The "Italian" meal from hell, a memoir.

[betsuni]

Have you ever had a restaurant meal from hell? Please share.

Yesterday, after a long exhausting day of in-law related activities, I dreaded experiencing dinner at an Italian restaurant with them. At five o'clock in the afternoon. The place seemed nice on the outside: big Italian flag, poster boasting a wood-fired pizza oven and homemade mozzarella. Inside, different story. Overheated, bright lights that made my eyes water and sting, depressing dried flower arrangements collecting dust and bad "art" on the white plaster walls; an extremely short piped music selection -- "La vie en rose" repeated forty times at least (this is in the countryside of Japan, so ... France, Italy, whatever). I was horrified to learn we'd be having a set meal, like a tourist trap, and couldn't order from the menu.

First, horse'derves (sic). Two dry stale pieces of grissini wrapped with tasteless ham, a small cup of coleslaw (WTF), and a melba toast topped with soft gray salty fish abortions. Salad featuring one sad wilted piece of endive that looked as if it'd been recycled from the day before. Next, a fake escargot dish of bubbling hot garlic oil with the escargot replaced by elderly octopus tentacles and whatever seafood was in the fridge, accompanied by a large plate of nice French bread which we all stuffed ourselves with.

Then came two pizzas, but the nice-looking pizza oven produced pies with soft, tough, chewy dough and scanty toppings. Then came two enormous plates of pasta. Now, I don't know much about Italian food, but I don't think it's a thing in Italy to include cheap supermarket sausages in a pasta dish. There were sad small out-of-season eggplant slices floating around in the sea of noodles. Then an extremely salty chicken dish.

All of a sudden, it was like a bomb of carbs and salt went off inside me. My heart beat wildly, my stomach inflated into a balloon, I was hot, felt ill. I needed to get out of there. But as this was a set meal, we had to stay there two hours. That last 45 minutes was hell. I was practically delirious. I time traveled to the future where I could lay down and read a book and not have to talk or eat anymore and pretend to enjoy hell. Finally, finally, they served us the last insult, tea and coffee and a dessert I couldn't eat. I can't have caffeine in the afternoon, let alone at night, but I drank the damn tea. I didn't get to sleep until almost four in the morning. The final insult was that I gave my wallet to my husband when it came time to pay the bill, thinking he'd share it with the in-laws, but no. He announced that I had treated them. Almost the equivalent of three hundred U.S. dollars. Oh hell no.

It has been a day after that meal, and I still haven't eaten anything. I now have a grudge against Italy, sadly.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Ma Donna! Pass the Strega!

[betsuni]

2. I have no idea what that means.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. OMG, pass the digestive liqueur.

[betsuni]

11. Ah, that would've been just the thing.

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

3. May I suggest...

...returning to said establishment after being suitably "prepared".

Be sure to sit close to a few other diners.
Bring along a small toy to introduce into perhaps the soup or to leave peeking from under some of your partially eaten pasta.

Call some wait staff over and announce that you didn't order that and that you'll be leaving now.

[betsuni]

4. Revenge!

Good.

[mainer]

6. Italian food in the Japanese countryside?

That's your problem right there.

[betsuni]

10. I thought this might be different, what with that large new Italian flag

and nice pizza oven, but of course looking around at the other customers ... naturally the food would be Japanized to suit them. What burns my bacon is that the restaurant was chosen because the relatives thought I "couldn't handle Japanese food." They've seen me eat and enjoy Japanese food many times over the years, but it just doesn't seem to sink in. I wouldn't have minded paying for a good Japanese restaurant. They're also under the impression I can't sit on the floor and are always trying to get me in a chair. I prefer the floor. A lot of things are like that, it's funny but also makes me nervous.

[Phentex]

7. What's with the dusty fake flowers? My MIL wanted to go to an Italian place

for her birthday. It went from ten people to about 25 so we ended up having to use the banquet room with a minimum charge. They told us not to bring decorations except for a couple of balloons and I quickly discovered why. The ceiling was covered in these weird trellis things with fake vines and flowers and about a thousand pounds of dust (gross!) and decorations would only have added to the fire hazard.

I'll spare you the horrid details of the food but it made Olive Garden seem like a 5 star restaurant. Even the bread seemed like it had been frozen and barely thawed. Had a weird flavor. Service was terrible even though they seemed to have enough servers. One plate of pasta was so bad, the kids wouldn't eat it. The only good thing was the cake which came from a bakery and not the restaurant.

I have had some other really bad experiences over the years. I think the worst was when we took some long time friends we had not seen in a while to one of our favorite local places. We had been going there for years and always had good food and good service. We really built the place up when describing it to our friends.

It turned out to be like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Our drinks took forever. There was a problem with the wine. The appetizers were horrible. The food arrived at different times and somebody's was burned. I think we waited for one person's that had to be re-ordered. The whole night was just awful. (I know, first world problems!) Needless to say, the place closed not long after that but it was a real mystery as to what happened since it had been consistently good for so long.

[betsuni]

8. The bad restaurants on "Kitchen Nightmares" all seem to have variations of dusty fake flowers.

It's sad when a place that used to be good changes for the worse, especially a local one. And I know, I always think "first world problems" after whining about things, but this kind of recreational complaining has a place in the wide world of conversation, and so much fun!

[Kali]

9. I remember getting a pizza in Tokyo in the 70's.

It was INTERESTING, to say the least.

[tonekat]

12. You Have My Empathy

I was married into a Southern family that thought they just discovered the 70's...in the late 80's. Their family dinners ended in tears and remorse because my MIL just needed attention, similar to trump.

[betsuni]

13. One of the elderly relatives dropped quite a juicy piece of gossip earlier in the day.

That was exciting, at least. Nobody else had heard the story. She said my father-in-law, who died about ten years ago, had spent a lot of time at the teahouses as a young man and was madly in love with a geisha, wanted to marry her. Now, his family used to be low-level samurai but lost everything after the feudal system was abolished and got into rather shady businesses like gambling and then construction. So his family was fairly wealthy but not respectable. My FiL's mother insisted he get a good middle class job working for the local government (forestry department) and marry a nice middle class woman. It would've been a romantic story to have him run off with the geisha, but then my husband wouldn't be here. The FIL gave up, told his mother to pick someone out, he didn't care. So she did. I always felt my PIL didn't like each other very much, so this made perfect sense to me. Everybody else seemed pretty shocked. My MIL hasn't been dead very long and I hope she wasn't hanging around to hear this because, being the most uptight bourgeois person I've ever met, she'd be furious.

[Sanity Claws]

14. The Olive Garden operates in Japan?

I hope you know about long-running jokes in the Lounge.

[TexasBushwhacker]

16. I haven't eaten at Olive Garden since

my last meal there made me pass a gallstone.

[ProfessorGAC]

15. Well, That's A Drag, But. . .

. . .but don't overestimate the quality of restaurants in italy. having been there few dozen times, i've had some meals that were grossly overpriced and, quite seriously (given the running joke), no better than Olive Garden, except smaller portions.

Finding a small joint, (but knowing you need cash from Naples and north is a pretty good bet (although you might have to know at least some minimal italian). But, in the bigger cities i've run into some places that were ordinary at best and pretty pricey.