My wife and I moved cities a bit more than a year after we’d gotten married, and we were still in a honeymoon phase of enjoying eating everything we wanted and liked, without really caring about consequences (and yes, we’d both been gaining a fair bit over that stretch). Our new apartment was near our city’s small ‘chinatown,’ so on our first evening we went to start checking out the restaurants there. The first one that we tried, however, we loved so much that we never got to the rest of them….but we did get back to that one once or twice each week. Every time we split the large hot and sour soup (meant for four) followed by three or four other dishes. We would walk out feeling very full, sated, and happy.
It was a family run place, with the kids waiting the tables, so we saw the same few people every time we were there, and got to know them in a casual sort of way. They were not necessarily the most polished wait-staff, but they were all nice. Anyway, after a few months of this I arrived one night for a rare night of take-out instead of eat-in, and one of the staff saw me and quickly hurried over—it turned out that the last time we’d eaten there, Visa had rejected our bill (we were living near the edge of our very low limit credit cards at the time, which should have been enough reason not to eat out so much, but that is a different discussion). I apologized profusely, but she commented “Oh, we weren’t worried, I told my family ‘It is that couple who eat so much, they’ll be back soon.’”
Then she clapped her hand over her mouth as she realized what she’d said, but I just had to laugh, because that was indeed us! I paid both bills happily, almost with pride. (Mind you, after that, due both to financial limits and my wife discovering just how much her thighs were rubbing together as the weather got warmer and deciding that she’d been enjoying herself a little too much, we stopped going there so often....although we still go a few times a year and they still remember us)
It was a family run place, with the kids waiting the tables, so we saw the same few people every time we were there, and got to know them in a casual sort of way. They were not necessarily the most polished wait-staff, but they were all nice. Anyway, after a few months of this I arrived one night for a rare night of take-out instead of eat-in, and one of the staff saw me and quickly hurried over—it turned out that the last time we’d eaten there, Visa had rejected our bill (we were living near the edge of our very low limit credit cards at the time, which should have been enough reason not to eat out so much, but that is a different discussion). I apologized profusely, but she commented “Oh, we weren’t worried, I told my family ‘It is that couple who eat so much, they’ll be back soon.’”
Then she clapped her hand over her mouth as she realized what she’d said, but I just had to laugh, because that was indeed us! I paid both bills happily, almost with pride. (Mind you, after that, due both to financial limits and my wife discovering just how much her thighs were rubbing together as the weather got warmer and deciding that she’d been enjoying herself a little too much, we stopped going there so often....although we still go a few times a year and they still remember us)
10 years