Thursday, January 20, 2005

Sometime in the past decade, as real diets and fad diets rose in power, a delicious corollary came into being. Well, delicious for others at least. There’s been an influx of healthy restaurants that offer unparalleled culinary freedom, see, and I’m always struck with wide-eyed confusion when I frequent them. I’m referring to establishments like Flat Top Grill and Pita Pete’s, vendors who promise infinite permutations and limitless chances of constructing savory bowls of shit.

By no means have I consumed real servings of poop, merely entrees that taste like poop. There’s a difference. It all begins when you step into the eatery and bear witness to dozens, maybe even hundreds, of ingredients chalked onto a board. You’ve got carrots, shredded carrots, chicken, beefalo, donkey, cucumber sauce, sweet-and-sour sauce, sweet-and-not-sour sauce, purple onions, cigarette butts, goat cheese, feta, fetid onion cheese, chocolate, toenail clippings, and oh my sweet Aunt Jemima my taste buds just burst.

Your bowl will always look delicious, make no mistake, and this illusion simply encourages you to pile on incompatible ingredient after incompatible ingredient.

“I’ve made a masterpiece,” you think as you pass your dish to the cook. “Man, it’s going to taste awesome.”

Eight minutes later, the waiter hands you a bowl you can’t quite describe. It’s like they grilled a whole lotta amnesia into your magnum opus. Half a dozen thoughts flash through your mind.

“I want an abortion.”

“I think someone already had an abortion.”

“Is…is that Captain Crunch?”

“I don’t remember dropping a Barbie doll in my bowl.”

“Who added nacho cheese?”

“Oh, so that’s where I left my watch.”

It’s like you went home with someone hot and woke up next to a llama the following morning. You made it, though, so it’s your fault. Now eat it.

We’re bound for a backlash of some sort, mark my words. One day, one day soon, you’ll stroll down your dining thoroughfare and discover a single item on the menu: totalitarianism. You’ll probably be forced to eat hamburgers, three a day, with ketchup. If you’ve been good.