This evening my mother and stepfather and I had the chance to eat at the Restaurante Azul, which is part of the hotel we are staying at until tomorrow morning, but a restaurant we had not had the chance to eat at yet. After checking-in some close friends of mine for their flights home tomorrow, which was an adventure in itself, involving a long phone call after a failed attempt to check them in online, we dressed in the formal clothes that were indicated to us and went upstairs to the restaurant and inside where we had a 7PM reservation.

When we received the menu, I had a good laugh because it was exactly the same menu that we had enjoyed at the Frida Restaurant on the Sabbath evening just before the Feast of Tabernacles began that I had enjoyed with my close friends that prompted the writing of the first part of this blog entry regarding the missing mushrooms. Knowing the fun that we had last time, I looked forward to seeing what a reprise of this incident would involve. I was not disappointed.

When the meal began and we were given our water and wine (I asked for a little wine and was given about half a glass, which is more than I can manage, I must admit, unless the wine is one of my favorites and this was not the case for the dry white that was on offer), I noted what it is that makes keeping orders straight an issue. I soon had the chance to see this in action, and see some of the variation in orders in action as well.

When it came time to order the appetizers, I ordered three of them: the farm soup, the salad of the house, and the mushrooms and panceta. My mother ordered the same three appetizers, and my stepfather ordered the salad and mushrooms. When the appetizers arrived, I only got my soup (which was tasty, and included the sirloin that I had missed the last time I had ordered it). My mother got two of the three things she had ordered, everything but the soup, and stepfather got both of the appetizers he had ordered. This indicated that the waiter did not do a good enough job of writing things down and remembered things better the more recent they were and the worse the earlier the order had been given, and had not used the proper techniques to remember the similarities of orders, especially since two of the appetizers had been ordered by all of us and the other two by two of us, which would seem to be something that one could remember.

As one might imagine, it took a bit of time to get the right orders, as we had to ask three times before we got the missing orders. I ended up not having my own mushrooms, again, because I finished off the mushrooms of my mother since I liked them better than she did. My mother eventually got her soup but it only included a single small piece of sirloin in it, in contrast to the several pieces that I had, demonstrating the rather variable way that the soup is served. At least we managed to get all of the appetizers before the main meal arrived, where we had all ordered the prime rib, albeit a bit differently in that I ordered it medium, my mother medium-well, and my stepfather well-done. When they arrived my mother’s was not quite medium well but my grandfather’s was well done, and we all ate and enjoyed our steak and even got some more bread and butter, even if it took a bit of asking before we managed to get everything there as well.

Finally, it came time to ask for dessert. Though I had not ordered dessert, I ended up unasked with a coconut flan that was alright for flan. I had not thought I would get any of the desserts, personally. My mother got a chocolate moose that was a bit different than one would expect, and my stepfather got a mango dessert that the rest of us avoided because of our allergies. It was interesting to see how much of a challenge it was to get what one ordered, and also how interesting it was to get something that one did not order. Restaurants can be full of surprises sometimes.