restaurant hell: a dining event

On Friday night, my boyfriend Beau went to a holiday dinner party for the company where he currently works. I am a nice girlfriend, because I agreed to go to a restaurant that I have actively avoided since it opened in this town: Buca di Beppo.
When Buca di Beppo first appeared in Austin, I knew nothing about it except that the signs outside seemed a bit garish. Well, so are the signs at Chuy’s and I love to eat there. After some friends ate at the new restaurant, I found out the scoop.
Buca di Beppo is a national chain. The restaurant serves only “family-style” meals—most portions are meant to serve 4-6 people.
In other words, single diners are not welcome there.

At the time, I dined alone a lot, except during group lunches with coworkers. I wasn’t about to support some restaurant that I felt actively shunned me and my single-diner lifestyle. So I refused to eat there. I wasn’t about to give an anti-singles restaurant any of my money.
Friends of mine have exclaimed about the gloriousness of the restaurant, the wonderful food and atmosphere, their great good luck in getting to sit at “the Pope table,” and other delights. I had never been invited to eat there with friends whom I particiularly wanted to see, because I probably would have caved in and gone. (I feel the same way about the Cheesecake Factory that is situated where the Arbor 7 theater used to be—I’m not going there of my own volition, but if invited as part of a social occasion I might otherwise want to attend, I will go and deal with it.)
My boyfriend had been to a Buca di Beppo in San Francisco once, many years ago, and he didn’t remember much about it, just that it was standard company/large group dining. So we decided we would attend the holiday dinner.
The minute we walked into the place, I was a bit suspicious. I realized this was going to be one of those “theme-park” restaurants, the kind that pretends to be authentic something-or-other and re-creates someone’s idea of authenticity. Obviously this was meant to represent a small family-owned Italian bistro, with photos of family members on the walls and so forth. Except that the place was enormous, with photos and posters cluttering every single wall, enough to represent several small Italian villages. Music was playing that I recognized as being in Moonstruck.
We were led to our table through the kitchen, which was meant to be another aspect of the Small Family Bistro experience. I saw a table for diners in the kitchen. Some restaurants in New Orleans have tables for diners in the kitchen, but these are upscale, pricey restaurants and it’s meant as the ultimate foodie experience. I became a little more suspicious.
Beau’s company had an entire room reserved for the dinner. It was a regular restaurant dining room, with tables for six or eight people all around—not a couple of long tables like I would have imagined. The tables that contained people my boyfriend actually knew were full, so we sat at a booth with a nice couple who were originally from Switzerland and we all got to know each other.
We realized that two more places were set in the booth—it was meant to be a “cozy” dining atmosphere. No one ever sat in those spots that evening, because perhaps no one wanted to be quite that cozy. It was good room for four, but terrible room for six unless you had small children or supermodels in your party. We would have fit fine, but waiters and waitresses kept squeezing into the extra space to bring us things, or to chat with us, so I felt claustrophobic and squeezed into the corner the whole meal. My boyfriend’s elbow kept smacking into me. I mean, I love to be close to my sweetie, but this was a bit too much. I think another part of the problem was that the seats were too close to the table.
The waiters came by and started pushing wine at us. No non-alcoholic alternatives were offered. Wine gives me migraines, so I stuck with water. The couple at our table did have the wine and they told us that we weren’t missing a thing.
As the room filled up, it got very loud in there. Now y’all know that my boyfriend and I are not fond of loud restaurants. He has a terrible time hearing anything. This place made North by Northwest and Trudy’s seem like chapels of rest. I was shouting the whole time, and after we left the restaurant, I tried to tell my boyfriend something and didn’t even realize I was still shouting. He had to remind me gently that I could return to a quiet voice level. There were whole chunks of conversation I didn’t understand, where I just nodded and smiled, or made a good guess at the appropriate answer and hoped I didn’t sound like an idiot.
The food started to arrive in a preselected group menu. The huge plate of garlic bread and gigantic salad would have been enough of a meal for most of us at our table. The salad was fine except that there were hidden tomato wedges and the olives were unpitted. Sneaky.
The dinner we got was on three huge platters: one plate of four different kinds of baked pasta, one plate of lemon chicken breasts, and one plate of shrimp scampi. The other woman at our table didn’t like cheese, so she had a hard time finding things to eat. She mostly had chicken. Well, it was an Italian restaurant, you can’t fault anyone for that.
And the food was … bleah. I am not picky about Italian food. My department’s dinner party was at Johnny Carino’s, another big-chain Italian restaurant, and the food was acceptable. (Actually my salad was kind of gross, but I’d eaten there before and the pasta dishes are fine.) I will eat at Olive Garden and be happy. I like Carrabba’s and I love Semolina’s in the New Orleans area.
