I called my daughter tonight for an informal chit-chat and she informed me that while she’s working in the Pacific Northwest this summer/fall she will have no cell phone and very little Internet access. Also that there will be one pay phone she can use but will need a phone card. This pay phone does not take incoming calls. Oh, and plus she may be staying in the area after her work gig just to hang out.
So basically, for all intents and purposes, she will be cut off from me for four months except for the U.S. Postal Mail. Does that even work anymore?
That call ended over two hours ago. What have I been doing in the meantime?
You guessed it.
Crying.
This feels worse than dropping her off at college. I thought that after four years apart we’d get to spend some time together before she went on her way to being a grownup.
During my bout of self-pity (which it was because I am not worried about Clare in the least — she is going to have a blast) I recalled that in December of 1978 I flew to England to student teach for about 4 months. Did I think about those I was leaving behind? Nope. Did I worry that my Mom couldn’t contact me easily? Not a chance.
I am so proud of Clare for what she’s doing this summer/fall — flying across the country to work in an area she loves (or thinks she loves) with no one she’s ever met before. But I am also so sad that this is the end of our extended periods of time together. Unless she moves back home (which I doubt she will) at some point, we won’t have leisurely weeks to just hang out — to go to the mall or to the tea shop or out to lunch. We won’t be able to sit and watch movies together at night for nights on end.
When someone starts a family she doesn’t think about the letting go. She thinks about the baby and toddler and child for whom she will care for years to come. She rarely thinks about the time her child says “Bye Mom, thanks for all the love.” Tonight when I was crying I thought I wanted to run out and shout at the first pregnant woman I saw and tell her that her child would leave her someday. But of course I wouldn’t do that. And of course she’d think I was a crazy woman.
I know that there are mothers that say goodbye to their children forever and I know I am being silly and shortsighted about Clare’s 4-month stint in no-cell-or-internet-land. I am allowed to feel sad and wish I could Grey Garden it up as Dean so eloquently put it tonight when he heard me boo-hooing.
On this side of it, 4 months seems like forever. And who knows what is on the other side of that 4 months.
Are cafeteria-type restaurants a trend? Are they going to be around to stay? I ask because in the past couple of months my husband and I have gone to three cafeteria-type restaurants. These were highly recommended and relatively new restaurants in Bethesda and Washington DC and we did not expect them to be serve-yourself restaurants.
Let me make it clear — when I go out for dinner, I don’t like to serve myself. I like to sit down and be served. I like a waiter to come to my table and ask what I’d like to drink, bring me a drink and then take my order and then bring it to me. I don’t like to walk into a restaurant, grab a tray and stand in line to pay for my meal before I eat it. I don’t like to have to go back to the line for a second glass of wine.
The first restaurant we went to recently that was cafeteria-type was a place whose opening in Bethesda I’d been looking forward to for months: Nando’s Peri-Peri. Nando’s Peri-Peri claims to be “the home of Portuguese flame-grilled PERi-PERi Chicken” on its Web site. I love chicken and hoped it would be comparable to Peruvian chicken — one of my favorite foods. I bought a Groupon for Nando’s Peri-Peri and was excited when my husband (who doesn’t like chicken all that much) agreed to go with me. We left home expecting a nice sit-down meal and were unpleasantly surprised when we were greeted at the door by someone who, instead of asking us how many were in our party, asked us if we’d been there before. We said no and asked why she asked. She then explained that we needed to go to the counter, order our meal and drinks, then sit down and wait for the food to be brought to us. Okay, we could do that, we figured. We also had a choice of sauces that we were told we could bring to the table. The young man who took our order had a hard time hearing us and we had a hard time hearing him. Every time he talked to us he turned his head to the side (looking at whatever he was talking about). I think the order was screwed up a little, plus there was a problem with getting the Groupon to work. The line kept on getting longer and longer behind us.
The chicken was okay, but not wonderful. The sauces were also okay. If the food were spectacular and the service was better I think I’d want to go back. I may try it again as a takeout, but not to go in and sit down.
The second cafeteria-type restaurant, Vapiano, we went to was with (and on recommendation from) our daughter who went there over Thanksgiving weekend with her roommate. She couldn’t say enough about the restaurant and I was looking forward to going along having heard about it elsewhere as well. When we got to the door we were given instruction on how to order.
As with Nando’s Peri-Peri, I’d expected to be seated and waited on, but again, this was not the case. We stood around looking foolish and confused, but the “wait” staff didn’t seem to notice our confusion. They just chit-chatted around the register.
The restaurant is set up not unlike a college cafeteria. There is a pasta counter, a drink counter, a salad and pizza counter and a bar. You need to go to each one of these separately in order to get your entire meal. After wandering around aimlessly for a few minutes, our daughter said we needed menus and went to the register to ask for one. She had to wait until the staff finished their conversation before she came back with menus.
