Monday, January 14, 2008

How To Make a Simple Dish Complicated

Austin is blessed with a great number of good taco places. One of my new favorites is actually just a mobile kitchen parked in a vacant lot with a few tables and chairs scattered around. Not exactly a custom kitchen, but good enough to make tacos in, right? Can’t imagine they do much actual prep there, but again it works.

I guess not everyone pays that much attention to the set up, however. The delightfully, “um, like” sorority girl in front of me had definite ideas about how she wanted her taco. Unfortunately, she wanted something that wasn’t on the menu.

After staring at the fairly basic, but delicious, menu for an excruciatingly long time, Missy says, “Um . . . What I really want is a carnitas taco.”

Pause.

The young woman in the window (who must be thinking, “Bitch, you’ve been looking at the damn menu since Carter was president and you still don’t realize we don’t have any fucking carnitas?) said, very politely “We don’t have carnitas.”

Missy exhaled loudly. Then, with a newfound sharpness to her already whiny sorority voice, said, “Well . . . then can I get the green chile pork taco? But I don’t want any cilantro. Or lime. Or onion.”

“Okay, so one green chile pork taco. Do you want the avocado and the queso fresca?”

“YES! I just don’t want ONIONS. OKAY?”

“So . . . do you want the lime and cilantro after all?

“I really just want a carnitas taco.”


Okay, people, you know at this point that O’Pine is about to make his own sorority girl taco and force feed it to her friends. I’m sure she just couldn’t figure out why, if they had the pork, they couldn’t make something JUST FOR HER. Never occurred to her that, given the cramped conditions of the catering truck, they probably had prepared all the food elsewhere. Besides, what difference does it make what's in the taco? She's only going to throw it up as soon as she gets home.

I placed my order and tried to find a table as far away from the Princess/Victims as I could. And wished that I could order mine, hold the whine.

1 comment:

hokgardner said...

And you just know that as soon as she got back to the sorority house she was all like, "Don't eat at the taco place on the corner. They like wouldn't make me my like favorite taco and like when I tried to order something different they like were so totally rude to me."