Nits About Restaurants and What I Love in a Restaurant

Right now, with an agent interested in selling my cookbook, Cooking in Leaves, I have food on the brain.  I don't always want to cook; I love eating out.  There are certain things that turn me off about some restaurants, though.  And there are things that make a restaurant one to return to.  Here's my list.  I'd love to hear yours.

My Restaurant Nits

**No reservations allowed

**Food I can make better

**Overcooked seared tuna

**Places closed between lunch hour and dinner

**Servers who kneel at the table

**Servers who push courses too fast

**Long, awkward waits for service or courses

**Expensive dishes that try but fail to be stacked art

**Tough or tasteless steak

**Sweet sauces on my meat

**Fusion of dissimilar cuisines for the sake of unique

**Ice tea from a soda dispenser

**Sticky tables

**Trendy food, like throwing a fried egg on everything

**Too cold

**Too dark to read the menu

**Fancy names for simple foods

**Desserts and appetizers that cost more than the main dish

**Barbeque sauce cooked onto my meat (I'd like to offer a shout-out here.  I’m from K.C. Missouri, and Rib House is the only place I’ve found in the Denver metro area that does it right…offering choices of BBQ sauce to later put—or not put--over pit-cooked ribs)

 What I Love in a Restaurant:

 **Ethnic restaurants as authentic as street food.  

**Hole-in-the-walls with dependable food and owners that get to know you.

**If casual seafood, paper towels on the tables and wood floors with shell discards.

**Free samples of wine.

**Ethnic faces in ethnic restaurants.

**Clean and elegant bathrooms.

**Exotic, unctuous offerings like innards (a wimpy companion will have to stomach it).

**Small portion offerings with reasonable prices so I can try several things.

**Food I’ve never had--unless it’s dog, rat, cat, or human.   

**My tacky indulgence—all-you-can-eat steamed crab (straight up, no butter).

**If casual, electrical outlets with internet enabled outside of peak hours.  It may be a chain but they welcome surfers and writers like me.

**Abundant lemon wedges for my tea.

**Would love but never get—passion fruit.

**Both olive oil and butter on the table for bread.

**Every kind of sweetener on the table from raw sugar and stevia to saccharine and Splenda, honey... offerings for all tastes.

What bugs you?

What do you think makes for a great restaurant? 

-- your food obsessed Inkpot

Free Writing

In the immortal words of the song: “Come on and take a free write…yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah….” (Anyone remember Edgar Winter Group?)

Recently a Sister of the Quill told us she was going to do some “free writing.” I asked her what she meant by that, and realized it was exactly how I’d started my first novel and the resulting series: brainstorming by writing.
Wonderful memories flooded back…
There was a tremendous excitement the first day I turned the corner from dreaming to creating. I had no idea how to write a novel, but knew I had to gather my thoughts. So I bought one of those chubby little spiral notebooks and, on that very first free writing day and every one that followed, I went to an outdoor bookshop café in Menlo Park called Café Borrone.
Perhaps it was the presence of all those books behind me in Keplers Bookstore, but the moment I sat under that magic umbrella with my magic toasted raisin bread chicken salad sandwich and magic notebook, I changed. I was no longer just a mommy, much as I treasured that title. I was a member of the intelligentsia, the literati, blossoming with confidence and creativity and dreams and energy and ideas. In that environment, it seemed incredible stories might come to life.
I sketched out my characters first, listing everything I could about them. I knew I had to have a main character, an unattainable eternal love, family, a sidekick/foil, employees, and bad guys. Not just one, of course, but a few: the ultimate one was known as SBG (super bad guy).
From time to time I remember looking up and rejoicing, incredulous that this could possibly be happening, that I was actually writing ideas for a book. Now I marvel that I ever imagined my first book would be published. Such idealism! Such hubris! Such a blessing that I was young and foolish enough to hope.
Then attention turned to the story. I’d write things in my weird private journalist’s shorthand like: “Char unwittingly sucked into dngrous intrnat’l intrigue w/bsnss. Difficult au, bk stirs up controv, or smthg in bk smeone dsn’t want knwn. He trvls wrld to solve myst & save own life…”
This is perhaps the most joyful part of writing for me. We’ve probably all found that the longer we run with ideas and let them go, the more intriguing paths appear and link to bits of research…and the more painlessly they translate into a full-blown story. Some of those paths are dead ends, like the character who wouldn’t work until I changed her gender: Alexandra Plumtree.
Those of us who “free write” regularly when eating alone in restaurants know the feeling of pride mixed with embarrassment. On the one hand, it’s a privilege to have such a joyous internal life that you can entertain yourself for hours on end. On the other hand, we can tend to appear, um, unbalanced. Many’s the time I’ve realized how crazy I look, scribbling on a napkin or receipt, wild lines connecting one part of the paper to another, or bold lines saying “NO, HAVE HIM COME TO ENGLAND HERE”. Or three big stars, inside a wobbly-lined box, “Oh! Oh! Actually, that was why he came in the first place!!!!” After two cups of coffee, the letters get wilder and squigglier, and the page becomes dark and crowded with writing, until it looks like the rambling nonsense of a truly crazy person…
But crazy in a happy way. --- Storm Petrel