Into the Heart of America

[Loosely based on true events.]

We sat around for awhile, pondering what would we have to eat for dinner tonight? We first eliminated some of the suspects from our list. I had sushi for lunch, so anything from the Far East was probably out. Mark was stuck in Florida, so Mexican and Cuban was a definite no-no. Issac could get us a sweet deal on burgers, but I already chowed down on McD’s not once, but twice yesterday. I did not wish to relive that experience again.

Suddenly, Mom talked about digging up some old stuff and said she found a $25 gift card to TGI Fridays that no one had used. We briefly discussed maybe trying that place out. After all, we had gotten a sneak preview with the many, many commercials for Ruby Tuesday’s and Applebee’s that had popped up during the basketball game on TV that had ended an hour ago. I remember falling asleep halfway through, an act that would shame anyone with alliegance to either Maryland or Duke University. When I woke up, the postgame took on a solemn tone, with the local news anchor forced to confront the fact that his hometown team was probably not going to be making it to the big dance this month.

Anyways, we all decided to do something incredibly daring: rather than feasting on fancy Italian or dining at the cheap-yet-cozy Chinese resturaunt, we decided to brave the Pike and hit TGI Fridays, giftcard in hand that Mom had so graciously uncovered and lent to us. We were going to venture into the dark heart of American cuisine. No telling what we’d find there.

Perhaps I should rephrase that: we had a pretty good idea of what we’d find. We expected to find steak, mashed potatoes, and a bunch of boiled green beans off to the side that they would call “veggies.” Even with this in mind, we hopped in the car and sped off to Fridays. Upon arriving, there were several people sitting off to the side. Julie was afraid we wouldn’t be able to get a seat, and her will was beginning to waver. Nonetheless, I went up to the nearest waiter and asked how long it would take for them to clear a table for three people. They gave me an estimate of 10 minutes.

I was willing to wait that long, but then out of the shadows a server struck, perhaps eyeing a possible tip or another sucker to get hooked on the stuff they were selling. “We could send them to table eight,” she said, “They just finished cleaning that table.” And so Julie’s intuition was thwarted by the server who had sprung the trap, leading us to our table and slapping down a few menus before we could turn back. We asked for some water and then glanced through the multi-colored menus laid before us.

The Fridays was indeed a celebration of the dark heart of American cuisine, and I hadn’t even ordered yet. The ceiling with the barberpole-striped red and white color scheme, curving down a nearby black column that provided a solid middleman as it lanced in between panes of opaque, star-studded glass. It looked like the rejected color scheme of a Washington Wizards uniform. My feelings sunk even further when we saw what was actually on the menu itself. The vast majority of items on the menu fell into one of two categories, as Julie later pointed out.

1) Fried and/or covered in cheese

2) Came with meat (even the meat).

Continuing down the dark path, the caffiene from my recently-ordered Coke fueling my desire to keep on pushing further and further. It was too late to back out now. So I went for one of the “Custom Combos by Jack,” involving a hearty glaze of Jack Daniels-flavored BBQ sauce pasted over a 6oz. piece of sirloin and a skewer of “bacon-wrapped shrimp.” Julie went for a similarly-sized piece of steak and asked for broccoli on the side. Tom was feeling a little more daring, and went with the fried shrimp with fries, but also threw in an appetizer of fried green beans with a “cucumber-wasabi” dip.

As we waited for the food, we could hear the screaming, the pandemonium and chaos that ruled in the Fridays and over America. Babies were screaming for their mommies to make their troubles all better. Fat women were chattering over the last episode of Gray’s Anatomy as they scarfed down their desert of crumbled brownie pieces with ice cream on top. One Latino gentlemen sat across from a woman and was paying with a gift card as well. Maybe they were close enough that such an action was no longer considered to be in poor taste.

Across the resturaunt, someone was cheering as the wait stuff sang the Happy Birthday song. At the bar, someone was cheering when the Washington Capitals scored another goal against the hockey team from the ice-less Carolina. The people sitting at the table adjacent from us looked like the cross-breed of giant lizard men and inbred women who got drunk on moonshine and collapsed in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. I was already freaking out, and hoped that they would speed up with cooking our food so we could eat and leave.

Eventually, our orders came. The fried green beans had a taste familiar to fried zuchinni sticks, and gave the impression that they were healthier than simply scarfing down the fries that would come with Tom’s main dish. Julie recieved her plate, and not only did they undercook it but they had given her vegetables to me while they gave her a small dish of cheddar-covered…something. I valiantly plunged my fork into the concoction after recieving her permission to do so, and took a bite. It was mashed potatoes. Mashed potatoes under a layer of cheddar cheese.

Finally, they set down my plate. The steak was unevenly cooked, but otherwise not bad. The “bacon-wrapped shrimp” meant that they literally wrapped one thin strip of bacon around the entire skewer of shrimp before they tossed the whole thing on the grill. The mashed potatoes were pretty good, aside from the fact that some bits of cheddar had gotten into the mixture. And the veggies were small, pathetic attemps to balance out this artery-clogging dish that sat before me.

We ended up eating most of it, thought Julie tried to get her steak cooked a little bit more as she found that she couldn’t eat it. That feeling only got worse later when the waitress returned with her steak. In a rare display of chutzpah, the cook had simply burned the already-burnt outsides while leaving the middle mostly untouched.

Finally, we declined to purchase dessert as we packed up and left, leaving only the gift card and a small tip in our wake. We didn’t want to be in that madhouse any longer. The cuisine was definitely from the dark heart of America, where everything was fried or had cheese on it. Maybe the French had the right idea when they opposed us during the Iraq War. We totally deserved to be nuked by Saddam, if this food and the people who normally ate this food were any indication.

God Bless America.