Old MacDonald had a farm...

There is a Mexican restaurant on the Hill that I frequent, not because it is particularly good but because it is cheap (when I was an intern they had 10 cent wings and 25 cent beers on Wednesdays), centrally-located and known by everyone in Washington, including cabbies (this is important because I never know addresses of places I want to go, just names and general locations).

No longer an intern, I usually visit this place during the week for lunch between meetings but Saturdays are all-you-can-eat chicken fajitas for $9 day and so in the past year I have been twice on a Saturday when I was craving fajitas. Both times I went with my boyfriend at the time (two different men). Both times I was horrendously embarrassed.

The first time I visited this restaurant, my date was going through this weird phase where he liked to eat everything Mongolian barbecue style: everything mixed together in a bowl. He would do this with everything: bacon and eggs, filet and mashed potatoes, the insides of a turkey sandwich--it was a weird phase for him. Anyways, I figured this behavior was reserved to our at-home dining and assumed he'd be fine in a restaurant.

Then he ordered.

"I'll have the fajitas. No tortillas though and can you bring me a really big bowl?"

My recount of this story does not do it justice, but he took all of the meat and vegetables on his skillet and dumped them in the bowl and then dumbed the pico and guacamole on top and then drowned everything in queso dip. And he ordered three more orders of fajitas. It was one of the grossest displays I have ever seen.

The waitress looked at us like we had been raised in a barn.

The next time I went to fajita night things went great until my date noticed I had eaten my last tortilla and interrupted the waitress while she was talking to another table to tell her I needed more tortillas. Chivalrous? Perhaps. Except for the fact that I had finished the rest of my food and really had no use for three more tortillas.

This fact was not lost on the waitress. She gave me my tortillas, which of course I could not eat, and spent the rest of our visit pointedly looking at them whenever she walked past. I almost wanted to put the tortillas in my purse so that I was no longer subject to her wrath.

Of course, the date was oblivious the dirty looks because she wasn't directing them at him. She had assumed (like a rational person) that he wasn't a complete caveman and that I had directed him to order me more tortillas as if it were entertaining for me to watch both of them dance. So he was fine sitting there for the next 30 minutes nursing his beer.

I have stopped eating at this restaurant until their staff changes or they take the poster with my picture and a big red x through it off the wall. Whichever comes first.