sharing a meal

this is a post written by my friend jeff at *so i go* - who is currently in between blogs as he just wound up his perpetual novel.

he and i had a great discussion and used a lot of restaurant analogies and it inspired him to pen the following; he told me to use it and after much debate back and forth, and since he is being a little stubborn about things, i thought it was a pretty cool read and since i am a restaurant kind of gal, wanted to give it some air time...no creative common license for me here; it's all jeff...

~*~*~*~*~

You and I are both hungry and so we need to eat. We have different tastes, but thankfully there's a big, well known restaurant that we both like. When we get there, the menu we're ordering from has a wide variety of options to choose from. I like steak and you like fish -- and both choices are excellent because the Chef is out of this world. We enjoy our dinner together (you know, that we ordered from the same menu) and we even steal a few bites from each other's plates for variety.

But really, at the end of the day, I prefer steak and you prefer fish.

Some experts say that fish is much healthier, but they can never seem to agree on anything, so I'm not too concerned. The important thing is that we're getting fed. Our bodies are being nourished. We're together and the conversation and the community we share is also of utmost importance.

Because of that, the last thing I would ever do is question your decision to eat fish. And I hope you're OK with my leaning toward red meat. We both love this Chef, so I think if we fought about this, our time together might be ruined. We could get heartburn, or worse yet, lose our appetite altogether.

When we're done, we need to leave and go for a walk and burn off some of these calories. The Chef encourages it and of course knows we'll be back soon, at least once a week. As we go, we'll keep alive our stimulating conversation -- but ultimately we're people of action and since we're full, we're stronger and healthier. And we're up for it, whatever it may be. While we thoroughly enjoy the food and the restaurant and long to eat again, we don't eat to sit still. We don't eat just to eat. We gain sustenance through the process, you know, for energy -- to go and to do the things we talked about during dinner. Actually, that's the whole point.

Even though I don't think we need to dissect how our meals were prepared, strangely enough, the amazing culinary touch of the Chef finds itself repeated and reflected in so many of the recipes that we enjoy when we can't be at the restaurant. And so we start to prepare some of our own dishes for people that are hungry. And maybe they'll to want to learn where we got the recipe.

Come to think of it, the restaurant is just a building, so by itself, it's really not as important as the Chef and the recipe and the dishes we prepare, because the ambience and the wait staff are only as good as the cooking coming out of the kitchen.

All the same, regrettably, every time we go out to this big restaurant, there are people there that would rather argue about why their choice of dinner was better than the other, or about the preferential treatment that they're getting from the Chef. Conversations get heated over this and over that and while some hungry people look in from the outside, their faces drop and the restaurant itself no longer seems appealing. Instead of entering in and perhaps becoming better acquainted with the Chef, they lose their appetites and simply walk away.

And so it goes - as the people inside argue, they lose sight of personal taste and tolerance and really, they're just getting fat talking about it because that's all they ever do. At the end of their day, nothing has been done because they simply wasted too much time. The Chef is pretty upset at this point because it seems like all they're doing is taking up space...