The microscopic small font on the menu surprises
The combination of impaired vision due to age, trendy designed menus with microscopic fonts at hip restaurants, and too many beers in the system can really broaden your food intake experience.
The other day my friends and I decided to go to a restaurant, drink and have a bite and act like adults. We googled a trendy shack on the other side of the city and decided to give it a try. Once we got there, we were placed in a dark corner with a view of absolutely nothing but it did not bother us the least because now we could focus on the hanging out and drinking. I remember that one of the square buds pulled out a small booklet with songs to sing, but luckily one of us was brave enough to say what the rest of us thought.
“Really? Did you bring lyrics to sing? What are you a hundred years old? Shut the hell up. Here should not a note or song be sung!”
And with those words, the buddy had to put down the textbook and hide away the tuning fork. The rest of us exhaled and shouted at the waiter.
“Beer over here, for fucks sake! And let it flow!”
The waiter slipped away a bit ostentatiously and seemed concerned that we were using calling-the-cows-volume. As if we cared. A couple of beers later, he approached our table and asked if we wanted to see the menu.
“Goddamn! We were supposed to eat as well!”
“That’s what you do in a restaurant”, he said.
”Yes yes, you do that on machdonaldsh alshoo… give me the menu, already!”
And this was when he got his revenge. He pulled forward menus as big as mini post-it notes. With font size absurdly small and text color that had taken the concept of melting into the background to absolute perfection. We looked at the menu, then at each other, and finally at the waiter who slipped away and hid in his booth with a badly hidden contemptuous look.
“What the hell! I can’t see what it says here!”
”Neither do I!”
“Does anyone have glasses?”
”As if that would help. Here you need binoculars.”
“What do we do now?”
“Keeping up appearances, and say a little prayer and order.”
“How do we know that we like what we order?”
“Trust me. I got this!”
“Falling Down, but standing up?”
“Exactly, never admit a weakness, and with a high five, we snapped our fingers and asked the waiter to take our orders.
And since the words and speech are a gift I have snatched from the crowd of the more speech-stricken lollipops, I took the lead and played knowledgeable, interested, and asked a lot of follow-up questions that in itself did not give me a sensible answer because everything contained the words “connuseuer”, “Chatu”, “pomme da this” and põmme da that ”, “ conflour ”,“ eel ”and so on. I waved my drunken arms and pointed (completely convinced that I was showing evidence of rarely seen initiative) at random on a few invisible lines and said “that, that and some of this also and can we have more beer?”.
When the food came in a very weird condition an hour later, I said:
“What is this?”
“What you ordered?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Do I look amused?”
“This can not be consumed by a living being.”
“It certainly can, but maybe not in this combination you have ordered, he said and slipped away.”
I must admit that I have never before eaten poached eel with pon-free, peanut sauce, and bean salad…
Tomorrow I will see the optician.
