The Vanity of Macaroni Grill
6/19/1

Some will say that I am being harsh since my expectations were built up about how good Macaroni Grill would be due to people telling me how much I�d like it. But that isn�t the case, since I always assumed those people had no clue what my taste in food is like.

Once it reaches my digestive track, it�s all the same to me.

When I ate at Wings last week, the two gals were telling me how much I�d like it. �Do you like Olive Garden?� they asked. �No, I hate it.� �Well, you�ll like this more than Olive Garden.�

I like a bowl of cereal more than Olive Garden.

So, we go to Macaroni Grill and get there at around 4:40 pm since we live in such a Podunk city that the new overpriced pasta chain restaurant has everyone swooning over it. Give it three months and it will be just like Copeland�s. Copeland�s was the big thing a few months ago. I bet it goes under in less than two years.

The best thing about Macaroni Grill was that right now it�s a cool place to work for the young beautiful people. Two of the comments that I made after we were seated were �I think I�m the oldest person in the building� and �If there was any doubt whether it was fashionable to weigh 94 pounds and wear skin tight black dresses, that issue has now been laid to rest.�

The hostesses all wear black. There were around six of them and the one who seated us was wearing a very tight dress. Solidifying the feel of her ensemble was a gold chain being worn as a belt, but loosely. �Collect all six,� I commented to Aisai. We joked that you couldn�t use them as bookends since they were too light.

But the young beautiful people were nice to look at. It was a parade of hairstyles also. One of my favorites was the girl who had blue hair pulled into two small ponytails. She never waited on us. �Sasami,� I commented to Aisai.

All wait staff wear white shirts with ties and have a red cloth they hang over their shoulder. The entire place has a very polished Six Flags feel to it. It�s a production, a show. Some people like that. One of my favorite places to eat is the bus stop�s sandwich shop. The food is great and the atmosphere is genuine though odd at times.

Our waitress showed up and brought a huge bottle of wine. I told her that we didn�t need that on the table. I refrained from making a fava bean joke when she mentioned it was Chianti. Then she did something that was very Six Flags to me.

�I�m going to make you what they call Italian Butter.� No, she made us olive oil with some spices in it by using the quart bottle of olive oil that had been sitting on our table and her foot and a half long pepper grinder loaded with spices that she brought.

You know what Italian butter is? It�s butter. If you were in Italy and asked for some butter, there are only two things you might get, and the one that isn�t butter is margarine.

The food was very oily. Aisai got ravioli and I got two chicken breasts with mushrooms and cheese on them. We also got Caesar salads. Aisai teased me that I was going to get the Chicken Caesar salad.

The waiter gal said that the word pollo in Italian was pronounces �polo� where I, being from Texas and leaning more to Spanish than Italian, would and did pronounce it �poyo�. Whatever.

Aisai had been given a gift card for $30 from her co-workers. We had what I described above and I drank a diet coke and Aisai a coke. The bill was twenty-eight dollars. She got a heck of a tip since I left the $30 card and a five.

I think she was shocked at the tip, because it was obvious we didn�t really like the meal. Sure, it was fine. But my wife can cook.

Aisai mentioned that as a reason why possibly so many people swoon over these restaurants. One thing I said when I got my food, �We can make this at home.� And you can. It�s easy.

I can also get pizza with crust from scratch at home. No pizza place I have been to has made better pizza than my wife. However, her brother, Tom, has made some really good pizza, though his is always so heavy on the meat.

It isn�t as if I don�t enjoy flavors or smells. I enjoyed the smell of the freshly paved I-565 quite a bit on my way in, perhaps more than a person should enjoy the smell of asphalt. I also like the smell of steel quite a bit.

But the execution and rules of Macaroni Grill are very well carried out. The lighting is great. The rules of how the servers bring food works really well as part of the experience. See, they will get as many carriers as possible to get your food to show up all at once. So you have this army of beautiful youth show up with food and then they are gone.

Another interesting thing was the organization. The controller in the kitchen doesn�t cook. He wears a black hat and coordinates everything. Aisai called him the logistics person. There was also a cook who actually was older than me. If you�ve ever seen how a jerk doctor treats his nurses, this man treated the female wait staff that way.

I�ve only mentioned the female wait staff, but the males also must have been required to have meticulously trimmed trendy facial hair configurations. They all looked like they could have made some boy band at the drop of a hat.

After we got home from the Italian Amusement Park Restaurant, Aisai worked in the yard, weeding. I watered the yard and played with the neighbor�s cat. Then we watched Futurama and Tenchi off the Replay TV. Aisai went upstairs to put together some piece of cheap furniture we bought for the upstairs bathroom and I watched the WRC Cypress rally.