“Instant gratification takes too long.” – Carrie Fisher
My eldest son and his girlfriend came to visit us this past weekend. My eldest son and my husband have a proclivity for authentic German food and my son’s girlfriend had never tried authentic German food, so I had a plan. There is an amazing, popular German restaurant about 45 minutes from where we live, that my husband and I had been dying to try, but we couldn’t get reservations. So, I finally got reservations, way in advance to my son’s visit, for our family to go there this past weekend, as a special treat.
The restaurant is a teeny, tiny, intimate establishment run by a family from Munich. As we entered the very packed restaurant, everyone seemed surprised to see us – the guests, the hostess, the cooks, the accordion player, all had the same look that said, “What are you doing here?”
I marched up to the hostess, whose stand is kind of right in the middle of this teeny, little hobbit-like building, and right in front of the entrance of the kitchen, announcing my reservation, for my party of six. The hostess looked flustered as she fluttered through pages, in her primitive reservation notebook. She timidly admitted that they had mistakenly marked our reservation for the previous night and that there was nothing available that evening.
The restaurant got hushed. The accordion player stopped playing. I suspect some of the guests were hoping for a little drama and excitement to go along with their strudel dessert. My family started edging towards the door. You see, I don’t embarrass easily, and my family knows that about me. They saw that I was about ready to erupt. I was standing in the middle of that tiny little beehive, filled with people and gravy and strong German beer, and my explosion was imminent. I’m a very nice person, until I’m not. I have a very long fuse, but the end of my fuse is not pretty. I’m a fire sign.
Luckily, the owner of the restaurant, an efficient, calm, structured woman, saw what the end of the imminent outburst could look like, as I was firmly implanted in the middle of her restaurant, growing larger in my stature as my insides were bubbling and rising to the surface. I had given my family the “mom/wife stink eye” that made them all freeze in place before they could slide out of the door. The owner fully accepted, in that very moment, that we weren’t going anywhere, without a frenzied fuss, at the very least. Everyone in the restaurant held their breath. The accordion player’s arms were shaking from holding the instrument up in the air, suspended from play. And then, with a few orders barked out in German, the owner of the restaurant rearranged the whole seating chart of the establishment like it was an efficient game of musical chairs. She poured large, “on the house” glasses of wine, encouraging her other guests to move to other corners of the cottage and everyone happily and quickly obliged.
In the end, we had a wonderful time. The food, drink and company were marvelous. The accordion player stayed a little longer and played some particularly merry tunes. I look forward to going there again and I will put in an extra call to confirm my reservation next time. Mt. Saint Mommy didn’t erupt after all. False alarm.
“Embarrassment and awkward situations are not foreign things to me.” – Paul Rudd