Food, Folks, and Bathrooms

Why is it that I can’t eat lunch these days without having to go to the bathroom? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. My apologies to any of my students who are reading this and would rather not know these things. But it especially sucks because my work bathroom is a single bathroom with a waiting room, so if you want to do anything that takes any amount of time someone ALWAYS comes in and hangs out in the waiting room and LISTENS to whatever you’re doing. Serves ‘em right if they hear something!

Let’s move on to the foods of Philadelphia (as promised). Matt and I had some great meals in Philly. Our first night was room service at our hotel, The Sofitel (did I already tell you they upgraded us to a suite? It was so swank AND pretty soundproof because it was on a corner and we had a little living room separating us from the outside door). The room service was way expensive, of course, but fun to eat in our room and mighty tasty. Plus we needed something fast, since I had a long night of meetings ahead of me. My favorite part of fancy room service is the little ketchup and mustard bottles. So cute! I don’t even remember what I had, but it was some sort of sandwich and fries. That’s not important, really.

A weird meal was had at the overwhelming Reading Terminal Market. It was supposed to be a falafel salad, and it was, but the falafel wasn’t fried or even very ball-like. It was more like uncooked chickpeas. I was kind of disappointed, but made up for the lack of friedness when we went to a small but SUPER tasty and MEGA food for your buck counter service restaurant called Mama’s Vegetarian (also certified kosher!). I had a combo plate, which consisted of three falafels, a vegetable latke, an eggplant thingy, a pita and some condiments. If I had ordered the falafel plate, there would have been EIGHT falafel balls! Believe it or not!

Our fanciest meal was at Susanna Foo, which I read about and thought we could try. I don’t normally pick fancy joints for us because I don’t like to dress up, and most of the time they don’t have many vegetarian options. Foo seemed OK for the veggie options, but I actually emailed the place to see if I could just wear jeans (since I was going to be in meetings all weekend, and I only brought carry-on). The email answer was very vague, so I took my chances. They ended up seating us in a bizarre one-sided booth (so Matt and I had to sit next to each other. Kind of romantic.) that faced out to the entire restaurant. I felt like we were the king and queen of the place, or perhaps a couple of freaks who everyone else was supposed to look at. Maybe they put us there because it had a long tablecloth to block the unsightly view of my jeans. In any case, the food was very good, the server was pretty nice (didn’t seem prejudiced against my casual look), and the dessert was fun and fancy. A $100 meal, not including any alcohol, but including appetizer and dessert. That will be our one $100 meal this year.

So that’s the Philadelphia Food News.

Ooh! I just remembered—New Degrassi tonight!