For Christmas this year, I gave my sister, Michel, a gift certificate to a local fondue restaurant. I wanted to do something special for her and my niece suggested a meal at this specialty restaurant would be a fun, different kind of treat. Something she would enjoy and remember...something like that.
Now, my sister is wonderfully generous. So generous in fact, that she insisted she and her husband, Chuck, use this gift certificate to take Roger and me out to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Yes, Michel is generous - she's also very smart. Smart enough to make sure she's not the only fondue rookie seated at the table.
Looking back, the entire evening reminded me of the joke about the two guys who attended a fight and a hockey game broke out. We went out for fondue dinner and a hockey game broke out, or something really close.
I'd already gotten some tips from my oldest, Alex, the Dining Adventurer. He warned me about the different cooking times for each type of food and that it takes a fairly long time for each piece of food to cook. He suggested we cook more than one thing at a time.
See? That's the problem..fondue is DINING, as in the European style of leisurely enjoying a meal. The focus is on the people and conversation instead of stuffing your face with the food in front of you, at warp speed, while wondering WHERE is the dessert cart?
My family definitely believes eating is more of a sport, and we all play to win. So, I guess it's no surprise that if you give us each a couple of long forks, a pot of hot oil and many small pieces of food, you've got a food version of a hockey game on your hands.
Oh sure, we started off slow and easy, but impatience (and hunger) reared it's ugly head and before long we were stuffing all of our food-laden forks into the pot at the same time. In fact, Roger and Chuck, in an extreme show of unsportsmanlike conduct, started throwing pieces of food straight into the pot - without even using their forks. I kept expecting to see a flag thrown or hear a whistle, but no such luck. Where's the call Ref?
By this time, the fondue pot is fairly disgusting with globs of breading floating on the top and God Only Knows What hiding on the bottom. When my sister's steak fell off of her fork, she grabbed all of the other forks and hoisted them up while she searched in vain for her missing bite of food. In my family we don't play fair..the Fair is in October.
Oh sure, it was embarassing when the restaurant manager, seeing the horrible condition of our fondue pot, immediately sent the waiter over to clean out all of the debris. But, it didn't stop us from high-fiving over the table when we found Michel's missing steak AND a forgotten piece of potato. SCORE!
I guess you could say the fondue restaurant was definitely an experience. An experience that we might not want to repeat, one that left a bad taste in our mouths so to speak.
Yeah, you could say that, except the only taste I really remember is the big ol pot of warm chocolate they slapped in the middle of the table at the end. After that, everything is a blur.
