A meal is more than what's on your plate. The smell of the restaurant, the attitude of the staff, the cleanliness of the menu, and many other factors all tie together to form either a pleasant outing or a nightmare. What follows is an absolutely true recounting of the worst meal I've ever had which would totally be corroborated by many witnesses if only they weren't all so conveniently busy.
It all started when my wife and I first arrived at the restaurant: that hole-in-the-wall Mexican place you've seen time and time again. Immediately upon walking in: the smell! Merciful gods above, the smell! It wasn't a bad smell, like a dumpster or a middle school locker room. It smelled like an Italian restaurant. Notes of olive oil and tomato sauce permeated the air. I had to pop back outside to verify I was in fact at La Cocina and not La Cucina. The incongruous aroma did not ruin the evening, but the confusion set an uncomfortable tone.
The teenage host couldn't be bothered to look up from his phone long enough to guide us to our table. After several minutes of awkwardly staring a hole through his head, he motioned toward an open table with his head. We weren't worth even an arm extension or a finger point. After sitting down and clearing a day's worth of crumbs from the table with my sleeve, our waiter gave us a half-empty bowl of chips and salsa that I just saw him take from a recently vacated table. When I brought this up he rolled his eyes at me like I was being unreasonable!
The waiter returned with fresh bowls of chips and salsa, and we ordered our drinks: two glasses of water with lemon. He brought out two glasses with lemon slices and a pitcher, set them on the table and walked away. Apparently I was eating at the restaurant version of Build-A-Bear because I had to assemble my own drink. After taking a sip, I found that the "water" was actually flat Sprite. What a power move! He must have intentionally poured out some Sprite and left it in a pitcher for hours, just to be able to pull this on customers for no reason.
I'm no Indiana Jones, but I am a bit of an adventurer, and after the nightmare we'd had so far I had to know in what sort of condition the food would be served. Would it be raw or rotten? Would it even be what I asked for? Will this turn out to be a rather confused Italian restaurant that serves chips and salsa after all? To my surprise, the food itself was delicious, and precisely what I ordered no less!
What I forgot to mention at the beginning of this story is that I am an accomplished dark wizard, master of ancient and chaotic magicks that precede man's rule of the Earth. The food was delicious, but did not make up for the rudeness of the staff, so while exiting the strange and rude establishment, I summoned a million tiny meteors from the sky that crashed around the restaurant in a semi-circle. They all opened up like tiny escape pods and a million and three tiny demons (six of them had to double up) descended like a chattering avalanche upon the place.
My wife and I cackled maniacally in the seedy parking lot as the screams of the damned and the sounds of swiping claws and gnashing teeth echoed off the wall of the nearby Denny's. When the demons' fun was over, the smell of burnt lasagna wafted through the air. They all boarded their meteor ships and I sent them back to space-hell with a wave of my Earth-wrist. The young host crawled out from the burning building and thrusted his head forward with his eyes wide and his brows furled: one final gesture to ask, "Really, bro?" Yes, young host. Really bro. And then he died. And then I spit on him a little bit. And so did my wife.
A bad meal is more than just burnt bread or bland steak; it's an entire experience.
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