Dining and Dashing

Lena's most memorable dining experience didn't actually have anything to do with the food. It was the fact that she and Wendell had fled the restaurant without paying the bill. Before he had left for the Teachers Without Borders program, Wendell had a thing about trying new restaurants. Even though he had lived in this same town his entire life, he was always on the lookout for a new place to eat. He craved diversity and variety, and that search had taken them to both some pretty excellent out-of-the-way places they would have never found otherwise, and some pretty abysmal dining spots that probably should remain off the beaten path and left for dead along the roadside.

This particular restaurant was a disaster. The wait staff was rude, the menus were incomprehensible, and the food was quite possibly left over from two or three days prior. Either that, or the chef really wasn't into the whole "fresh ingredient" aspect of cooking. It was the kind of place that made you want to swear that you'd never try a new and untested place again. But Wendell would never make that promise.

The final straw was really when the entrees arrived. The appetizers had been wrong (they ordered bruschetta and got ceviche), and their drinks had been lukewarm, but the real clincher was when their dishes arrived and they discovered that instead of chicken piccata and eggplant parmesan, they received veal piccata and ossobuco. With Lena having strong feelings about eating baby animals, and Wendell being a strict vegetarian, they didn't appreciate the fact that the chef apparently decided that they would both eat veal that evening. Sending the dishes back to the kitchen evoked the wrath of the chef, who came out and screamed at their in Italian, a language neither Wendell nor Lena spoke, both had a pretty good idea what was being said.

After the irate chef had returned to the sanctuary of his kitchen, Wendell and Lena both agreed that it was time to go. When the restaurant's sole waiter was preoccupied with the only other table on the other side of the restaurant, they made their hasty escape, grabbing their coats and first walking, then sprinting for the door as the waiter turned around.

Bursting out the front entrance, they hurried for the car parked down the street, speeding up their pace when the waiter and a crimson-faced chef emerged from the restaurant moments later and began their pursuit.

Wendell and Lena ended up having to pass by their car; they wouldn't have been able to back out of their parallel parked spot on the street before they were overtaken by the chef and his sidekick. Instead, they ran down the block and around the corner, ducking into a side alley and taking cover behind a dumpster as their two pursuers ran by, stopped, peered into the alley, and took off in the same direction they thought their two dine and dashers had gone.

Lena couldn't hold back a giggle as they two of them huddled there, in the dark, damp alleyway, tucked behind a stinking dumpster as a crazy Italian chef and his second in command.

After waiting an appropriate amount of time, they slowly made their way back to the vehicle and, making sure the coast was clear, got into the car and drove home.

It was the only time they had ever dined and dashed. And although they knew, in general, that the practice was morally reprehensible, they felt slightly vindicated that they did so at such an awful restaurant, and often recounted their criminal enterprise for one another when they were feeling down. It was a popular topic of conversation during their video chat sessions while Wendell was teaching in Eritrea, whenever either of them were feeling particularly lonely or in need of a good laugh.

Wendell was the lucky one, though. He was in an entirely different country now. He didn't have to worry about driving by that place on his way to work and being discovered. Or worse, worry about finding a new favorite restaurant in the same shopping center as that awful restaurant. Every time Lena went to her new favorite restaurant, she had to look over her shoulder, wondering if the Italian chef next door would recognize her and come running out of his restaurant like he did that night.

She always thought it was funny – and satisfyingly unique – that her most memorable dining experience hadn't really been about the food at all.



(754 words)