But this food? The baked pasta was heavy and bland, except for the shells with sausage in them, which I found a little gross. The shrimp was just plain nasty (now, I am picky about shrimp, and I would hesitate to order seafood in any chain), and the chicken was dull but edible. I didn’t understand why, instead of all that heavy baked pasta, they didn’t bring a big bowl of plain linguine to enjoy with the shrimp and chicken dishes, but apparently that is not the way things are done at Buca di Beppo. The heavier, the bigger, the better.
And there were no vegetables whatsoever, other than the salad, although I did see some on the menu so I can’t blame the restaurant entirely for that.
(I am indebted to my friend Jennifer for giving me a hint to fill up as much as possible on the salad. Jennifer is often forced on a low-fat diet because of cholesterol issues, and she said she had a terrible time finding anything appropriate to eat at Buca.)
The waitstaff cleared away an obscene amount of uneaten food, which was going to be thrown away since none of us wanted it. I would fuss about the waste, but trust me, no one wanted that food. They brought out a giant bowl of tiramisu and a huge wedge of chocolate cake. I have been known to like tiramisu sometimes, but what was in that bowl was frankly disgusting. The cake was just tasteless. We had a few sips of decaf coffee and finally my boyfriend could stand no more and we got the hell out of there.
Getting out of there was a problem. We had to ask two different waiters for assistance, and the front entrance hall was packed full of people. I heard the hostess at the front door telling someone that the wait would be two hours, at least.
Two hours! People actually were willing to wait two hours to experience mediocre-at-best food, poor wine, horrible acoustics that prevented much conversation … why? Would someone explain this to me? Why would so many people clamor for the mediocre? (I will avoid drawing political parallels here, although it is tempting.)
When we got home, we both felt ill. I had trouble eating the next morning—I hadn’t had very large portions, but the food was so heavy that I felt positively gross. I suggested to my boyfriend that sometime soon, perhaps even before I leave town if I can manage it, we eat at a very good Italian restaurant to wash the evil echoes of that horrible meal out of our systems. I don’t even know where, but we’ll think of something.
Or maybe I can convince my parents to go somewhere really nice with me in the New Orleans area, where there are tons of top-notch Italian restaurants. (My favorite was a place where my uncle apparently apprenticed as a chef, so the chef knew who we were, told us to ignore the menu, and just brought us a lot of different stuff that he liked to cook. I don’t remember the name of the place but the food was fabulous and I love eating like that.)
I still don’t understand the appeal of Buca di Beppo. My boyfriend said that it is one of those places that provides a Great Dining Experience, that it is meant to be an event more than a meal.
“What kind of an event? One with good food?”
“Um, no.”
“One with lively conversation?”
“Nooo.”
Beau feels that the dining event we experienced was Restaurant Hell, including every single possible thing we might complain about when we go out to eat: the inability to hear each other, the “theme park” atmosphere, crowds of people, and poor food. However, I suspect that was not the intent of the restaurant. So if any of you know what the Great Dining Experience was meant to be, would you please tell me?
Now, on the other hand …
My favorite Great Dining Experience was at Drago’s in Metairie in 1993. My parents took the family there for dinner to celebrate my getting my master’s degree from the University of Texas. We ordered something called The Feast, which I don’t know if Drago’s still offers, and which we haven’t done since. It was a 15-course meal (at least), with small portions of all kinds of amazing things. Drago’s bills itself as a Cajun-Croatian restaurant, so you can imagine the variety. The best things were the charbroiled oysters, which are the only oysters I truly love (even oyster haters like them), and the seafood pasta. My dad knows the owners, and when one of them found out we were there for a special occasion, they brought out even more courses, including some delicious scallops.
I love a restaurant where you can ask where the oysters came from and someone will actually tell you, in detail, where they were caught and when. (Drago’s charbroiled oysters are still the best thing ever done to oysters. If you are ever in the New Orleans area, particularly Fat City, you must try them.)
We tried to pace ourselves through all the courses but I am not sure if any of us managed to try everything. It is difficult to remember that you really should have only a taste of this or that when it is all so very good.
At the time, my family had just started watching the TV show Seinfeld because a relative told us (correctly) that my brother’s hair made him look a lot like Kramer. We had all seen the episode about the masturbation contest in which the characters keep asking each other, “Are you still master of your domain?” “Still king of the castle.” We had a running joke that night in which we’d ask each other that after every course, and conversation was very lively and silly.
And then at the end they brought out brownies with ice cream, and we just stared at the plate with our eyes glazed, and groaned, and ended up eating most of it anyway. I think it took us all days to recover, but it was a good and happy thing.
That is my idea of a Great Dining Event.