Foodie Asshole

FA Rating: F
Price: $


I woke up in bed this morning with a friend from Boston (no no, it's not like that) in her friend's really nice apartment in the East Williamsburg/Bushwick borderlands area of Brooklyn, and the three of us headed out to brunch at Life Cafe nearby (This Bushwick location is the other location of the Life Cafe mentioned in RENT, in the East Village).

Eggs Life dish: poached eggs, smoked salmon & sliced avocado on a toasted English muffin, topped with hollandaise sauce and served with home fries

I ordered the Egg's Life dish, and it was delicious. The avocado portion was generous, the home fries were perfectly cooked and served fresh, the hollandaise sauce was creamy and flavorful, and best of all, the eggs could not have been more perfectly poached. They were well-eggsecuted :]

Plus, they had Tapatio sauce available!

Their menu isn't doing anything earth-shattering, but the food is very good, there's a nice little beer selection, and they offer somewhat reasonably priced and very cutely named cocktails, which I'd wager are being made with care. The bartender who was serving us seemed a little put upon by our admittedly numerous requests, but I forgave him as he did accommodate all our needs and was never actually rude at all, just not particularly warm and friendly. It is Bushburg after all. I can live with that.

The awkwardness:

Sitting at the bar waiting for our food, I couldn't help but lend an ear to the conversation of the couple to my right, who were clearly on a date, seemingly either their first or second, considering the preliminary nature of their getting to know you questions.  I didn't hear all of the context of this part of the conversation, but here's a snippet I overheard:

"..well, like, I just read Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and I know some people say it's not, like, that amazing, but, well did you like it?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah, I enjoyed it."

"Oh, okay good, because yeah, I really liked that book. I thought it was really deep and stuff sometimes."

Thus, my brain was already getting into judgment mode, when I noticed something odd. The woman, who had ordered the same dish as I had ordered (as well as my friend's friend, prompted by the bartender who'd pronounced it the best thing they serve for breakfast). But this woman wasn't touching her delicious food. At first I naturally assumed that the guy's food hadn't come yet and that she was being polite. Then she started very slowly eating just the potatoes and not any of the good stuff on top of the muffins.

I motioned to my friend to check out the weirdness, as the girl had still not taken a bite of the main event but had begun, in her very slow manner, lightly grazing the hollandaise sauce that was on her eggs with her potatoes before slowly carrying them one by one to her mouth, and my friend pointed out to me that their check had arrived, so the girl's date must have already finished his meal before we came in and sat down.

Sadly I didn't hear much more of what would have undoubtedly been a fascinating conversation other than:

"Blah blah blah Florida blah blah blah."

"Blah blah blah me too blah blah blah."

And then their date ended, the guy leaving the girl there as she mentioned something about getting another coffee before she was going to leave. They hugged, he left.

Then the girl finally started eating her egg sandwiches... and she ate every last bite.

To my mind, there are three possibilities. For starters, we know she wasn't just engaged in the conversation to the point of eating slowly, or else she would have eaten at least a few bites of the smoked salmon, avocado, hollandaise, and fucking wonderfully poahced eggs with all their gooey wonderful yolks oozing down their sides while it was all fresh off the grill.

So she either actually wanted to give this guy the impression that she doesn't really care that much about eating to the point of wanting it to seem like she was not even going to ever touch the main course of her meal and just let it be thrown away. Or else she just didn't want to eat all that much food in front of him, but the reason she didn't touch the eggs and all was that it was going to be messy (mmm...runny yolk jizz...) and therefore unattractive in her mind (wrong) or because she knew she wanted to really enjoy that part and wouldn't be able to do that under her date's gaze. And that's some sad shit because it means she lets her food get cold in order to try to enjoy it when she's not near a man.

Good gravy. When I related this story to the Canadian girl staying at my apartment, she asked, "What neighborhood were you in?"

"East Williamsburg!" I exclaimed, "This wasn't fucking SOHO or some shit, this was Bushwick!"

That's fucking sad. What do guys think of this? Do they notice? I know when I go on a date with a girl, if she doesn't eat at all, I get way less attracted to her and wary of her in general. And if she straight up wastes a bunch of food, it's basically over, unless I have some compelling ass reasons to give her the benefit of the derision.