Eating out in my 30s should not feel like this, but there often seems to be a strong note of pranking whenever I go to a restaurant with certain friends. And in very specific instances, eating out seems designed to be a prank at my expense—or at least to trigger my particular set of neuroses. Ordering the perfect appetizer is necessary to the success of a well-rounded meal, and the dining experience would be duller and more unfulfilling without a little snack to get the taste buds firing. But it is also true that, in a practical sense, the things that this task requires of the people ordering them are all things that many of us are uniquely unsuited to do. So you see the problem here.
It is only sort of a problem, honestly. Most people eating at a pizzeria would not mind if someone ordered garlic bread or mozzarella sticks for the table, but here’s the prank: Both of these are wonderful apps on their own, but in this context, I’m spending my hard-earned cash on redundancy. I’m not particularly concerned with carbo-loading, but there is something inherently greasy about the prospect of eating bread topped with garlic butter and a dust of parmesan and then dipping it in marinara sauce, only to run it back for the entree. It’s like ordering a slider before a smashburger—like, you just want a burger with a side of burger? Sure, I’m a gutter palette little piggly wiggly who will eat most things that arrive at the table, but it should be commonly accepted that garlic bread pairs more appropriately with pasta, while wings or fried calamari or a Caesar salad are superior apps to go with pizza. In all the ways millennials are horribly stunted and simply maladjusted for adulthood, we are, quite frankly, too old not to understand basic flavor profiles. I once ate next to a woman slightly older than me who ordered a beef Wellington and an orange Crush.
There’s the libertarian part of me that wants to let people enjoy things, but I’m also riddled with a host of signature defects that cannot abide by the enshittification of basic standards. At a certain point, there needs to be some baseline level of personal conduct that should be expected from a grown-ass adult, like knowing better than to order chicken tenders at a seafood restaurant. On the inside, I am absolutely seething when someone wants to order four apps and no entree because it violates any understanding of the economics of dollar-to-portion; each app is about 70% of the cost of an entree but only 30% of the food, which is literally why tapas restaurants exist. And, somewhat related, if there is a shared app that involves dipping, dunking, or scooping, people need to be mindful of their ratios and not get reckless with their scoops and fuck up the proportions for everyone else.
I know all of this sounds like I’m a prissy trainwreck to dine out with, so for the sake of bridging the national divide, I will find commonality with people by complaining about how expensive restaurants have gotten. “I can’t believe they’re charging $5 extra for fries with a $13 cheeseburger,” I’ll exclaim before hitting ‘em with a “Prices went up during COVID and they just never came down…” It’s actually an effective conversational hack to find a mutual interest or experience with anyone, especially when they’re ordering mozzarella sticks with your chicken parm.
I'm with you on the redundancy thing and it's funny that more people don't get that. Like why order something when you're just going to get the same ingredients in a different configuration dropped off at the table 10 minutes after this appetizer?