Because we're filled with enthusiasm regarding our upcoming move into our large mortgage, Tiersa and I had dinner in downtown San Jose on Saturday night. Downtown San Jose is in many regards an odd place in that it is loaded with numerous little eateries, British-style pubs and other interesting little destinations, only nobody seems to go to any of them until the businesses shift into club-mode at around 10 p.m. or so. At 7 p.m. on a Saturday, you can park anywhere. By 11 p.m., it'll take you a half hour to drive 100 feet.
Anyway, we settled on a place serving Middle Eastern cuisine. More accurately, it settled on us. They had some girl standing outside the place, handing out free menus and promising buy-one-get-one-free entrees. We're suckers for little places like this, and the idea that this place sent someone out to the streets to drum up business worked on us. It didn't work on us enough to turn down that 2-for-1 offer, though. We may be suckers, but we're cheap suckers.
In order to get to this restaurant, we had to walk through another restaurant. One would think this would be bad for business, which probably explains the girl outside. We told her we were interested, and she became our private little eatery Sherpa, guiding us through the other (and seemingly much nicer) restaurant until we reached our little slice of the Middle East. Actually, this slice of the Middle East looked nothing like the Middle East; the European-style posters on the wall, the closed-for-quite-some-time oyster bar, and the patio tables complete with tavern-issue Heinkenen umbrellas told us much more about the previous establishment than it ever could have about this one.
We chose a patio seat, studied the menu for a bit, and placed our order. We had the appetizer plate -- which included hummus (decent), tabbouleh (very good), dolma (just damn nasty), falafel (average), and some olives -- and a couple of kabobs with rice. Kabob is a fun word to say, which might be why we ordered them. One beef kabob, one chicken kabob. Sideshow Kabob was not on the menu. All in all, everything was OK, although I certainly wasn't disappointed that one of the kabobs was a free kabob.
Dessert was really odd. I ordered baklava, which was pretty good. We also got this bizarre ice-cream creation which featured rose water ice cream (mmm ... the richness of ice cream with the unmistakeable flavor of bath soap) with a big block of frozen noodles on top. And when I say frozen noodles, I'm not doing the dish any justice. They took some rice noodles, hydrated them, put them in some sort of custard cup, and stuck the whole thing in the freezer. There was a big ice block atop our ice cream, and inside this ice block was noodles. Eating it made me feel like a really bad archaeologist. "What is behind this layer of ice? Might it be a mastodon? Nope. Just more noodles. Criminy."
The best thing about a dish like soap-with-block-of-frozen-noodles is that someone invented it. At some point in history, some demented chef determined that cooking noodles made them an entree, but freezing them in a solid block of ice like a noodlesicle made them a dessert. It's not like any flavoring was added. It was ice-flavored.
As we chisled our way through the noodles, the waiter came up to us. "Big treat soon," he said. "The show begin in less than 10 minutes. You like."
As promised, 10 minutes later our waiter goes into this little shed-like structure on the patio. All of the sudden, we start to hear Middle Eastern music piping out of a boombox. Then, right there in the middle of the frozen-noodle course, a belly dancer appears smack dab in the middle of the patio and starts, well, belly dancing. (What did you expect?)
When you're sitting under a Heineken umbrella on a patio in downtown San Jose, trying to rescue noodles from their frozen tomb, few things seem more out of place than a belly dancer shaking her business six inches in front of your face. What's more, I really have no idea what I'm supposed to do in the presence of a belly dancer. I figured with Tiersa sitting directly to my right, it probably wasn't the best idea to stare at any of the belly dancer's exposed parts -- and, mind you, this belly dancer was primarily made up of exposed parts. I didn't really want to look the belly dancer in the eye, either, lest she think to herself, "His eye contact must serve as an endorsement that I should continue to shake my business in his face for several more minutes."
We then entered the subtle-hint part of the show. She danced from one table to another, then she danced over to a waiter who knowingly tucked a dollar bill inside her bra strap. Suddenly, this place started to feel a lot less like a quaint restaurant and a lot more like a strip club. This brought on a whole new set of problems -- if I don't pay her for shaking her business in front of me, that certainly seems rude. But if I suddenly reward such behavior with cash and prizes, I really might be headed down a slippery slope. The last thing I wanted was to have a "you know, you could have refused the lap dance" conversation on the way back to the apartment.
Making matters worse, at least psychologically, for me was how I couldn't shake the mental image of my only other exposure to a belly dancer throughout my lifetime -- that episode of "Happy Days" where Marion dresses up like a belly dancer to attract the attention of her seemingly sexually disinterested husband, Howard "Mr. C" Cunningham. Not paying the belly dancer would be one degree of rudeness. Laughing at her because I half-expect Fonzie to walk in the restaurant would be quite another.
Fortunately, there's always a table of inebriated sales guys willing and able to come to the rescue. Another table of patrons started waving paper currency at the dancer, performing the Caucasian mating call ("Wooooooo!"). That was the last I had to deal with her. Thank you, drunken sales guys. And no, I'm not in the market for a Kia.
We paid our bill and left before any second showing started. I really didn't want to spend the rest of my night watching some chick dance with an anaconda draped over her shoulders. No kabob is worth that.
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