Men are stupid, and even the mere existence of women make us stupider. This statement cannot be supported any more unequivocally than by the apparently common belief among men that sending your food back in restaurant is a good way to impress a woman. As your faithful and unbiased reporter from the inside of the restaurant business, gentleman, let me tell you that unless the food is really terrible, you’re probably not making yourself any more attractive by complaining about your meal. In fact, you’re probably just showing your date that you have neither a brain nor a penis. I mean, honestly-if you feel the need to prove your manhood to your date by harassing people that are paid to serve your every whim anyways, you must be compensating for something (or the lack of something).

This may seem harsh to the uninitiated, but let me show you what I mean. A week or so ago, a funny-looking gentleman brought his wife or girlfriend or mistress or whatever into The Shaker Table for a nice candlelit dinner. This gentleman ordered a steak (medium), and the poor female unlucky enough to accompany him ordered a roasted chicken half. We cooked their meals, plated them up nicely, and sent them out. The waiter brought their food, and had hardly put the man’s plate down in front of him when the man seized his steak, cut it open, and declared it to be too pink. It’s as if he knew ahead of time that his meat would be insufficiently cooked for his tastes; I can imagine two reasons for his premonition: he either had ordered the steak less well-done than he wanted it, so he could send it back and impress this poor woman with his strength of character and lack of genitalia, or he always ordered his steak medium-rare and was consistently disappointed to find that his steak wasn’t cooked enough. Let me share a secret with you, dear readers: If you always order your steak medium-rare, and it always comes out more pink than you would like it….you don’t actually like your steak medium-rare. You like it medium. Please use this handy guide when choosing how to order your meat:

Choose “Rare” if you want your steak to have a dark red, chilled middle.

Choose “Medium-rare” if you want your steak to have a red, hot middle.

Choose “Medium” if you want your steak to be hot and pink all the way through

Choose “Medium-well” if you want your steak to be hot, grey and juicy all the way through, with a small, faint circle of pink in the middle.

Choose “Well” if you want your steak to be thoroughly disgusting. Er….if you want your steak to be grey all the way through, with no pink juicy goodness left in it. To be honest: if you want a steak, you don’t want it well done.

This is the standard used by fine establishments around the world, where by “fine establishments” I mean “anywhere the meat doesn’t arrive at the restaurant partially cooked to begin with”.

Anyways, back to our story: We got the steak back, looked at it where he had cut it, and found it to be a perfect medium. “Oh well,” we said. “The customer is always right, Even if the customer happens to be wrong.” The steak went back into the oven until it was cooked to a perfect medium-well. Steak, feeling far too much like a boomerang, goes back to customer, customer takes two bites and sends steak back. Steak, beginning to feel a bit rejected, gets cooked until it is well done, customer eats a couple more bites and then decides that we’re never going to get it right. Customer goes home hungry and angry. Cooks go home bitter and tired. Woman goes home frustrated because not only is her date a jerk, but her date is now in a bad mood, and she had to keep sending her chicken back to be kept warm while the poor steak was being re-cooked, since it would have been impolite of her to continue eating while Sir Whingealot was waiting.

The moral of the story? Don’t send your food back to be re-cooked just to impress your date, because you will probably just end up ruining the evening for all involved. And if your date complains about his or her food, check it. If the food is cooked the way your date ordered it, stand up and walk away, because your date is either a fool or a poorly-endowed jerk…probably both. But I’m not bitter, I swear. I honestly hope that the gentleman enjoyed his steak, which he apparently meant to order “well done”. I also hope that it gave him gas bad enough to drive his date away forever, especially if she was his wife.

Required Reading:
With the election upon us and the Grand Choice just around the corner, it’s about time you checked out Political Animals for a “fair and balanced” (read: “funny, and liberal-leaning”) look at the two candidates, as presented by a pair of cloven-hoofed ruminants of the ovine family.

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