Last night Lauren, Emily, Sarah and I had our second Supper Club outing. During our most recent spa day at Nob Hill Spa (see Grapes and Salami post on March 27, 2008) we decided to start a Supper Club. The inspiration was this season of Top Chef Chicago, which has four chefs from San Francisco. It was decided that we don't see each other often enough because life gets in the way, so if we have a monthly dinner it will force us to get together and we can check out the Top Chef restaurants. So far we haven't been to any of those restaurants, but we have plenty of time for that.
We went to a tapas place called Laiola in the Marina. Not to turn this into a yelp posting, but the place had a great atmosphere and they pour little carafes of wine for the wines by the glass, so it's more like 1.5 glasses for $12. Which is also the price of a pretty good bottle of BV at Safeway. This is of course beside the point because Supper Club would lose all of its elegance if it took place in the Safeway deli. The first suggestion I made from the menu was chickpeas and blood sausage. Lauren quickly informed me that blood sausage is some sort of coagulated blood, not actual sausage, at which point I almost knocked over my $12 glass of wine in horror. Needless to say I ended up ordering the grilled quail. After we finished our first five or six dishes, we decided to continue ordering. We got some advice from our waiter and he said that we should order the blood sausage dish and everyone agreed (except me). It was basically dark brown/red squishy bits of matter on top of chickpeas in a bowl. Gross. After a lot of pressure, I tasted a little bit and it didn't taste like much, but it was very salty.
After two hours of another successful Supper Club meal, the bill arrived. Everyone didn't have the same amount of alcohol, so we decided to divide the food by 4 and then everyone would pay for their own alcohol. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. Three of us are accountants and it took us about 20 minutes to figure this out. Part of this 20 minutes was taken up by our bitching about the "cover charge" which we thought was the bread and water. We were getting pretty fired up about being charged for something that was brought to the table without us ordering it and something that is customarily free. The waiter finally came over and asked if we needed help because it was taking so long (and I think they were trying to close and we didn't realize it). He explained that the cover charge was for the health care costs of the employees that San Francisco recently voted for. It was also written in bold on the insert with the bill. Hmm, that was embarrassing. Then we all got confused about how much to tip. What percentage should we tip and should it be before or after alcohol? Emily was attempting to tip 16% (that's right, not 15% or 20%, but 16%) and couldn't figure out how to use the calculator function on her cell phone. The whole scene was ridiculous, entertaining and sad.
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1 comment:
That's awesome. I hate figuring out the check...especially when I have a diet coke and everyone else has like 3 glasses of wine, then they just say "let's split it." Grr. I also hate the new SF tax, but am amused how restaurants make it overly obvious on the check.
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