When you can't quite control your guests

[Jenise]

A friend of mine, a journalist in her former life, was working with one of the First Nation bands (Canadian for 'tribe') in British Columbia who were visited by RFK Jr on one of his environmental treks. A few months later, he invited a few of the chiefs to a topical dinner in New York. My friend organized the trip and travelled with them.

The chiefs were relatively unused to the ways of white men. For instance, they were told that the style of dress for the dinner was "business attire". So they all wore jeans.

The dinner was held in an elegant Chinese seafood restaurant. Vancouver was not yet overrun with refugees from Hong Kong and the PRC, and where restaurant dining of any kind was relatively unfamiliar to the chiefs Chinese food was even more so. During the dinner, one of the chiefs left to go to the bathroom and did not return. Soon, another did the same. And then another and another until all the chiefs were gone so my friend scampered off to look for them.

And she found them, in the lobby, which had tanks for live seafood around the perimeter walls and, in the middle, a tank just for lobsters. The chiefs had surrounded the lobster tank and were holding hands and dancing in a circle, chanting a song of from their culture to their crustacean brothers.

Funny, and pretty beautiful I think.

They were probably chanting recipes for Homard a la native Americain....

A lovely story.

To divert the thread a little (sorry!) - the lobster tank reminded me of a dinner the Francophile and I had some years back. It was our anniversary so we went to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant that was where we'd first gone out to dinner together years before. (We occasionally have a try at being romantic.) We got a table for two in the quieter end of the room, just adjacent to the live seafood tanks. A couple of large cod were swimming round behind the glass just behind our table, and on the next section of wall, perhaps four feet away, was the lobster tank.

Just through the doorway into the big private function room at the back, we could see that there was a big party going on. A wedding, the waiter told us - two Chinese families, a big affair.

We were midway through our main courses when three waiters - young blokes in their late teens - trundled up to the lobster tank with a traymobile and a small stepladder. They all rolled up their sleeves, then one of them climbed the stepladder and took the lid off the lobster tank. They'd been given the job of catching the lobsters for the wedding party's next course.

What followed was ten minutes of noise and splashing, as the bloke up the ladder delved into the tank to catch four big lobsters who clearly didn't want to be caught. The Francophile and I were liberally splashed with lobster-tank water, and the other two waiters, standing at the ready to take hold of the live lobsters as they were handed down, were drenched.

Eventually, the fishing expedition was over and the lid went back on the tank. The lobsters, wrapped in towels, were wheeled through the room and out to the kitchen by the three dripping waiters. The Francophile and I mopped ourselves up and went on with our dinner.

Luckily, we got no lobster-tank water in our glasses of wine.

Yeesh. I'd've been up in a second to demand a new table, or leave. I no longer have patience for clumsy restaurant staff.

I once had dinner at Uncle Nick's, a Greek place. We had a table near the waiter's prep station which included the bins where the busboys tossed dirty dishes. One of those bins had bleachy water in it but the A/C took the smell the other way and I didn't mind. Well, sure enough, I got home and there were white streaks all over my coat where those idiots had splashed me with that bleachy water. I took the coat back to show them the damage and demand compensation and they stonewalled me. Fine, and they're out of my rotation. I'll go if somebody suggests it but I will never suggest it, and for sure I'm not sitting near that station again.

[Jenise]

Jeff and Matilda, such awful stories! I've never had anything even remotely like that happen, and I don't think I'd handle it well if I did!