Restaurant Tours

 
In honor of Restaurant Week in Chicago, we consider the lure of warm bread, half-price wine, and other ways I’m trying to turn my restaurant meals into a deductible “research expense” for this blog. What could possibly go wrong?

1. Whenever I’m in a restaurant and they bring warm rolls to the table, my opinion of the place improves. Warm bread says, “Welcome home,” while cold bread says, “We couldn’t be bothered.”
   
   
2. Speaking of which, I hate it when a restaurant proclaims proudly that a dish is “deconstructed.” If I wanted to put it together myself, I’d have gone to Ikea.
   
   
3. Shouldn’t steak tartare be a lot cheaper than a hamburger, since they don’t have to cook it or slice a tomato? I suspect a pricing cartel is at work.
   
   
4. Every so often, I’ll ask for a different table in a restaurant and they’ll tell me it’s reserved for someone else. When I call for a reservation, though, they’ll tell me they don’t hold specific tables. This is one of the many ways restaurant operators tell you they think you’re an idiot.
   
   
5. We went to New York a while ago and a friend recommended a specific restaurant as the most romantic place she had ever been to in her life. So we went and we had dinner and it was okay, but…I think the difference was whomever she was, um, dating at the time.
   
   
6. On half-price Mondays, you end up with a bottle of wine that costs about as much as you should have been paying the other six days of the week.
   
   
7. Sure sign of a restaurant that’s not going to last very long: The staff wants you to know how lucky you are to be there.
   
   
8. The best way to immunize your kids against every possible disease is to let them draw on their place mats with the restaurant’s crayons.

 
And on that appetizing note, we wish you a great week of fine dining, with warm bread, great wine and a staff that knows how to mix the *&^%($%# salad. 
 
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