Fifteen bucks for all you can eat for sushi? Hell yeah, man!
I'd been to this restaurant a year before and it had become an instant icon for me. I'd brought the boys here the week prior and we loved it, but we'd made a total ruckus. The three husbands suck at restaurants. Patience is a highly recommended virtue for restaurantiers, and the three of us lacked it.
Whilst waiting for our food, we'd fallen into a bored, hungry stupor. Boredom and hunger don't go well together. The combination results in a need to do something - anything - to pass the time between the moment the boredom hits and the time you get your food.
By the time the first course arrived, we'd succeeded in covering the table in the myriad of sauces the table offered, spilled almost a third of our water, and stacked everything that was stackable on top of itself. The waitress was appalled, but she kept her words to herself. We dove into our food.
The restaurant had a rule to prevent idiots like us from coming and over-ordering: if you didn't eat all your food, you had to pay a fee of 50c per remaining piece. The faster we ate, the faster she kept bringing us the rest of our order. Once it became blatantly obvious that we couldn't eat our entire meal, three things happened:
First, we started stuffing handfuls of sushi into paper towels, bundling them up and shoving them into pockets, backpacks and whatever else we could find.
Second, we realized the tremendous expansion of our mess. Mere soy sauce, water and stacked shit now seemed feeble in addition to the conglomeration of rice, fish, wasabi and prawn tails that now oozed all over the table. Nice.
Thirdly, one of our friends had popped into the restaurant to say hey. Her sly, sexy and seductive grin was ill-placed in the presence of our ungodly mess, but she wasn't nearly as disgusted by our "creation" as the waitress was. Our type of people aren't easily grossed out. Garbed in a studded leather jacket with torn skinny jeans, her punk outfit spoke of rebellion but the genuity that sparkled in her eyes when she smiled did not. I couldn't figure out for the life of me why she spent so much time hanging out with the Traincore kids.
She sat down next to us and we essentially force-fed her sushi while avoiding the prying eyes of the waitress, in hopes that we wouldn't have to pay any additional fees. Our surreptitious efforts failed us.
"You can't do that!" The waitress's abursdly Asian accent floated across the restaurant. She cast us and our mess and our punk friend a look of intense scorn that I thought to be extremely unusual for a member of such a polite culture. I also remembered that the Japanese culture places a huge amount of importance in regards to manners around food. Whoops.
Once the waitress turned around, we pilfered the rest of our food, paid the bill with a pound of freshly spared change, and left feeling satisfied that the waitress now had something to do for the next half hour while she cleaned up our mess. See? We could be good Samaritans!
Anyway, that was last week. This was this week. The same waitress was working. She made to welcome us, then hesitated once she recognized. She shifted her glance side to side, and then mumbled with the accent of one who rarely lies: "We do not do all you can eat, today."
"Uh, yeah you do. The sign's out." we pointed to the sign on the sidewalk that had offered us a warmer welcome than the waitress. We weren't getting kicked out without a fight.
"Not today."
"Okay. Well, we'll just order off the menu then."
"No, we are closed."
"No, you're clearly not closed." Pet peeve number seventy-four: beating around the bush. If you want to kick us out, just kick us out. Don't waste your time dishonouring yourself by fabricating lies. Either way, we realized that the argument wasn't gratifying in any sense, so we bounced and went next door to a Thai restaurant. The service there was better - so fantastic, in fact, that we didn't even feel the need to make a big mess. Lunch was served, and Scrib was beginning to get over the initial shock of being caught with drugs.
Things were moving forward again.
:)
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