How many times has this happened to you:
You come to one of those fancier restaurants; one where they have waiters, ambient music, and expect you to eat with a knife and fork. Then you find out that they have a system for ordering food, wherein you set check marks next to items you want to shove into your face-hole.
“This is easy,” you think to yourself, “I’ve set check marks next to items in a list before. This is going to be a cakewalk.” Then you start thinking about cake, because you have the attention span of a flea high on exhaust fumes and are easily distracted when clown bonanza flashing lights escapade.
You decide to skip the starter and to only order the main dish. You get back to the menu and discover that you can set a giant “A” or “B” after the number of your dish, where “A” stands for “normal person portion” and “B” stands for “shortcut to obesity.” You figure that more food is better than not more food, so you set a “B” next to your order. Then you proceed to set a check mark next to “French Fries” instead of baked potatoes, because baked potatoes can go right to Hell where they belong.
Then you set a check mark next to “Bearnaise sauce” only to immediately find out that it actually says “Bearnaise butter,” because this restaurant offers both butter and sauce and believes you to be an adult capable of making an active choice as to which one you prefer. You cross out the butter part by basically drawing all over it and proceed to mark “Bearnaise sauce” as you intended. At that exact moment, you read the line below “Bearnaise sauce.” It reads: “Chili Bearnaise sauce.” You want that one. Also, you’re an idiot who can’t stop his stupid hands from compulsively drawing check marks without letting the brain process information.
You cross out the wrong choice again. You’re so close…
And then your wife casually suggest that you may want to consider a starter after all. She’ll be having one. Also, those starters do look good. Good point, you’ll pick a starter…but first, you probably should change that main dish size from “B” back to “A” to at least pretend to have a sense of moderation. You look at the final order and realize that you’ve somehow managed to make an absolute, god-awful mess of something that requires fewer steps than picking weekly lottery numbers.
Thankfully, the card has a reverse side especially for people with your failing motor skills. You decide to start all over.
But wait! How will the waiter know which side to use?! Better make sure the side you’ve botched up is as visibly unusable as possible. So you cross out all items. Then you add a giant “X” over the whole thing, because honestly, at this point, why the Hell not?
You also momentarily forget that you’re a 30-something-year-old dude and not an adorkable child, so you draw what you believe to be a cute little smiley face that is crying over its failure to fill out a simple form, mistakenly believing that the restaurant’s staff won’t make fun of you the moment your waiter shows them this pathetic piece of ruined paper.
Can you relate to that hyper-specific scenario? If so, me too! What a coincidence, right?
All of the above is 100 percent true. I even have the picture to prove it:
My hobby: photographing own failures for posterity.
You can laugh. Go ahead. I dare y…oh, you were already laughing? Well then, carry on.
Nest Expressed 
I could never go there because: A. Both sides of the menu would end up with a big X on it B. I don’t live in Denmark.
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If I were you, I’d come to Denmark just to set a bunch of “X”s on all restaurant menu cards. You could even gain a reputation as the “X-foodie bandit.” That’s gotta be worth something!
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That sounds like an idea! Not sure what kind of idea,but hell I am game. 😉
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whoa. tell me where the restaurant is, so i know not to go there!
only place i’ve been to with that type of ordering is sushi and dim sum restaurants. at a sushi all you can eat, the service was terrible (they kept trying to tell us to order less food) and at a dim sum restaurant, i don’t know what anything is called. its a recipe for failure!
and i have no idea what bernaise sauce is!
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Well, this restaurant is on a ferry that travels between Copenhagen and Oslo, so you probably don’t risk running into it on a regular day!
I always assumed Bearnaise sauce is something this dude called Bearnaie makes. His parents thought “Bernie” was too simple, so they named him this pretentious name instead. Now he’s a world renown chef with his own sauce brand.
I may be very wrong about this.
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There’s a burger joint here in Knoxville that makes you fill in check marks on a menu. We ended up ordering way too much food and felt rather foolish. Now I wish I had drawn a crying smiley face on the menu. That would have made all the difference. ALL THE DIFFERENCE.
But of course, I don’t have your savvy Daniel. Damn you Daniel and your savvy. Damn you.
(Thankfully you don’t have your fans fill out check marks of your funniest posts. I don’t have that kind of time.)
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I find that drawing crying faces works for a number of social situations: Forgetting an important family anniversary, stepping on your neighbor’s flower bed, “accidentally” setting fire to your colleague Dwayne’s desk and burning down all of his personal belongings. Stupid Dwayne.
I hope you remember this lesson. Uh, the crying face one, not the “burning your colleagues’ desks.”
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I’ve never had to complete my menu choices with pen and paper. A couple of years ago on a cruise I had to choose my food via an iPad – and a total balls-up I made of that!
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The advantage of an iPad is that you don’t have to draw a crying smiley. You just pick one from the many pre-designed templates in a special app!
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So they do this because the waiters are not able to check this for you? I guess we’re behind here on this side of the pond, our waiters read the list to us and then checks what we want, and if we change our mind too many times and cause them pain, they spit in our bearnaise sauce.
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We’re much more independent around these parts. If we want spit in our sauce, we’ll damn well explicitly order it ourselves!
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Ha, I am indeed laughing. How could something so simple go so wrong? I hope the food was good at least. And that they didn’t put anything gross in it…
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The food was quite delicious indeed. As for them putting something gross in it…you and me both.
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