by Chanie Friedman

Eating out is getting more expensive all the time. Take the other night, for example. My family and I were eating dinner at my favorite restaurant — my favorite restaurant being whichever happens to have seating available when I don’t feel like cooking — when I began to choke on a particularly succulent chunk of prime rib. I’m talking real choking here, not the kind where you splutter and just generally embarrass yourself. I’m talking the kind of choking where the screams inside your head haven’t got a chance of squeaking past the wad stubbornly wedged in your windpipe. I’m talking the kind of choking where if one’s fellow diners are really engrossed in separating their kasha from their varnishkes — well, you get the picture.

Luckily my husband chose just that moment to glance up from his plate. He took one look at my bulging eyes and flailing arms and went into action; with nary a moment’s hesitation, he began jumping up and down and hollering for all he was worth. His shrieks alerted a passing bus boy, who rushed over and performed the Heimlich maneuver, dislodging the medium-rare obstruction from my throat.

Needless to say, I was pretty grateful — at least until I got the check. There, scribbled in right under the cost of the chocolate raspberry soufflé, was a charge of $674 for “emergency medical intervention.” Figure tax and a tip, and that’s one pricey meal.

And the situation is getting worse every day. Just last week my friend told me about a popular new glatt kosher establishment offering an exotic melange of Japanese, Mexican, and Hungarian cuisine. Called “Haikud-U-Eat-This-Stuff,” the place is quite expensive. Even so, my friend reports, when she called to make a reservation, she was taken aback by the maitre d’s request that she first fax him a certified financial statement and copies of her tax returns for the last three fiscal years.

Not that paying a premium price guarantees good food or service. Au contraire. Universal laws and principles dictate quite the opposite. “Goldberg’s Law of Gastronomics,” for example, holds that the greater the number of fancy squiggles the chef paints on your plate, the less actual food there is to eat. Other incontrovertible Epicurean axioms include “Nussbaum’s Law of Inertia,” which posits that a waiter’s body at rest will definitely stay that way if the tip is included in the bill; and “Nussbaum’s Law of Gravy,” which holds that a waiter-borne bowl of gravy falls to the lap of a diner at a greater speed if the diner is wearing an expensive new designer outfit.

(Just a word here on this guy Nussbaum, who obviously ate out a lot and thus single-handedly contributed more to the study of dining out than any other individual in history. Born in the small town of Plitz in the early 1600’s, Sir Izzy Nussbaum was the youngest son of a poor tailor. Fortunately for mankind, Izzy couldn’t tell an inseam from an outboard, so he was sent to study bricklaying under the tutelage of his great-uncle Lazer, in nearby Plutz. It was soon discovered that Izzy wasn’t any good at laying bricks, either. In fact, the only thing Izzy was good at was curling up under the dining room table when no one was looking and catching a few winks.

One day at lunch, Lazer’s toe accidentally brushed up against Izzy’s prone, snoring form. Lifting the hem of the tablecloth, Lazer was incensed to find his lazy, good-for-nothing nephew fast asleep under the table. In a fit of uncontrollable anger, Lazer grabbed a kneidel from his bowl and flung it at Izzy’s head. Startled, Izzy awoke, and the following idea, one that would change the world forever, popped into his head: “Spherically symmetrical objects behave as if all their mass is concentrated at their center. However, if one were to whip egg whites up into a snow and gently blend them into the matzoh meal before forming them into said spherically symmetrical objects and dropping them into boiling chicken soup, the centers would remain chewy and soft.” The rest, as they say, is history.)

My purpose here is not to scare you away from restaurants, though that would certainly make it easier for me to get a table on the night of bedikas chametz. My objective is, rather, to enlighten and instruct. Indeed, over the last few years I have devoted hundreds of hours and millions of calories to writing a guide cataloguing the most common dining-out dilemmas and their solutions. Entitled The Most Common Dining-Out Dilemmas and Their Solutions, the guide is based on my own restaurant experiences and on those of the many highly irritated diners I interviewed while they were in the midst of eating. Partly for the sake of clarity and partly because I couldn’t think of any other way to do it, the guide is presented in question-and-answer format. Some excerpts follow:

Question: If there’s one thing that I really find annoying, it’s making restaurant reservations well ahead of time and still being seated near the restroom or within inches of the swinging door to the kitchen. What’s the best way to make sure you get a really good table at a restaurant?

Answer: Go to medical school. Now, it’s not like it has to be a really good medical school. And you don’t have to specialize in anything fancy like brain surgery — even podiatrists get decent tables.

If medical school is not an option, you can always do what my husband’s cousin Harvey the plumber does; when you call to make a reservation, just say you’re a doctor — it’s not like they actually check. Now despite Harvey’s protestations that he’s not exactly lying — “plumbing is plumbing” is the way he puts it — there are inherent risks to being less than truthful about one’s medical background. As Harvey knows all too well.

The last time he ate out, a woman seated across the room began to choke. The restaurant’s proprietor rushed over to get Harvey’s help. Quickly Harvey performed the emergency procedure members of his family have used for generations: he started jumping up and down and hollering for all he was worth. Fortunately, says Harvey, the woman coughed up the “clog in her pipe” herself.

Things worked out okay for Harvey, too. Finding out that Harvey wasn’t actually a doctor made the proprietor pretty angry at first. But when he heard that Harvey was a plumber, he rushed him into the kitchen to clear the drain of a seriously backed-up sink. Now, whenever Harvey goes to that restaurant, he gets the best table in the house. As the proprietor told Harvey, “Doctors I got plenty. But try and find a plumber at seven o’clock on a Sunday night.”

Question: Last week I took a date out for dinner. Afterwards I asked the waiter to wrap up the leftovers in a doggy bag. Now the shadchan tells me the young lady thought my behavior was tacky and refuses to see me again. Did I do something wrong?

Answer: That depends. Back in my dating days, I also went out to eat with a young man who requested a doggy bag at the end of the meal. It didn’t really bother me when he asked the waiter to wrap up his leftover chicken. I was slightly more perturbed when he asked the waiter to wrap up my leftover chicken. But when he asked the waiter to wrap up the leftover chicken of the couple sitting at the next table, I got a little turned off.

Of course, you never can tell what will turn a girl off, which is why eating out on a date is a risky proposition. I know a young lady who ended a promising relationship simply because the young man kept talking with his mouth full. True, his mouth happened to be full of soup — but still.

Question: I’m as happy as the next guy to reward good, courteous waiter service. But do I really have to leave a tip when the waiter’s attitude is bad and his service is worse?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Why?

Answer: Because waiters might read this guide, and if I say no, who knows what kind of disgusting things they will do to my food before they bring it out of the kitchen!

Question: Aren’t there laws against that sort of thing?

Answer: Indeed there are. And that explains why lawyers, in larger numbers than any other professional group, claim to be plumbers when making reservations for dinner.

Chanie Friedman is a frequent contributor to The Jewish Homemaker.