Corona dining

There was joy in the streets last week when the restaurants reopened. People were thrilled, saying that they had waited weeks for this happy day. Though I am pleased for the restaurant entrepreneurs whose livelihoods were turned upside down by the virus, I’m not among those rushing back out to eat. The coronavirus hammered home to many that some things that we thought were indispensable to our lives are simply not indispensable to our lives. Like physically going in to work, physically going to class, or watching baseball games. There are alternatives.

Same with restaurants.

There are alternatives to eating out. It’s called eating in. And The Wife and I have done quite a bit of it over the last three months – to the benefit of our bank account.

Not that we are such huge restaurant-goers. Once a week we used to go out for breakfast, and once in a while we’d go to dinner for special occasions. And then, individually, we’d snag a quick falafel, pizza or hamburger lunch here and there on the run. As well as coffee. We buy a lot of coffee.

Over the last three months, however, we didn’t do any of that. The result: our realization that a breakfast here, a falafel there, a coffee everywhere add up over time.

But that’s not why I’m not rushing out to eat.

IF ALL the stars line up just right, eating out can be a real pleasure. It’s a pleasure when the service is good, when the table does not tilt, when the place is not too noisy, and – of course – if the food is flavorsome. And that does happen more times than not.

But other times something goes wrong, throwing the whole experience out of whack. Like if you have to go hunt for the waiter, or beg for a glass of water, or wait too long for the food, or – when they do finally bring it out – it’s cold or not what you thought you had ordered.

Then the dining experience goes from being pleasurable to being annoying, rife with mini confrontations. And to top it off, at the end you have to pay good money for the privilege of having been annoyed.

Enter COVID-19, and now the regulations put into play to allow restaurants to reopen in the new reality add an abundance of fresh ways to get annoyed while eating out.

Now, in addition to all the regular things that can go wrong, you can add new dilemmas: What to do if the waiter is not wearing gloves? What if the menu is not disposable? What if the cook, not wearing a mask, sneezed into your baked ziti?

The ban on smoking in restaurants put an end to one constant area of friction – telling the guy at the next table to put out his cigarette.

But the coronavirus has replaced that with something else: do you tell the guy sitting too close at the next table that he is violating your two-meter corona-free zone? Or do you not tell him, but then feel uncomfortable while slurping your onion soup because he has pushed back his chair and looks like he is about to sneeze in your space?

Life is full of unavoidable confrontations, but when I go out to eat, I’m not looking for confrontation. I just want to eat. So why look for trouble?

SO WE eat in, The Wife and I, which means we’re cooking a lot. I don’t necessarily enjoy cooking, and never have. And, like so much else, I blame my father for that.

To say my dad wasn’t much of a cook would be a radical understatement. I grew up in America of the 1960s and ’70s, which meant that there were well-defined divisions of labor in my home. My dad did the taxes and cut the lawn, my mother went shopping and did all the cooking. All the cooking. Just like in Leave It to Beaver. That’s just the way it was back then.

So since my dad wasn’t in the kitchen much, neither was I. The first egg I ever made was in college, when the thought of a potato omelet sounded intriguing, and I threw raw potatoes into a pan with the egg, thinking that would work. It didn’t.

Over the years, out of necessity, I’ve learned to cook; though – truth be told – I never found much joy in it. Some people like to cook – my sons, for instance, who made their first omelet in second grade – but not me.

But since I had to eat during the coronavirus; since it’s not right to always dump unwanted chores on one’s spouse; and since man can eat only so many hot dogs, I looked for things to make outside of my wheelhouse.

One night I had a yen for twice-baked potatoes, another for stuffed mushrooms, and on a third occasion I yearned for Chinese food, something like beef, tomato and green pepper stir-fry.

And all those urges took me to the web. Type “stuffed mushrooms” into Google, and literally hundreds of recipes appear.

So with that wealth of choice, how does one choose? For me it’s simple: Do I have the ingredients without having to go out and shop? What is the preparation time? If the prep time given is 15 minutes and under, I’ve found my recipe.

The only problem is that the preparation times are never accurate. Fifteen minutes to make beef, tomato and green pepper stir-fry? Who are they fooling? It takes me 15 minutes just to cut the peppers, figure out the substitute for oyster sauce, and find the measuring spoons, cornstarch and soy sauce.

The preparation times listed are not for normal people; they are for culinary specialists, for cooking whizzes, for contestants on those cooking shows. It’s false advertisement. And, like waiting in a restaurant for your food to come, it causes pre-eating aggravation.

Which means aggravation comes with eating in, just as it does with eating out. But faced with that choice these days, I’ll opt for the aggravation that comes from following recipes written by liars. At the very least I won’t have to worry about a gloveless waiter sneezing into my stir-fry.

The COVID-19 regulations allowing restaurants to reopen add an abundance of fresh ways to get annoyed while eating out