dinner on the 14th

i spent the long weekend touring central california's wine country with a friend (whom we shall refer to as person 'a'). as the evening approached on saturday, we had no dinner location in mind, but we decided that we wanted bread, cheese, and wine.

we did drive past an olive garden, which as an "italian" restaurant would offer all three items, but for whatever reason opted to forego the garden option. instead, we drove another 30 miles down the 101 to the next town because they had a "split pea soup" restaurant advertised on a large billboard. however, we ultimately ended up at AJ Spurs, an establishment i would describe as a "cowboy restaurant". our decision was largely due to the large crowd spilling out of the restaurant waiting to be seated. if a place has tons of people waiting for the food, it must be good, right?

after being told the wait would be 1.5 hours, we contemplated our other options: drive back up to olive garden? go to the hitching post restaurant next door (from the movie: sideways)? carls jr? again, the large crowd convinced us that this had to be the best place in town and we settled down to wait. our entertainment consisted of a moderately decent cover band with a country twang and a game of reversi (which, being a gentleman, i lost). after overhearing a family complain that they had been waiting for over an hour even with a reservation, person 'a' began to lose hope of ever being seated. i felt that we would be seated before 9pm (1.5 hours) while person 'a' thought it would certainly be later. we made a bet that the person who was wrong would have to pay for dinner.

at around 8:15pm, i got tired of waiting and floated the idea of going to the mexican joint we passed on the way over or the hitching post or carls jr. i told person 'a' to go ask the hostess how much longer our wait would be. after a lot of fumbling with the computer and yellow sticky notes by the hostess, it became clear that she never put our name down at all. princess 'a' then showed her sassy side by complaining that we had put in her name over an hour ago. we were then promptly seated (much earlier than the 9pm deadline).

our four course cowboy dinner started off with some sort of bean/vegetable soup (served in a cool looking cast iron pot!) accompanied by a black bean something-or-other and salsa. the next course was an unremarkable salad with our dressing of choice. then came our entrees, which required an inordinate amount of time to prepare. on receiving our dishes, we found out that the reason they took so long was to allow our food to have time to cool off. we decided a microwave would do a better job of heating up the food, packed everything up, paid the bill, and asked for our final course (a root beer float) to go.

serves us right for not going to a place with bread, cheese or wine.