Over the past few weeks a team of fellow managers and I have been making road trips to visit our Regional Care Centers in the Houston suburbs to have meetings and deal with some issues to improve workflow of importing their electronic patient documents which we process at our central location. This usually means a long car trip, meetings, and a girls lunch outing. When we went to The Woodlands last week of course the biggest debate of the trip was where to have lunch. If you’re not from around here, let me explain that The Woodlands is a very nice upscale master-planned city nestled in the pine forests north of Houston. Oh Smoky Bear, where are you?? Aaaahh!! (Sorry, momentary relapse.) The options for lunch were endless and we all decided we wanted to try something new. Something different. Something TRENDY. Hahahaha… okay, many of you see where this is headed now?
So one of my coworkers had heard about this certain place from a friend-of-a-friend’s brother-in-law’s cousin’s friend’s daughter… or something like that, and googled it for directions. It’s description was “gourmet backyard cuisine”. Cool, so off we go. The restaurant was located in Woodlands’ Town Center, the Disney-ish Main Street Americana-like district built to look like a classic small town downtown full of cool little shops and boutiques. (Don’t you just love how they’re all trying to copy the small-town feel?) So after finally finding a parking spot, parallel parking between two cars that each cost more than my house, and only running up onto the sidewalk once (Yay Monica!), we had arrived!
We wanted trendy and trendy we got. The inside was decorated in the industrial chic modern style… lots of stuff made out of pipe, flat steel and aluminum, and even the salt and pepper shakers and little vase on the table were welded 1 inch aluminum square tubing. I think we’ve got some of that in the barn; maybe I’ll have DJ whip me up some so I can feel trendy? Of course mixed with this was lots of curvy lines and “natural” stuff – bare tree branches, bamboo, and big clumpy grasses as section dividers… you know the drill. Kinda like shop class meets wild kingdom??
The very aloof and snobby staff wore all black and most of them had that modern shaggy hair that practically covered their whole face look. Cousin It, would you please show us to a table?? So the four of us were finally seated at our little booth, and seated we were. Like, when we sat down the table came up to about our armpits. That combined with Cousin It the hostess, and the whole overwhelming trendy silliness just gave us the biggest case of the giggles. I was seriously looking around for TV cameras; it was like we were in a funny SNL skit or something. Okay girls let’s hold this together, okay? Okay?! We were really trying, we were. The menu, all one page of it, consisted of a piece of paper listing overpriced choices glued on an imitation leather covered board. Hmmm… should I have the $20 cheeseburger or the $14 bowl of soup? Our waiter’s name was Clem. Black clothes, lots of hair, I guess he probably had eyes in there somewhere, and a nice smile. Since every employee we encountered seemed to have really unusual artistic names we decided that if you applied for a job there and your name was Joe or Bubba, they either screened you out immediately or made you change your name to something more exotic sounding? Maybe Clem was really a Bubba in disguise? Hmmm… or not. Clem took our drink order and my boss asked for a glass of iced tea. So Clem starts going down the ‘Tea List’… kind of like a wine list… there is a Madagascar black tea delicately infused with papaya and saffron, etc. etc. Too many choices for me; I ordered water. So Clem started going down the ‘Water List’, Pelligrino, Perrier, etc. etc. I managed to hold it together with a straight face long enough to say “Could I just have a glass of your finest House water today?” Then I asked for lemon. He paused and I seriously thought he was about to start in on the ‘Lemon List’. Lord, help me. So anyway I wound up ordering the barbeque pork tenderloin and shortly before our plates arrived, Clem brought me out what I guess was their version of a steak knife. It looked homemade from solid aluminum, again like something that was made in shop class or perhaps a prison shank? This thing was huge. I’m talking Bowie knife baby! I think it was larger than DJ’s biggest hunting knife which is just shy of machete size. (Well not really, but its pretty big) Our whole table cracked up laughing. Of course by this time we were having some fun with Clem and I had to ask him “The pig is dead, right? Am I supposed to kill it with this thing?”
So anyway, the food was actually good, I got out of there for less than 20 bucks, and we had fun. Best of all we had a refreshing day out of the office and solved some issues which should improve patient care. I guess a little variety does us good sometimes, even if just for the entertainment value alone?
No comments:
Post a Comment