Our waitress’s name was Debbie, and like her movie counterpart, she had come to the Big D to hit the big time. She had grown tired of pickup trucks, line dancing and honky tonks on Friday and Saturday nights. Dallas offered style and class for those who could afford it, and the fawning sycophants that lived off their table scraps could, at the very least, watch the show. My wife ordered a cosmopolitan, just to loosen up before dinner. This is a drink that should be mixed and served at the table. The martini glass has such a shallow base that it’s almost impossible to carry it across the dining room with spilling it. The waitress, who wore a white lab coat, did her best to place it on the table, but spilled a better part of it. She immediately began to grovel, fearing that we would stiff her on the tip.
Cafe Pacifico’s cuisine was inventive. It had some spark and originality. The chef borrowed from European style, giving the flavors a Texas spin. My wife and I split a ceviche appetizer and sweet potato fries, sliced almost as thin as coleslaw, which is good, but hard to eat. My eldest daughter, had a Caesar salad, and the youngest had the tomato bisque. The chef also included some international items with local flavors like spring rolls with barbecue sauce, Creole blackened scallops, Cajun-style grilled shrimp, and chicken-fried lobster. It all turned out well.
What we didn’t like was that the place was full of snooty assholes that turned their noses up at us as soon as we came in. The bitch at the next table gave a few furtive glances in our direction, rolled her eyes and said, “Isn’t anything sacred?” The condescending witch that made the comment was disgustingly overdressed. She had wrapped herself in jewelry that looked so expensive that we concluded that either she was a fake or the jewels were. There’s no reason to dress up the real thing.
Smiling like a cat as she sipped her cosmopolitan, my wife added that anyone who needs to drop that much cash for clothes must have been desperate to pass for Texan nobility and her backwater roots. And, it turns out that she was right. The patriarch of this group of bumpkins was wearing a bright-red cardigan and plaid pants. The drooling bastard was so hammered on vodka that he looked like he had a neurological disorder. He had no difficulty striking up a conversation with us, much to his daughter’s chagrin. He said that he was his daughter and his grand-daughter from Jackson, Mississippi. He worked in television and was the producer of the local hit show, entitled “County Law,” a program in which a camera man rides along with local law enforcement and arrests drunken drivers, dead-beat parents and domestic battery suspects. Although the program was paying the bills, so to speak, his daughter cringed when he spoke about it publically. For her, Dallas was being overrun by football fans, gamblers, prostitutes, tourists, alcoholics, sodomites, marijuana addicts, pornographers, litterbugs, and lesbians. County Law
This comment, which was aimed at those sitting at my table, inadvertently offended the entire wait staff, kitchen help and dishwashers.
To be continued…
Cross-posted at My Ongoing Struggle with Misanthropy: http://jimmygabacho.com/?p=652