We have not been to this upscale seaside restaurant next to a state beach for at least five years and were surprised to see it become an almost fast-food joint busy mom-pop shop.
Gone were the dark blue starched table cloth, the fresh flowers in a glass jar on the table, the matching expensive china, and the soft-spoken and swiftly moving waiters and waitress. Instead, all the staff was behind a long glass box food counter, in a semi-opened kitchen busy preparing the popular dishes now hand-written on a whiteboard hanging from the ceiling.
There was a long line of hungry customers waiting to place orders. After the payment, the customer got a plastic tag with numbers. They then walked around to find an empty table and sit and wait.
We soon realized no food was sent to the tables according to the numbers we were holding, as we saw people carrying the tray of their food from the cashier’s counter. So my husband went back to retrieve our ordered food.
I heard him speaking loudly with the busy staff in the kitchen. He was hungry for sure.
“Yes, I ordered the clam chowder. No no, this is not what I ordered. I ordered the chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. No, no, this is perhaps a shrimp salad. I ordered shrimp cocktail.”
What a mess. It was such a contrast to our last time here, the same time approximately six years ago when we had to whisper for an extra set of forks.
I guess COVID-19 changed many things, including how an upscale restaurant downgraded itself for survival or for changing clientele — more outdoor playing and hungry customers, and less well-dressed and fanfare planned lunch or dinner reservation meals with expensive wines and champagne pops.
While my husband was still fighting back and forth with our order, a very tiring-looking skinny girl carried a tray of the sourdough clam chowder dish to our table.
“Number 10?” she asked. It took me a few seconds to register that she was perhaps the only waitress of this all of sudden very busy restaurant as she did not even wear any uniform, and she could be easily mistaken as yet another customer.
A few minutes later, my husband carried the rest of the Number 10 items back with a big smile on his face.
The fish and chips still tasted as good as last time we ordered and reminded me why we came to this restaurant. However, the shrimp cocktail was very suspicious-looking, which was a plate of lettuces topped with socially distanced cooked shrimps sided with a small bowl of ketch-ups.
“They insisted it is the shrimp cocktail.”
After a few bites of the juicy, aromatic, and tender fish and chips, I slowed down and left the rest to be finished by my husband.
And it was then I noticed a couple just arrived and sat down on a table outside of the window on the deck. The couple was in the bright outdoor under the canopy. We were hiding in the dimed room behind the glass, so I was pretty sure the woman was barely aware that there was a person like me watching at her face to face, merely three yards away.
I saw her pull out an almost two-inch-thick book onto the table and start reading. I almost instantly laughed. This must be a couple married for too long. The man left a big thick back towards me, so I had to crane my neck a bit to see what he was up to. To my dismay, there was a mini watercolor painting pallet set of at least three dozens of different colors fully opened in front of this man’s left side. He used a special tiny pen to doodle on a small journal printed with some floral pattern sketches.
They did not talk at all and concentrated on their own tasks.
I was slowly finishing the fries, then the shrimps, and then the canned beer with a picture of a long leg blond smiling idyllically from Santa Cruz mountains. And I kept looking at this couple that occupied my window scene.
The man was older looking than the woman, had a double chin baby face with thick glasses. He was so focused on his doodling, like a 10-year-old obsessed with his toys. The woman was poised, slim and elegant, and wearing dark-frame reading glasses.
She started to get a bit impatient and secretly raised her head to look around towards the counter.
Their number was 19.
I wanted to walk out of the door and tell her that she’d better fetch her #19 food on her own.
But something held me back. This couple never exchanged a word till that moment.
The woman raised her head more frequently, and her expression got more agitated. I tilted my head and looked at the only plain cloth waitress I knew. She was busy pouring icy water into the self-serving water fountain and totally ignored any stares shooting in her direction.
The couple still never exchanged a word between themselves.
The woman obviously had no mood to keep reading that thick book, but she tried hard pretending.
I was finishing the unimpressive (other than the long legs) Santa Cruz beer but still not convinced it was a good idea to walk out to tell her the secret we discovered and help kill her agony.
Only if they had been a couple laughing, chitchatting, I would have had popped up and had told them to go to the counter to get their food fast.
But their strange silence and zero communication made me feel that I would have to admit my witness of a painful crack in her emotional life she was trying hard to conceal by showing her how not to wait in vain like that.
So we rose and left the table. I walked past her — from the glass window — without saying anything at all.
She made another subtle try of looking at the counter with almost some hatred. Her partner was still doodling as if nothing else mattered.
I sighed when we got into the car.
“What’s the matter?”
“The fish and chips were so good.”
