Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Okay, I admit it, we eat in a lot of bars.

The original reason for this is simple. We wanted to avoid squawky, shrieking infants and undisciplined wandering tots. The odds of avoiding these used to be better if you ate in the bar. The reason was the bar area was normally the designated smoking zone. Generally those bringing young children to sup avoided the cigar-cigarette crowd.

This all changed with the passing of smoking bans by the nanny-state. Now people will drag their infants and the infantile into any area of a restaurant. My suggestion was when smoking bans were implemented that restaurants should make the formally smoking areas child-free areas. But that didn't happen.

So why do we cling to eating in the bar area of restaurants?

More privacy and freedom to talk is the answer. Most bar areas have booths as opposed to the open tables in the dining rooms. You are presented with a buffer zone from the diners about you.

Now you might say, "Aren't bars noisy?"

Yes, often the bar is compared with the dining room. There is often music blaring and a dozen people about the bar itself chattering away at each other, but this just adds an extra layer of privacy. Who can hear your conversation over all that. Besides it is a different noise than that of a crying baby. Babies and young children can reach decibels in their wails and banshee shrieks that would down airplanes and break glass. Generally the bar sound morphs into a background hum, something like amped up white noisy.

Still and all, it is a bar and liquor is served. In our experience most nights have just been nice people getting together to untie the bounds of their daily stress, they chatter quietly, laugh occasionally and little more. Now granted, the Little Woman and I don't frequent Biker Bars and dives. None-the-less, once in a while there is an idiot in the house.

Thus it was this past Saturday night at our current favorite dining-out place.

We have a great fondness for this particular restaurant and its bar. It has booths in the bar with extreme high backs giving us that complete feeling of intimacy. The staff is always especially attentive and friendly. Even ones not serving you may stop by for a brief chat and wish you well. You are never rushed. The food is quite good and they have specials every night, which provides a nice variety when you dine often, and we do. And their prices are low.

Every place can sometimes make mistakes. On this Saturday our wait person messed up my order. I ordered a cajan burger, what I got was a fajita panini. I know, I know, how do you mix that up, they don't sound anything alike. Well, the Little Woman ordered a fajita salad and the young lady serving us simply got fajita stuck in her head. No big deal, they made it right and were very apologetic. The wait person was a bit upset, but we calmed her down and we were happy and at the end everyone was happy.  It wasn't the end of the world.

Then near the end of dining there was a ruckus at the bar. Some middle-aged guy was screaming at the barkeep, denouncing him in strong language, pounding and stomping about some mistake with his pizza. Everyone was looking at this clown demanding his money back and denouncing all the staff. There was no reasonableness here, just a self-centered (and perhaps tipsy) moron acting out.

The Little Woman doesn't take kindly to fools who disrupt her pleasant evenings. She let this bozo know he was a jerk, told him to hit the road and added on some descriptive characteristics far more saltier than the language I employ. The guy did stomp out of the joint.

You just don't rile the Little Woman's feathers.

The crowd at the bar applauded the Little Woman and at the end of the night the manager thanked us for having their back.

At the end my meal cost me only the tip I gave the wait person.

What more can one ask for a Saturday night but a dinner and a show for the price of the tip.




(Yes, the Little Woman - 5'10" - was once a mascot, a Road Runner, "Beep beep".)