restaurants

Lunch with my old Excite@Home gang, dinner with Michelle and Greg, and an evening at Fry's.

That's what Fridays are made of.

Lunch: a small, Buddhist vegetarian place in Mountain View called "Garden Fresh." For those of you who are interested, it's on the intersection of Shoreline and El Camino.

"How do you know it's Buddhist?" I asked the Guy.

"Do they have fake meat?"

"Yes."

"Then it's Buddhist."

I don't really see where that follows, but the Guy is the authority on food, after all. I submit it to you as a Buddhist restaurant.

The vegetarian aspect of the place was exciting to the Manager (now the ex-), and Indian Woman the Second, both of whom were able to make it to the luncheon. For once, they would be able to order anything on the menu. The food was delicious for everybody, that is, with the exception of the Firecracker, who expressed a certain lack of enthusiasm over her Vegetarian Chicken Kung Pao.

"IT TASTE FUNNY," she announced.

We all leaned across the table as one to ask, "You do realize that it's vegetarian, right?"

"YES," she declared. "I KNOW, VEGETARIAN EXCEPT FOR CHICKEN."

"No, no meat," we insisted. "It's vegetarian food. That means there's no meat."

"NO," she insisted, "IS MEAT INSIDE. IT IS CHICKEN KUNG PAO, VEGETARIAN."

"Vegetarian means 'without meat,'" the ex-Manager said patiently.

The Firecracker frowned. "BUT THERE IS CHICKEN HERE, SEE? THEY PUT IN CHICKEN."

Confusion and merriment reigned until the Firecracker could be convinced that there was, in fact, no chicken in the Vegetarian Chicken Kung Pao; the realization brought with it a certain amount of disgust, and some dismay. The Firecracker is a strictly carnivorous animal.

"IN CHINA SOMETIME THEY SAY VEGETARIAN AND THEY PUT IN MEAT," she explained to the rest of us with beetlings of amusement and annoyance.

"Here in California," we pointed out, "you can get sued if you do that."

Dinner was spent at a sushi place called Ariake's, one of a small chain that served fast, inexpensive, and surprisingly good sushi. Several years ago I'd patronized the selfsame restaurant under the auspices of Michelle and Greg, who were kind enough to take pity on a lonely, poor, and disillusioned musician just moved down to California without funds or too many friends. It's amazing the difference that a little self-confidence and a few years of experience can do for one's perceptions of a place. The restaurant that seemed overwhelming and crowded, completely alien, and bizarrely neon, now seemed small and temperate and quaintly Californian.

The menu that I remembered from a few years ago involved sushi named after start-ups and neighborhood computer companies. The IBM roll. The Hewlett-Packard roll. The Sun roll. Nowadays, with software stock plummeting, those companies are being punished for their failures on the market, and have been replaced on the menu with harmless names that will survive the ages. The Sunshine Roll, for instance. The Pittsburgh Roll.

The day either of those start to fail on the New York Stock Exchange, we'll know God has turned day-trader.

I fail to understand how it is that unemployment has culminated in a near-constant dependence on restaurants for sustenance. One would think that, as a person with copious amounts of free time, I would explore the parts of me that love to cook and end up spending most of my creative energies in the kitchen.

Of course, one would also think that I would live in a clean apartment, with a sink empty of dirty dishes, bathe regularly, and exercise. Not to mention learn exciting new technologies and keep abreast of cultural, technological, and social trends sweeping across the modern landscape. As opposed to, say, peeling dead skin off of one's feet for an hour and a half while listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR.