Goes Well With Seafood, Grilled Chicken And Black Cotton

We went to lunch on Sunday with my folks, after witnessing the awesome might and majesty of the Blue Angels showing the greater Seattle area how they dazzle the enemy into submission. We went to a seafood restaurant down on the water, not super fancy, but fancy enough. Not bragging, it comes into play here in a minute.

My dad ordered a bottle of wine to go with lunch. He was not going to drink that day as he had gotten five degrees of fucked up the night before on vodka, whisky and beer - even leaving me a slurring voicemail, where I'm not positive, but I think that he said "purple nose monkey" to me. Sound familiar faithful readers? Particularly those that I have drunk-called? Yeah, those are my genes.

Anyway, the cute, little waitress brings over the bottle of Chardonnay and proceeds to tell us that she has never opened a bottle of wine before.

Hold up.
1) How the hell do you get a waitress job and not know how to open a bottle of wine? Isn't this something that you should know for your job? And even if you were hiding that fact from your new employer, at least sneak over to the bartender before bringing it to the table and get a little advice.

2) Unless you're a teetotaler, how do you get to be in your twenties without opening a bottle of wine? I knew my way around a corkscrew before I could drive. Then again - review paragraph above.

3) It's not like performing open cranium surgery while contemplating the Theory of Relativity and riding a mechanical bull. It's a really simple piece of machinery used to pull a cork from a bottle.

But alas, she couldn't really even figure out how to cut the foil around the bottle. My dad took the bottle, showed her the little cutting tool on the opener, and took the foil off for her. Her first attempt at opening would have snapped the cork in two, so we pointed out that she would want to get the screw further down into the cork before pulling it out. After a couple of false starts, she got the cork out, put the bottle on the table and walked away.

Now, I'm not a restaurant snob. I don't eat at fancy places often, but I do know that when you open a bottle of wine, you're supposed to go through the pretentious rigmarole of letting the person who ordered it taste it - which, for those fucks out there who think they're impressing someone, is to see if the bottle has turned or has been corked; it is not for you consider whether you like the wine or not - and then pouring. You don't just leave the bottle sitting on the table.

But fine, I can pour my own wine, not that big a deal. But when the waitress returned, she knocked my newly filled glass with her arm and I was suddenly drenched in a cold (yet delightfully mellow) Chardonnay. She was understandably embarrassed and she apologized. I mopped up what little wine had actually hit the table with a couple of napkins and asked if she could bring some towels so I could try to dry off a little bit. She left and I literally wrung out my shirt. Thankfully, we were outside and I was sitting in the direct sunlight which allowed for my clothes to mostly dry out because I never got any towels. Nor did we get anything comped for the meal.

Okay, again I'm not uptight about my restaurant visits. I mean, if I don't get what I order I will probably ask them to take it back (sometimes I might go ahead and take what I get - life throwing me a little surprise, something I wouldn't have tried otherwise), but I'm really pretty lenient with mistakes. When Magnolia on Haight Street first opened, there was a waiter that was wonderfully adorable and sweet, but very forgetful when it came to actually putting in your orders. We would usually just laugh it off, but we were being fed a lot of free beer in the meantime.

So it did surprise me when we didn't even get the bottle of wine for free. Typically what should probably happen is the manager comes over (hopefully with those towels), apologizes and tells you the lunch was on him. As I wasn't paying for the lunch, I didn't really feel it was my place to say anything about it, but was honestly surprised that my folks didn't either. They are the epitome of picky, bitchy restaurant goers.

I walked out, slowly shaking my head and hoping I didn't get pulled over on the way home since I reeked of light floral notes with subtle flavors of oak.