You know the drill. It’s 7 on Friday night. Six of you are out for dinner, the wine has arrived and your waiter has just plunked down an assortment of bread, buns and butter onto your table.
Pumpernickel buns. Some kind of herby, whipped butter. A perfectly nice but pedestrian crusty whitebread. Why do we dive on it like a pack of ravenous dogs?
Sure, sure – we haven’t eaten since noon. And yes, we need to soak up the booze we are drinking. But I think it goes deeper than that.
It’s free. Free is good. Free is a bonus. No matter that free includes carbohydrates we wouldn’t normally consider eating and free makes us full before the scallops that we were really looking excited about eating, arrive.
Personally, I never “fill up on buns”. That said, for complete disclosure purposes, put tortilla chips and salsa in front of me and 30 seconds later and I am asking for more.
From a restaurants point of view I don’t understand it. We’re all full so no dessert. Or do free buns and addictively delicious butter mask the over priced middling fare provided? Do the carbs go to our heads? Will white flour stupor prevent us from giving 2 and half star reviews on Yelp?
Or maybe the bread/buns/butter is merely a diversion? While we are all happily chewing, in the kitchen the staff are screaming “we have more customers – again” and then run around crazily flapping their arms. They need those bread munching minutes to get their heads back in the game?
I’m going to throw this thought out there. While the whole “crazy in the kitchen” thing is going on, instead of sedating us with sugar’s evil cousin carbs, why not give us something else to do? Divert us with something like food related jumbles or crosswords? Fine dining Keno? Beaujolais bingo?
Just stop making us fill up on buns.
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