One whole pan. In two days.  Gulp.

Rice Krispie treats, it seems, are one of my “trigger foods”.  (Isn’t that the term? I try to stay away from diet books and diet lingo after a protracted period of overdieting in high school, but I think you know what I mean.)

Like go-to pantry items, I think each of us has individual taste when it comes to foods that you just can’t stop eating.  You know the type: food that turns you into a mindless overeating robot and your stomach into a bottomless pit.  I, for example, can leave ice cream alone, am not overtempted by tortilla chips and salsa, and have no problem saying “no” to a second brownie.  On the other hand, I am apparently incapable of stopping myself from eating the following unless I physically move them out of sight to some deep forgotten recess of our kitchen:

• Rice Krispie treats
• sharp cheddar cheese and triscuits
• cookie dough (homemade)
• green grapes
• pretzel thins and hummus
• cherry tomatoes (Helpful tip: do not eat an entire quart of these  by yourself for lunch.  Trust me.)
• Swedish fish
• popcorn (especially kettle corn. Good god, when the movie theater near us started serving kettle corn, that was the end of me and my foolish attempts to avoid the extortionate pricing of movie-theater snacks.)

Please tell me I’m not alone in my lack of willpower around certiain highly-desirable foods.  What are yours?