My husband decided on a pizza and salad. I thought I’d get a salad and pasta. Our daughter planned on getting pasta. My husband’s order was easiest — he only had to go to one food counter and the bar. I should have gone to the bar first, then the salad counter then the pasta counter, but I went with my daughter to the pasta counter and then realized that my pasta would get cold by the time I ordered my salad, so decided to not get the salad. I did go to the bar and get a glass of wine. It took forever for someone to see I was there, but finally I got my glass of “happy hour” wine. Everything tasted fine — my husband’s pizza was very good. When I went back to the bar for a second glass of wine it took nearly 10 minutes for anyone to show up to serve me. The chit-chatting folks at the register looked away whenever I tried to catch their eyes.
The most recent cafeteria-type restaurant we went to was just over the line on Wisconsin in DC: Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza which was recommended by our son. He’d mentioned how he had pizza with clam at a friend’s house and that it was very good. I was not so keen on having pizza with clam, even though I like clams, so thought I’d have pasta instead. When we got to the restaurant my heart fell when my husband said, as we approached, “it looks like it is cafeteria-style”. He was right. We decided on what food to order by looking at a menu, then stood in line to order our food, were given a number and told to find a seat and the food would be brought to us, but we needed to pick up our drinks at the end of the counter. We did all that and noticed that there were many young families in the restaurant. Of course it was early in the evening, and it was a pizza joint after all. When the food came, we were happy with the pizza, clams and all, but the pasta was a disappointment. I’d settled on the fettucini carbonara but it was far too salty and it had chunks of what looked like sausage when I was expecting thin slivers of pancetta.
I don’t mind going to a cafeteria-type restaurant for lunch. In fact I quite like to eat at Le Madeleine for lunch and do so often. I also don’t mind ordering food at the counter (although they take orders tableside now) at Lilit Café because I like the restaurant so much (it’s my “Cheers Bar”). I just don’t like being surprised when I am expecting a sit-down experience only to have to stand in line to get my food.
In addition, the prices were about the same as sit-down restaurants we go to. Our meal of a large pizza, salty pasta, two beers and two wines came to $65. That’s a lot of money to pay for a cafeteria-type restaurant, in my opinion.
Finally, we did a little research before we went to two of the restaurants and neither mentioned having to stand in line to order food. The one I didn’t research does mention a “chip card”. If I’d known beforehand that the restaurants were not sit-down-and-we-serve you I may have had lighter expectations. It is not that I’ve not been to those kinds of places before, I have. Previously mentioned Le Madeline and Lilit, plus Cici’s Pizza, Fudruckers, and Urban Burger/barbecue are a few that come to mind. But I expected those to be more like fast-food places.
When we were at Vapiano I wondered if perhaps the people that like to eat there are homesick for their college cafeterias because that is what it felt like to me — with the exception of the bar. The very slow and rarely manned bar.
Have you been to this kind of restaurant? What do you think about this trend, if, in fact, it is a trend?
Many of the homes on my quiet, narrow, suburban street have no driveway or garage (including ours) which means that cars are always parked along both sides of the street. Some of the homes have several drivers and often each driver has his or her own car and understandably everyone wants to park as close to their front door as possible.
Our across the street neighbor, when we first moved in, once knocked on our door in the middle of a party we were having to complain that someone had parked in front of her house. We had the offending car moved and made sure to never park in front of her house again.
A few years ago, after a teenager on the street got his license and a car to go with it, a parking space battle broke out. Sometimes one of the three cars from the home with the teenager would park a little over the next door neighbor’s property line and the neighbor would complain to whomever would listen about their parking spaces being infringed upon. The teenager or one of his parents would then park elsewhere on the street and another neighbor would complain. Finally they began parking on a side street and walked the half block to their own house in order to make peace with the neighborhood.
Because we live on a corner, our parking space is even more limited than other neighbors’ because one is not supposed to park within 16 feet of an intersection (which we discovered when we got a ticket for parking too close to the stop sign). We have three cars, but park at least one of them on a side street in order to not annoy our neighbors (although Andrew parks in front of a neighbors house all the time — they have a large parking area and have said they don’t mind him parking there).
The latest of the parking space battles is the silliest, I think, but then I’ve never been one for appearances. A neighbor who moved into a McMansion about a year ago apparently doesn’t appreciate another neighbor parking her old Cadillac in front of their house. About a month ago a large pile of branches found its way into the street in front of the new neighbor’s house. It is possible that the neighbors, being new, didn’t know that the county didn’t pick up branches over 4 feet long. it has been speculated that the neighbor put them there to prevent the old Cadillac from being parked in front of their home. I walked by the other day and was somewhat amused to see that the Cadillac was there, but behind the pile of branches.
Today I saw the branches were gone but the Cadillac has not been moved. The new neighbors do have a driveway and a garage, so their parking is taken care of. I doubt the Cadillac owner is parking in front of the McMansion out of spite — I just think it is easy for her do do so. I’m not well acquainted with either of these neighbors, but hope their battle, if indeed it is a battle, works itself out.
We’re not the only street with this problem in the area. My son once parked in another Bethesda neighborhood to help a friend’s family move furniture from a flooded basement to higher ground. When he returned to his car he found a nastily worded note on his windshield complaining about his parking in front of someone’s house.
My advice? Chill people. Life is too short for such pettiness.
Clutch Cargo Lips 