Fancy food name in 5-star hotel menu led me to ‘rice, chapo, minji!'
A woman wears a sad face. Don’t rush to order what you don’t know, or you could end up with a pale shadow of what everyone else is eating.
What you need to know:
- A colleague who was seated opposite me, and who seemed to think I had knowingly ordered minji and rice, asked: 'So, you can actually eat minji at a five-star hotel?'
- Don’t rush to order what you don’t know, or you could end up with a pale shadow of what everyone else is eating.
Last Monday, I was thrilled to do something ‘bold’. I was at a workshop in one of the big hotels in town. Towards lunchtime, we (the workshop participants) were each given a sheet with a list of meals to select what we wanted to be served for lunch – a starter, a main course, and a dessert.
Here is the thing, I have no single bone of adventure in me. I know there are people who are curious about what happens when you mix sugar and salt, or when you call your Sim one with Sim two… I am not one of those people. But on this particular Monday, I decided to be adventurous with my lunch.
Keen to impress people on The Gram with photos of something different and interesting on my plate, I marked the oddest name on that sheet (Aloo Matta, which was going to be served with rice. I did not care about the rice. It is the Aloo Matta I was going for).
Main course options included lamb chops with mashed potatoes, tilapia fillet with French fries… and then now there was the third option. A name I had never heard of in my life.
And I know what you guys say: “Google is your friend”. To which I refer you to paragraph two – I was igniting my spirit of adventure. I did not want to ruin the mystery of what I would meet at the meal table.
Fast-forward to lunchtime and everyone is seated at the long rectangular table, draped in white cloth, and adorned with shiny cutlery and maroon napkins. One by one, my colleagues started being served.
Perhaps my alarm should have gone up when I noticed my meal was taking longer than the rest to be ready. But the obstinate spirit of adventure in me that day insisted on seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses. It was a beautiful mystic moment, and I was looking forward to the surprise.
When it landed, the meal was a combination of rice, chapati, and minji. The food was a pale shadow of the juicy lamb chops, the savoury-looking tilapia fillets, and, of course, the mouth-watering fries everyone else was eating.
For a few seconds, I tried so hard to balance my tears and maintain the positive vibe I had been giving off. But it was difficult to pretend that rice and minji were the best things ever to eat at a five-star hotel.
A colleague who was seated opposite me, and who seemed to think I had knowingly ordered minji and rice, asked in a half-surprised and half-annoyed voice: “So, Daisy, you can actually eat minji at a five-star hotel?”
God in heaven has seen that I have tried to be adventurous. Next time you invite me for lunch and I ask for a beef burger and fries plus freshly squeezed pineapple juice, even before looking at the menu, just leave me alone.
On the flipside, the incident injected me with a few more doses of empathy. My heart goes out to everyone who is under pressure to be adventurous.
Luckily in my own case, a sense of adventure only meant trying out a new meal, which came with minimal consequences. However, do not sacrifice your values by chasing this elusive thing called adventure blindly.
My favourite meme this week said: “I do not know who needs to hear this, but living life to the fullest does not have to include hiking.”
You can replace hiking with anything you imagine everyone is doing. The incident has also been a reminder that even as I step out into the world to try out new things, such efforts must always be within reason because not all mistakes are the same.
Epilogue
Last week, the world was alerted to the missing and eventual death of five people through the Titan submersible implosion.
The five are said to have been on a journey 13,000 feet underwater to the ocean floor, where the wreck of the Titanic disaster is located. I will never understand what the five were going to do at the location where about 1,500 people died 111 years ago.
My conservative upbringing cannot even allow me to hover around the grave of one person for no good reason. But something must kill a man, right? For these five, it just happened to be an adventure to see what was left of a shipwreck.
The writer in the research and impact editor, NMG ([email protected])
