Miasmatic Review

You want how much?

Tonight Employee-M told me that for dinner she wanted steak. Now you have to understand she is a health food nut. She doesn’t eat red meat, or “unhealthy” food. In fact when we first came down here I told her one of my goals was to get her to eat a steak. I know you find this hard to believe, but I kept up at it long enough to start to annoy here. So when she said that I actually stopped the car dead in the middle of the street, blocking traffic, to ask her who the hell she was and if she was feeling okay.

She said she was fine, she just decided she wanted a steak, fillet mignon to be exact. So we find this local steak joint that was recommended for great steaks. When we arrived, the sign on the side of the building said “Prime Steakhouse” and “Wine Bar”. At first I thought, this is not the kind of place we’re looking for. Then I see a group of people walk in wearing shorts and T-shirts so I thought it couldn’t be that bad.

We walk in and the first thing I know I hear the hostess say that there is a dress code to the group in front of us. GREAT! They didn’t seem to have a problem with how we were dressed. We were seated; our waitress came up and showed us the menus. Yes, menus. One for wine and one for food. The one for the wine was three times as thick as the food menu. She took our drink order and left to fill it. We all took a look at the food menu and then looked at each other simultaneously. Emp-P and Employee-M have this wide eyed shocked look on their faces. The cheapest thing on the menu was a chicken breast, for $32.99. The average price on the menu was $49.00.

That didn’t include sides!

The cheapest side dish was a baked potato for $9.50. For a baked potato! I’m sitting there trying to figure out how I’m going to justify this on my expense report. I figured that maybe my staff was really excited about eating a really nice restaurant. No, they were shocked at the price. They weren’t comfortable eating there, so I made the decision to leave. When our waitress came back with our drinks I apologized to her and explained we were on a corporate expense and that was not the kind of restaurant we thought it was going to be. We offered to pay for our drinks, but she told us it was fine. I left her a five dollar tip for being nice, but tore out of there.

We ended up going to a Lone Star for steaks, and laughed about the whole thing, but damn. I’m just happy I didn’t have to explain that one on an expense report!