My wife and I make okay money in a middle class area, but, due to a combination of good luck, and contrived to circumstances, we recently got to watch a college football game in the stadium’s super executive corporate sponsor level suite. It was awesome. Open bar, amazing catered food, and people networking all around me who are clearly in the c-suite of their respective companies. I had a list of crazy things I was going to say if someone asked me what I did, but it never came up.
One time I went to the restaurant DAMON BAEHREL. I was informed afterwards that it had a 10-year waiting list and only seated 100 people a month. Despite having regularly commuted between the Midwest and the East Coast, getting there felt like the longest road trip I’ve ever taken since I had to go with my mother-in-law and some of it is on a gravel road.
I had to Google DAMON BAEHREL to spell it and I’m not going to bother retyping it.
It was far and away the most pretentious, absurd, cartoonishly fancy experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve dressed up in antique ceremonial Moroccan robes for a banquet at the art museum in the city I grew up in. At the art museum I sat next to the mayor’s mother in a room of 200 people conversely, about 30 people total could fit into DAMON BAEHREL.
I thought the art museum banquet was fancy, but when I was little I thought Boston Market and IBC root beer were fancy.
DAMON BAEHREL was the kind of place that serves a dozen ‘courses’ but each one is like one cracker one sliver of cheese and one spritz of condiment with maybe a sliver of sausage made from some bespoke farm animal. He insisted that the water we were drinking was actually unreduced tree sap. Everything was served on various slabs of wood some with the bark still on it. The slabs were so much larger than the food It looked like putting a coin on a serving platter for each course.
I just felt embarrassed every time I looked at the Damon and his staff. They had clearly heard his bullshit so many times that it was hard for them to feign credulity anymore.
Anyway, that shit was way too fancy for me. Clearly it was just wasted on me.