Restaurant Smackdown!!!

My husband and I don't get out much. The going Fairfield county rate of $15 per hour to hire even the most underage, inexperienced, mouth-breathing child care provider pretty much guarantees that. But this Saturday night my Mom announced her intention to visit, providing us the opportunity to exploit her for free babysitting under the guise of grandmotherly love.

To set the context for our evening, you should know I have been fully brainwashed by child rearing experts as to the critical developmental importance of family dinners. According to said experts, if we do not eat dinner together at least 3 times per week, our daughter will wind up a teen drug addict/prostitute and our son would be destined to grow up an illiterate germophobe who regularly beats up his classmates. Or maybe they'd just have low self esteem, get bad grades, and wind up toiling in a dead end job such as professional VCR repairman or something.

Either way, it ain't worth the risk. So we do the dinners, although typical dinners with a 5 and 7 year old are MUCH closer to the side of pain than of pleasure. There's nothing more satisfying to a mother than lovingly crafting a home cooked meal, and putting the plates in front of your angelic children... to have them say, even before the plate hits the table, "yuck...I hate this!"

The meals themselves are not as much family bonding time as they are Manners Boot Camp, as we try desperately to keep it all together and impart some social graces while actually consuming food. Each meal follows a pretty well-defined script, consisting of eye-rolls, fidgeting, dropped food or spilled drinks, and one parent or the other barking shopworn phrases such as "please sit down;", "Use your manners," "Are you going to eat that?" "please don't throw vegetables at your sister," and "Why are you smearing honey in your hair?"

Hence, the prospect of a dinner with just the two of us is something we jump on at any opportunity, whether it's at Morton's or McDonald's.

We had dinner at the tiny, yet warm and welcoming, Emme of Capri on Summer Street. (Manager Mom highly recommends.) We were able to relax and have a delicious meal as well as some semblance of a coherent conversation. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we decided to go for a drink and dessert elsewhere, just to prolong our time away from home. So we decided to stroll around downtown to find another place to try. We even held hands while we were walking (awwww) although my hands are so chapped from overwashing it could not have been a pleasant experience for Mr. Manager Mom. (Manager Dad?)

We wound up at Ferrante, where we each ordered glasses of wine and something sweet. Our bartender was friendly and took care of us, but she had a curiously dour air about her - and after getting our drinks and placing our food order, she vanished for about fifteen minutes, leaving us to stare longingly at the hazelnut ice cream melting all over our lava cake as it sat on the bar's serving station two feet away. Somehow, the kitchen staff that delivered the dessert could not be convinced that it was ours, despite the fact that we were the only people sitting at the bar.

Finally, one of the waiters took pity on us and slid our dessert over. We dug in with relish and single-minded focus. All of the sudden, we became aware of a commotion! A kerfluffle! A brouhaha! A to-do, not more than 5 feet away at the back of the restaurant! Said ballyhoo (thank you by the way, thesaurus.com) resulted a man lying flat on the ground and a small crowd of people yelling for someone to call 911.

Somehow, we managed to miss the moment of impact (were we drunk? chocolate-crazed? you decide) - but the other bartender, a comely young Russian lass, was only too happy to dish that OUR bartender got in a fight with the manager and called her boyfriend, who came in to take a swing at said mananger, rendering him prone on the floor.

Needless to say, we assumed she would probably consider herself fired, and wasn't coming back.

The ambulance was called, and the manager seemed OK, and we were done with our drinks and dessert. As we got ready to leave, we suddenly became aware of a short slippery slope of potential moral dilemmas:

- We could easily live life on the edge and skip out on the bill.

- Knowing that we could, should we? Did the universe or the moral powers that be owe us a freebie to compensate for the bystander trauma we might have incurred by witnessing the aftermath of this senseless violence?

- If we did wimp out on the dine-n-dash, did we have to tip, since the person who served us would never see the benefit?

- And if so, how much of a tip was sufficient?

For the record, we DID pay, and we tipped about 15%. But there was definitely a moment where we were inspired to get our Bonnie & Clyde on. Hey, us minivan-driving, corporate-working for, suburban-living average Americans have to stay dangerous somehow.