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great food, terrible service
Thursday, May 25 2017
This morning before work, I launched into another long-procrastinated chore: the starting of the garden. I did some more tilling of the ground so as to minimize competition from the many weeds that already had a headstart. Some of those weeds were so tall that I pulled what I could of them out of the ground, dug a pit, and mass-buried them like some disfavored minority group following a good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing. As I always, I did nearly all of my digging with the same garden fork that I use for shoveling humanure. I prefer it to a shovel, which tends to kill a great many earthworms as it cuts through the ground. Gretchen had bought a bunch of different seedlings from the seed library guys. In addition to tomatoes, brassicas, basil, and peppers, Gretchen had also bought lettuce starts, which is the worst kind of gardening cop-out there is. (Lettuce is something to be grown in big dense beds, with the weeding of tender leaves directly into sandwiches one of the joys of late spring.) I planted everything in straight rows, since Gretchen has been complaining for years about my scattershot, non-geometric planting style. I worked quickly due to a steadily-intensifying rainfall.
It was just cool enough to justify a fire, but instead of burning wood, I scooped the tarry clotted fuel oil salvaged from the Brewster Street house into various paper containers and put that in the stove to burn. A mass of fuel oil (thickened, in this case, with cat litter) burned as slowly as a chunk of wood and gave the outdoors a grim mid-20th-century industrial fragrance. The oil certainly burned with less than ideal efficiency, and probably produced a fair amount of particulate pollution. But in the grand scheme of things, this may not have been any worse for the beleaguered planet than burying it in a landfill.
This evening, Gretchen and I drove over to Susan & David's place to meet them for a dinner date. First, though, they showed off their basement bedroom suite, which, after two years of procrastination and slow progress, they'd finally moved into. Both David and Susan are indecisive and highly-particular, and this makes progress on such projects difficult. This leads to a lot of wasted motion as they do and undo various things in process I refer to as "feature churn." A prime example of this was the woodshed that David built and then decided was too tall. Today I was dismayed to see it was totally gone except for the platform it had been built upon. (By contrast, Gretchen and I tend to make snap decisions and just go with it.)
The consensus restaurant for tonight ended up being Mountain Gate Indian restaurant, which Gretchen and I only recently decided was acceptable following more than a decade of avoidance. Susan, David, and I had wanted to go to Catskill Mt. Pizza (which Gretchen dislikes; she says the pizza doesn't taste like anything), and Gretchen had wanted to go to the Little Bear (the Chinese restaurant that Susan and David have decided they do not like). For whatever reason, the waiter we got at Mountain Gate was a youngish man with poor English skills, and he kept being perplexed by our order. We quickly learned to keep things as simple as possible so as minimize the risk of getting the wrong things or the food taking too long to arrive. In any case, the food took forever. We had to wait at least a half hour for the fucking papadum appetizer. I soon discovered that the raw onion & red-sauce condiment (supplied as part of a four-condiment unit with the papadum) was a cut above all previous instances of that condiment I'd had in my life. It was good not only on papadum, but when the chapati and naan arrive, little burritos made containing just that were absolutely amazing. Another stand-out dish was the mulligatawny soup, which was about as good as such soup gets. We were all amazed.
We'd pretty standard curries, including aloo gobi and chana masala. But for whatever reason, the chana masala (about which there had been no warnings) had been spiced as though we were in India and it had been prepared for natives. It was too hot for anyone but me to eat. After a long delay, our waiter showed up with the hot sauce I'd ordered before I'd known how the chana masala would be. Believe it or not, that hot sauce was perhaps a little milder than the chana masala. I could make it less of a challenge to eat by adding hot sauce.
The hot chana masala was sort of a bummer for David, who is on a new diet designed to wean him off prilosec (which he takes to combat acid reflux). For whatever reason, that diet frowns on spicy food and caffeine. Indeed, David hadn't had any caffeine in three days, and it marked the first time he'd gone without caffeine (unless sick) since he was eleven years old.
Towards the end of the meal, we started being waited on by a young woman (who, like our original waiter, appeared to be Indian). In contrast to the young man, she seemed like a completely assimilated American. She's probably the person who normally takes orders at Mt. Gate, but for some reason tonight that job fell to just-off-the-boat Rajput.
Back at Susan and David's house, I used David's multimeter to investigate whether a transient electrical fire had happened in their furnace. But the tranformer (which the electrician had suspected) checked out good, and the furnace worked when it was started up. So then we looked at the water filter system. Inside, it smelled a little of burned electronics, and then I noticed that a small electric motor designed to control a valve had what appeared to be some melting on the plastic part of its housing. Still, the filter system all seemed to work when tested. Perhaps the valve had been jammed briefly and the motor had overheated enough to produce a cloud of smoke without being killed. Usually smoke implies dead equipment, but electromechanical stuff can occasionally survive such things.
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