After Amber’s show on Friday, Lauren, John and I went to one of those ultra-hip, winery-as-restaurant places. We walked into a wine tasting bar with seven million bottles of wine stacked floor to thirty foot ceiling. More bottles were displayed decoratively on tables, together with wine enthusiast’s frippery and those tea towels you use to wipe the lip of the bottle if you are a sommelier.
I hadn’t eaten all day and it was mobbed. We were met by a woman with a tray of wine samplers. I refused with relative good grace. There was a duo of hostesses and when we indicated we’d like to sit outside, they looked at each other with frowny faces and one of them said, “Gee, that won’t be possible. We have one server out there and there’s a big party. It will be at least 45 minutes…” again they exchanged glances and got busy scowling onto a restaurant map that looked like a guide to a theme park so vast was the layout, so alluring the seating vignettes. They were about to dismiss us completely when Lauren said, “Well, we have a reservation, sooo…”
“Oh,” said one of the black swathed duo, “Just go to the bar and we’ll get ahold of you.” There were probably 1,500 people sandwiched into the place, and these did not look like hostesses who gave a shit whether we ate or not. Lauren said, “Don’t you want our name or something?” One of them said, “Oh,” (again) as if she hadn’t thought of that and for some reason it annoyed me greatly. Digits were exchanged and they would “text us when our table was ready”.
The bar (to be distinguished from the wine tasting bar) was in one of those cutting edge warehouse rooms with exposed ductwork, communal tables and seating for dinner. It too was mobbed and John and I stood helplessly leaning around bar patrons, trying to make eye contact with a bartender, while Lauren went to the bathroom. I began to mutter under my breath, “This is ridiculous,” and “I despise this place.” Poor John, who does not know me well, said reasonably, “Well they are kind of busy…”
Have you ever known you were being a total bitch, but couldn’t stop yourself? I was like the Snickers commercial without the celebrity comic relief…
When Lauren came back, I complained a bit more vociferously, until three seats miraculously became available. We ordered drinks and the woman next to me turned and patted my shoulder like I was a skittish mare that needed calming and said, “You’re sitting now. It will be okay.” I guess she had heard me grumbling. When the drinks came, my neighbor looked at my brimming gassy water in a wine glass and asked with (what I took to be inappropriate familiarity), “Is that sparkling water or wine? Cuz’ if it’s wine, I want to know why you got a bigger pour than me.” She exchanged glances with her date and they both laughed aloud at her cleverness…
This annoyed me too. Lauren got a text from the hostess and texted back, “On the way!” John, who seemed to appreciate the irony of a restaurant so vast you had to give an ETA to get from the bar to the hostess stand said, “It’s not like we’re driving in from Ocala…”
We were seated a quarter mile into the fray and I was also annoyed by the waiter, who spent the first five minutes bellowing over the cacophony to explain the wine menu and the coding system, pairing the proper wine to the food selection, like Garanimals for toddlers. Lauren said she thought I was just “hangry”, but there is something a little more than difficult about being in a hip, overbooked winery when you are sober.
When the pretzel bread arrived my spirits improved…
