Restaurant Excitement

From Brad.

Although we've been here for more than 3 months, we are still experiencing new things all the time. On Sunday, we decided to visit a new restaurant. As we walked in, we were thrilled at how clean it was. It is a little bit on the nicer side and as a result, they have many aquariums in the lobby area. However, these aquariums were not for aesthetic purposes, but rather to give you, the customer, the ability to choose your lunch/dinner for the day. We have typically stayed far away from seafood in restaurants to this point, but today felt adventuresome and began to inquire. Regarding most of the things I saw, my knee-jerk reaction was, 'that's not food.' But alas, it is food for some (really many), as difficult as that is for me to understand (sting rays, anemones, eels, blob looking things, etc.). One tank even had a dead fish lying on the bottom if that happens to be your favorite.
Well, I figured out from my dictionary that they had trout. HEY! I recognize that, so I picked one out (heretofore to be called Flipper, or Flip for short) and tried to order it battered and deep-fried. Two guys (obviously rookies) grabbed a net and started fishing with all of us excitedly watching. They caught him in the net but had a little trouble getting him out. Finally, Flipper flopped out of their hands and directly onto the floor. These two guys looked like they were chasing a chicken with its head cut off. Peter & Alex have never been more excited, eagerly wishing to grab Flipper and take him home and make him their new bathtub buddy. I'm a little concerned and not sure if I should ask for a new one, and Amy is standing nearby, turning green. She's trying her best to be a local, but its killing her. All the while, I'm silently enjoying reading her body language, which wasn't terribly positive. Well, they finally corral the wild one and with a quick dip in the tank for cleansing purposes, off Flip goes to the kitchen to be our main course. How many restaurants in American can provide this much entertainment, and we haven't even taken a bite yet.

We sit down and enjoy the first two dishes, sweet and sour pork (chicken as Savannah insists) and another similar dish without sauce. Thankfully, the dishes were quite good and we even got a small bucket of ice to drink our Sprite with (a rarity here). Well, our friend Flipper still hadn't arrived so Amy and I were beginning to wonder what could have happened. Of course we speculated that the guys in the kitchen are searching all over for the crazy one who got away. But finally, out comes Flip. Here, when you order fish, you get the whole thing. I was thankful that when he was placed on the table, he was staring straight at Amy and I got the tail side. Amy now was more of a greenish-yellow color while I was wondering why Flip had no batter on him. In fact, they had cooked him in a pan with a little bit of oil, rather than deep-fry him with batter. But I took a few bites, Amy one small bite and Savannah, always the local, had to try it. But we all agreed it wasn't terrible, but not worth eating.

All in all, it provided us with a lot of laughs and we chalked it up as a learning experience. I had originally intended in this blog to describe our (somewhat scary) experience last night at a restaurant, but there's not time right now. The short of it is Alex dipped his finger ever so slightly in a peanut sauce and rubbed it in his eye (he's allergic). Bad news, a big swollen eye. Good news, nothing ingested and he is perfectly fine. Thank the Father, it could have been really bad. More later...