Curtain Call, Indeed.

Okay, so D.W. and I had the worst restaurant experience of our lives last night. In the mood for a horror story?

First of all, I have to say that I really love food. Maybe more than the next person, maybe too much. The way I see it, food isn’t just sustenance. Good food is aesthetics, imparts dignity, and offers comfort, even entertainment. Perhaps surprisingly, when it comes to food, I’m easy to please: just give me something excellent.

Excellent is not synonymous with fancy, and this is an essential point.  A meal might be a loaf of bread with butter. It could be a simple hamburger. But make it a great loaf of bread. Make it an excellent hamburger. Food doesn’t have to be expensive or exotic to be great. Anyone who feels differently takes a narrow view of food’s pleasures.

Now, night before last, D.W. and I went to a community theater production of a musical here in town. It was awesomely bad. Actors forgot their lines, the orchestra was anemic in their finest moments, and the director clearly had no idea what her job entailed (i.e., lighting the actors, staging a musical, etc.) Still, I loved it. There was a lot of heart to the production and I was actually artistically inspired several times— homespun sets bring a tear to my eye every time.

I got greedy. Because we had fun at that show, I made a reservation for two the next night for another show. It was at a place called The Curtain Call Cafe. Bisbee’s very own dinner theater.

I know.

We got to the restaurant and were the only two people there until, thankfully, another couple showed. We were seated. We were given menus for the evening’s prix fixe. We read the description of the four courses, offered in English and in French. Things seemed promising, even though the decor of the place was sorry, indeed; think fake ivy and walls that had been sponge-painted. Pink.

Tiny, store-bought toasts with a thin sheen of tapenade were brought out as a first course, along with flutes of lemonade. I’m still not sure why lemonade. I asked for some bread, and that’s when we should’ve known we were in for it. The proprietress brought us slices of white sandwich bread. Just Wonderbread.

The price of the meal, I have to mention, was $26 a head. Not a lot, no, but enough to warrant a baguette. Remember, the menu had been printed in French.

Then the entertainment…happened. The mail waiter suddenly picked up a guitar. A cockeyed African American girl who introduced herself as an “intern” began to sing “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay.” Oh, yes. As she sang, she began to advance toward us. It was terrifying. She would point her finger at herself when she sang, “I?m,” then at the ground when she sang, “sittin’” and then at us, sort of, when she sang, “wastin’ time-hi-hi-hiiiime!” She moved closer and closer, like a lemur about to attack a mouse. I don’t know if lemurs attack mice but it was just like that.

There was nowhere to look. It was horrible. She was not a good singer. The song went on and on. I prayed for food because at least we’d have something to do. Then the food came and I prayed for the singer to come back.

What was on our plates was not fit for human consumption. My chicken—though I swear it’s insulting to chicken everywhere to call it that—was so bad, so unbelievably awful, I actually spit it into my napkin. This was clearly the cheapest meat available for 1,000 miles in any direction. It tasted like it had cost the owner 10 cents a pound, then been shoved in the back of a freezer for over a year, then defrosted in a flatbed truck, then put in the microwave. And it was undercooked. I made D.W. try it because he had to understand. He did, wincing as he chewed.

Also on my plate was what appeared to be several canned peaches, a lump of pickled red cabbage, two cooked carrot medallions, and a pasta tossed with chickpeas and stale Ragu marinara sauce. I lived in a dorm once. I know stale Ragu when I sniff it and try unsuccessfully to put it in my mouth.

D.W.‘s steak, nude and ugly as sin, was also raw. He had the peaches, too, and the carrots. We looked at each other. We looked at the Wonderbread. He sent his steak back to the kitchen.

“It’s not fit to eat,” I whispered, panicked. “It can’t be eaten!”

The steak came back. D.W. tried. He?s got a good heart and he tried, God knows he did. His eyes darted from his plate to me, from me to the lemonade. The black girl had said the main show was to start after the dinner. We were in grave danger.

“We don’t owe them anything,” I said slowly, watching the waiter watching us. “We can just pay and go, okay?” D.W. gulped his iced tea, trying to get the taste of the “chicken” out of his mouth.

I called the waiter over. “We misunderstood,” I said, my voice calm but firm. “We thought the show was during dinner. We have a commitment at seven o’clock and it’s nearly seven. We’d like the check. So sorry about that.” The proprietress had to have noticed our nearly untouched plates. She went and got our check, taking off the price of the show, which was nice. I didn’t let her leave before I gave her my credit card.

“Okay, count of three,” D.W. said as I signed the check. “One, two, three.” And we were out of there.

We went down to the awesome Mexican restaurant and ate the hottest chips and salsa they had until we had burned the flavor of the Curtain Call from our mouths.

I have no compunction about sharing this story. Clearly, the restaurant is struggling. But there is a reason why, you see. You can’t serve people food like that and stay in business. You’d be better off doing something else.

We beg you: do something else.

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