Last night, Tobyjoe and I met Sarah, her daughter, Sarah’s aunt, and her uncle at a small Italian restaurant in Park Slope. For the remainder of this post, I will not release the name of the restaurant because, well, my mother always told me “If you don’t have anything good to say about someone, don’t use their name when talking shit.”
Tobyjoe read a review of the place before we left but not because we’re snotty. I might be snotty about my electronic equipment and my deodorant but I’m not about restaurants. We were trying to figure out how to get there and the reviews merely slapped us in the nipples. They were impossible to miss.
One reviewer writes:
Blank is very approximate in matching the menu description to what they serve. A salad was listed as including smoked salmon, but arrived without it. When I asked the waitress, she told me they couldn’t afford the salmon, and had changed the dish (though not on the menu). Pizza margarita comes without the promised basil. There’s an ad hoc quality: You won’t get what you ordered, but it’s okay. The service is really weird and hostile. One example: They literally took bread from my baby, after we ordered a brick oven pizza, not “food” (the waiter’s words). I asked if there was a minimum, which there wasn’t; he’d give us the bread only if we’d paid for it—this, after my baby had eaten of it. We’re talking small piece of Italian bread, nothing fancy. It was ridiculous. We didn’t ask for a water refill, lest he charge us.
I love it when grown adults take bread from babies.
The food wasn’t so bad, once we actually got some. The peculiar part of the evening was when the owner of the restaurant came out to inform us AFTER we waited for a half an hour for our food that the sprinkler system in the kitchen came on and soaked the entire kitchen. There was no food to be had at the Inn. But we could order pizza! He had the ability to make pizza. And the pizza was good.
Sarah’s daughter smelled something fishy and did a little investigating of her own. She looked into the kitchen and discovered that nothing was wet, even the pizza boxes were drier than an alcoholic’s mouth at dawn. Me? I could simply NOT keep from laughing. I realize that laughing at some poor gents misfortune is rather rude, the whole ordeal was oddly comical. Figuring the joke was on me, I looked around for Ashton Kutcher. But then realized that I wasn’t at all famous.
When the check came, it seemed cheap. We were all very pleased. And then when we went to pay, the price of the check went up by about 15 dollars. (Which was a warning from another review written about the restaurant.) It was, by far, one of the weirdest dining experiences I have ever had. Although, I’m not sure it would have been had it not been for our having read the reviews.
But none of that really mattered, however, because I got to hang out with the lovely Sarah. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but Sarah is a really sweet person. She has always been unbelievably kind to me (and others) in the blog world. She doesn’t succumb to petty arguments or cheap insults. Instead, she’s quick to cheer someone up when they’re down and quick to make someone laugh when they’re grumpy. She’s always been quick to email a kind word. I’d take a quirky night out at a seemingly foodless restaurant any day to hang out with Sarah.
Mihow 
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