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The Sneak Attack

I've written plenty about how I've had my share of adventures when going out to eat at restaurants. Sometimes it involves funny exchanges with waiters and waitresses, sometimes the reservation causes some hilarity, and sometimes I gain a dislike for a particular item on a menu. I don't know why, but restaurants always seem to bring about laughs.

I have another story to add to the list.

I went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant with a bunch of friends, and we all settled down to ponder what we wanted to eat. As is pretty normal, the waitress came over and rattled off the specials. They happened to have a uni (read: sea urchin) special that sounded interesting, and there were a couple of us at the table that had never had it before. As we were discussing the merits of ordering this item, though, the waitress cautioned us that it had something of a unique taste. In short, some people don't like the taste.

Well, me being me, that meant that I wanted to try some. I am the type of person who will intentionally order items on menus that I've never tried before, so this sounded like exactly the sort of thing I would be interested in sampling. In fact, that's exactly what I told the waitress. Basically, I said, "I'm in."

Everyone else at the table was game for having some, too, so we ordered some. It was basically going to be an appetizer, since we were also ordering a whole bunch of rolls to share among everybody. So, the staff brought out some salad and miso soup for us to start with. We were all chatting away and joking around, so it probably took us a little while longer to finish the starters than usual.

That meant that we all had soup and salad in front of us when the uni came around. In my case, I figured that meant I should try to finish one of those as quickly as possible. Now, the uni came in the actual sea urchin shell, and it had to be mixed together before it was ready to eat. I figured I had a few minutes while she did all of this, so after making sure I wasn't missing anything interesting, I busied myself with finishing my soup.

I swear, I remember looking down to finish the last mouthful of soup from my bowl, so I didn't quite see what the other people at the table were doing. More importantly, I didn't see what the waitress was doing. As my friend would later comment, though, she was very carefully scooping out a spoonful of the dish. She was presumably going to serve it out to people very carefully, so no one really thought much of it.

However, as soon as I looked up, she shoved the spoon right in my face. I practically opened my mouth out of self defense. Holy crap, she sneak attacked me with food. That's something that I've seen adults do to kids to get them to eat things, but I don't think I've ever seen it happen with an adult before. Heck, what are the odds that not only would it happen to an adult, but it would happen to me? Let's just say that everyone had a good hearty laugh at my expense.

I wasn't going to live it down for the rest of the meal. It didn't help that the food was good or that everyone liked it, all that mattered was that I got my own personal serving of uni. Heck, it even came up when we were trying to figure out how much to tip ("dude, she gave you your own serving of uni"). Like I said way back at the beginning, restaurants sure do like to mess with me.

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