How to eat out in America

June 7, 2006

America is a land of wide open spaces. There is room to eat all you can.

I read recently in, I think, the Adventure Cycling magazine of a traveller arriving in France on an American airline. As the plane dropped down towards Paris, she heard the words "Say farewell to ice in your drinks."

The American passion for ice is quite something. I had to beg people to leave it out, or at any rate limit it to a couple of lumps. Otherwise it got served in Titanic-scale quantities so that there was no room left for the drink. If you didn't drink it all straight away, the ice would melt and you'd have an ever-increasing but ever-weaker glass of coloured water that defined description.

Alley Mill and its turqouise waters. (Saying *waters* rather than simply *water*, which means the same thing, is the sign of a poetic soul.)

On the other hand, I really appreciated the American habit of refilling my glass (or more usually, plastic container) with cold drinks for as long as I sat there. It's true that, in the case of Coke, it was that foaming, ersatz stuff that gets brewed on the spot rather than the real thing from a bottle, but I could hardly complain when it kept coming for nothing.

On the other hand, things like that made us laugh. We were a mixture of nationalities and we Europeans couldn't understand when we went for a meal for the first time why there were only starters on the menu and expensive ones at that. Try as we might, we couldn't find the page with the main meals. Then the Canadian in the group explained that, in America, the entrée is the actual meal. In Europe it means what it does in French - "the entry" or the starter.

In Eminence, Missouri, we went out in the evening and Jacques, the Belgian, appointed himself head of wine. Jacques spoke Dutch and French but not a lot of English, so I went to the counter to translate for him.

"I'd like to see the wine list, please", he said.

"We don't have any."

"You don't have any wine or you don't have any wine lists?"

"Sure we got wine. We just don't have lists."

Jacques looked perplexed. I don't drink wine because I don't like it but Jacques is used to wine lists as long as a telephone directory.

"So what have you got?"

"Well," said the teenage waitress, trying her best to remember, "we got red wine."

"What sort of red wine?"

"Well, we got it in big bottles and little bottles, but I don't think we got any big bottles left."

Jacques made that sort of "ooof" noise that only people with French as their native tongue can make and came to some sort of arrangement for what we'd all drink.

Now, it happened that in the party, too, was an Australian woman, much younger than her 60 years, who dreamed of the occasional night in a hotel and "a comfortable room where I can drink wine and paint my toenails."

Helen was the last to join us. When she came in, the wine had been ordered but not served and the rest of us were choosing what we'd eat. The same waitress saw her and asked what she'd like to drink.

'But I haven't seen the wine list yet," Helen protested, unaware of what had gone before.

"I meant," said the waitress, "Coke or Dr Pepper."

Helen, the wizard of Oz: "But I haven't seen the wine list yet..."

Eminence was where we had a rest day to go kayaking . It was where my Dutch friend and I went into the post office and the man behind the counter identified Holland as the ancient kingdom of Batavia and began citing its history. Given that the girl in the souvenir shop across the road had had to ask where in the world Holland was, that was quite something.

But there was better to come. We were just about to leave when Jacques came in. The post office man was delighted to now have three nationalities, all of them foreign, and began talking to Jacques in French. When the two of them got to the Gauls and the Romans, the post office man began addressing Jacques on the history of Belgium - in Latin.

This may not be normal in American post offices.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	0
Comment on this entry	Comment	0