Ok so I just went to the Majestic which according to Yelp and family members is a great great dining experience. Good food, good location, good atmosphere. Most of those things were true, but… the more I think about my dinner there the more I am so confused and weirded out by it. So Michelle (sister) and I get there and the hostess just looks at us, we tell her a table for two, and mumbles something, not because she’s mad, just because she talks really quietly and doesn’t want to make eye contact. Then, at least 4 groups of people leave over the course of the next 30 minutes, and we are still waiting to be seated. I’m almost wondering if the hostess has forgotten about us, even though we’ve been standing right in front of her for the length of a normal television sitcom. I mean, you don’t just forget it’s on, right? But she would go do stuff like she had purpose, walk away from her stand thingy and go towards a table but she would come back like she didn’t know why she ever strayed from her diagram of tables in the first place. I was convinced that she forgot about us because there were 4 empty, clean tables with no one occupying them, so I asked her how long the wait was. She said, oh… I just have to set this table over here. Michelle hushed me before a slightly snide comment (…I would have said it in a very nice tone).
So we sat down, and since we had had that half hour to stew over the menu, we knew what we wanted. Michelle ordered the sea bass and I wanted the pork chop. LITERALLY FIFTY MINUTES LATER, our food FINALLY CAME. This extra time to wonder about where our food allowed us to wonder about everyone working in this restaurant, including the guy standing in the back with a blazer just WATCHING everything. Was he the owner? Did he do this every night? What a terribly boring job. He just stood there. And looked at stuff. The whole time. So when I excitedly cut open my pork chop I was a little surprised to find it TOTALLY RAW on the inside. Completely totally raw. Pork… has to be cooked all the way, right??? Michelle seemed to agree. So I called the waiter over, I told him it wasn’t cooked at all on the inside, HE SAID NOTHING. ZERO WORDS. Took my plate, and looked kinda pissed. I didn’t know if he was mad at me, or mad at the chef because of some crazy mistake she keeps making.
Then that guy with the blazer (!) came up to me and, at this point, I had decided it was the chef’s fault, and that the powerful man with the blazer was going to offer my plate for free. So when he came over to tell me that the meat was SUPPOSED to be like that, and “you know how chef’s are…” and “pork, nowadays, can be eaten medium, medium-rare.” WELL WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME THAT BEFORE?? WHY DID YOUR WAITER WALK AWAY WITH MY FOOD WITHOUT TELLING ME THAT’S WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE??? Basically, everyone in that restaurant HATED me, and showed it to me by later giving me a very tough, dry chop of pork.
I mean, maybe my expectations are too high, but a SORRY would have been nice. Y’know? Or the waiter TALKING TO ME about the problem. (I feel like I’m talking like the waiter and I are in some sort of relationship and we’re really not… nor is this a weird metaphor for some other real life problem… I really was just mad about the waiter’s lack of communication skills.) Anyway, I tried talking about it later with him and he had a hard time understanding my concern and it didn’t help a bit, so I just smiled and chewed on my pork.
In the end, Michelle’s sea bass was PHENOMENAL. And I bet, if I had eaten the pork the way the chef had originally cooked it, I would have enjoyed it more. And while there were other places that we could have eaten, I kind of enjoyed this weird experience because Michelle and I ended up laughing a lot and dissecting the evening to try and figure everyone out. Because… it was weird… amirite?
