It is no secret that I love wings. I love them more than what is probably healthy. Mike and I try to have one date night a week, and we usually go have wings on that night. We almost always go to the same place—the Olde Towne Tavern—my favorite place for wings. I have eaten the most perfect of wings at Olde Towne, and from time to time, I have also eaten some fairly mediocre wings there, but tonight I ate the worst wings I have ever had, at my favorite wing place of all time.
I was so upset by the state of my wings that I felt like misquoting Shakespeare and shouting, “Et tu, Olde Towne?”
It all started with a ten minute wait for a table.
There was live music in the bar, so I couldn’t be upset about the wait. We have played musical restaurants on many a Friday night over longer waits, so ten minutes didn’t seem like much time at all in the grand scheme of things. I would have waited twenty minutes without batting an eye, or feeling the temptation to run to the next restaurant down the road.
The time flew by.
We were barely seated when the waitress stopped by to get our drink orders, and our drinks came back within a few minutes. She took our dinner orders and disappeared into the crowd just like every other busy Friday night at the tavern.
So far there was nothing out of the ordinary.
As per usual on a Friday night, Mike was running thorough the last few stragglers from his work email on his BlackBerry, while I flipped through the screens on my new android smart phone. I lost track of how much time we spent on our phones, alternating between that and critiquing the one man band in the other room. He was no John Mayer, but he wasn’t bad. The waitress refilled our drinks promptly when they were down to near the bottom, and disappeared again.
I clicked on the Kindle app on my phone to read a few pages from a book I’ve read a dozen times before, while Mike responded to a few more emails. We are huge multi-taskers, so we managed to carry on a light conversation at the same time. Before long, I was slurping down the last of my Diet Coke and the waitress was back with a refill. I was now on my third caffeine filled, artificially sweetened soda and I was well aware that I would be hard pressed to fall asleep tonight. Mike was on his third beer, and I was also all too well aware that we had yet to receive our food.
We scanned the room, trying to determine if the tables around us had come in before or after us and if they had their food or not. It was a busy night, for sure, but not so busy that so much time should have passed without as much as a French fry or a carrot stick to munch on.
Mike used his deductive reasoning skills (and an email timestamp) to figure out how long we had actually been sitting without our meals (over an hour as it turns out), as I tried to flag down the waitress with no luck.
The previously attentive waitress was now nowhere to be found. Trays of food were flying about the room, visiting every table but ours. My stomach was growling and my nervous system (pumped full of anxiety causing caffeine) was in overdrive.
After what seemed like another hour, but was probably only a few minutes, the waitress finally passed by our table and I was able to grab her attention. She seemed oblivious to the fact that we had not received our food as of yet and vowed to check with the kitchen. We translated that to mean that she forgot to put our ticket in, and after watching her leave our table and run straight to the open kitchen with a freshly written ticket, I was certain it was a valid theory.
Our food arrived within a few short minutes, and we were told that due to the “kitchen error”, the manager would be discounting our meal.
It was the least they could do, because after waiting for more than an hour for my favorite wings off all time, I was left miserably disappointed. These were not the wings I had waited so patiently for. These were not the wings that made me salivate at the mere sight of them. These were barely edible wings. They were dry. And there was no flavor at all. The only saving grace was that they were filling. I was no longer hungry, if not satisfied.
Somehow the manager must have known the magnitude of my disappointment, because our food was completely taken off the bill. We paid for my bottomless Diet Coke and Mike’s three beers, and yes…I left a tip…and we left.
I suppose there are worse things in life than bad wings. In my usual habit, I will look to the bright side of things. At least it gave me something to blog about tonight.
Until the next time…I’ll be lying awake after drinking enough caffeine to keep the entire math department of Georgia Tech awake during midterms!