Phun in Phoenix
Last night I had an absolutely hysterical dinner with a colleague and our client contact in the legal department.
We drove way out of Phoenix, practically to Scottsdale, to eat in this magical place on the grounds of the Royal Palm hotel. We drove past the Camelback Mountain -- which is a big hill that looks like a side view of a camel sitting in the sand. There is a camel hump, and then a swooping curve thing that looks like the camel's neck, and then a bunch of rocks that look like the camel's head and its nose drooping into the sand. The Phoenician resort is in the foothills of the Camelback Mountain. There are many $6 and $8 million homes.
The atmosphere out at Camelback is so mellow it makes you feel sort of loopy. Our restaurant was tucked away under palm trees, in lush gardens, with gurgling ponds and warm red tiles and mosaic little bar tables and warm wood rafters and the smell of mesquite everywhere and a big bocci court under the stars and the moon and the palm trees and the weird, unidentifiable trees and men that looked like they might be hacienda-owners or gauchos drinking expensive liquers at the bar that was under a low hung roof and had giant comfy chairs and wooden book shelves bulging with books and maybe you might see Ernest Hemingway in the corner smoking a pipe and all the while outside it smelled bizarre but in a good way -- like a yummy sausage frying in a pan with chocolate and honey and all the rest of your favorite foods. We had to wait for a table so the three of us flopped down in the comfy chairs by the overstuffed bookhsleves and were immediately prone with our jaws hanging down completely engulfed in thoughts of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. We were shattered with exhaustion from the stress of the day. We were so blotto on the chairs that we started to giggle, first individually and then as a group. The evening went downhill from there.
We were eventually seated in a room with hideous paintings of old people. It turns out that the portraits were all of members of the same family, and when the owner of the portraits had died he had bequeathed that whoever bought the portraits must promise to always keep them together in the same room. So there they all hung together -- only a painting of Byron had crept in as well. We examined our maitre d' on why Byron was among this ugly family and the maitre d' concluded we were nuts and refused to answer. Grr.
Then the menus arrived. I was immediately fascinated by an entry that said, "Open face Arizona shrimp ravioli." What could it possibly be? I've never seen a shrimp with a face...Arizona doesn't have a "face," really, either. And if shrimps have faces, have I been eating closed-faced shrimps all these years? Maybe some hyphens were missing? I asked the waiter what "open face Arizona shrimps" were. He said, "they come from the Arizona coast, a shrimp farm." I obviously must have been looking incredibly dumb at this point, because the guy finally explained that it was the raviolis that were open faced, not the shrimp.
All this time, my colleague was complaining that he couldn't see the menu very well. He claimed it was too dark (it wasn't). I asked him if he had left his glasses at home. he said, "I don't wear glasses -- I have perfect vision." This becomes important later.
After the client and I ordered, my colleague proceeded to order what struck me as a preposterously huge meal -- the paella entree AND the red snapper entree. His exact words were, "I'll start with the paella and then I'll have the red snapper." I held my tongue, not wanting to be rude. Wow, who could eat that much? When the paella arrived, my colleague said "My GOD! This is HUGE! This doesn't look like an appetizer size! I assume I will only be charged for the appetizer?" The waiter looked confused, and said, "sir, we don't HAVE an appetizer size of the paella. We had sort of wondered why you ordered so much food...." We all collapsed -- everyone started laughing -- all the other patrons, the serving staff, the maitre d'. Everyone. Turns out my colleague had mis-read the "antipasta" appetizer as paella. The restaurant was so amused it gave us the paella for free.
Then, much later in the meal, we were drinking coffee. My colleague had an espresso. It came with an espresso cookie, which was very brittle and dense. My colleague took a bite out of the cookie. I heard a loud SNAP -- almost a POP. There was a moment of calm. Then after a second of slow-motion delay, my client convulsed in her chair, looking shocked, perplexed, her head pitched forward, then thrown back in an effort at self-control. She came to an upright position, looked pained, as if struck by a pistol shot, and looked at us. My colleague said, "did something hit you?" There was a moment of silence. My colleague said, "it wasn't, no -- not, no! was it part of my espresso cookie?" It was. That was the end of us. We doubled over in laughter. We couldn't finish our meal. We laughed so hard no noises came out of us. We drove all the other patrons in that section of the restuarant away.
Today was a much more subdued day. I spent the day in client interviews. My colleague did the same. We had breakfast and lunch without any giggling. He went and got on his plane back to DC. The only vestige of our terribly humorous night before was that the client showed up with a very small band-aid on her cheek -- over the spot where the espresso cookie had hit her. It was a joke, of course, but on occassion throughout the day one of the three of us would turn toward the wall and sit and silently sob with laughter about the open faced shrimp, the paella, the projectile cookie...
In more substantive news, Phoenix today was covered in imprenetrable, cloaking fog. Unheard of. I might as well have been in San Francisco. I'm told by the Legal Department here that this is the first time in 5 years that there has been fog in Phoenix. Also, the pouring rain yesterday was the first rain here in 2 years. Weird.
Tomorrow I get to drive down to the Mexican border and don a hard hat, steel-toed boots, and gloves, and go poking around an abandoned company town near the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument called Ajo. My Fodor's guide tells me Ajo is the Spanish word for garlic. How many of you think that's accurate?
posted by Anonymous @ 10:41 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home