Last Wednesday I met some colleagues for dinner at House of Nan King.  Nan King backs in as my Favorite Chinese Restaurant because I have been to  so few others.  The place is best when you go with Masha, who recruits Mr. King himself to do the cooking.  Otherwise he patrols the small space with a jewler’s eye, asking for patron’s order seconds after they sit down, often while they’re still removing their coats.

He’s not as bad as his servers though. One of them likes to balance plates of food on the edge of your table when you aren’t looking. I think they figure they can turn the tables over more quickly if the people just drop the food, instead of eating it.   I, however, eat food faster than most people can drop it, so their strategy, if realized, would backfire.

On the way there I stopped by Impala for drink.   I accidentally sat in some bloke’s chair. As he and his two friend returned I corrected my error before they could say anything. Or so I thought.   As the guy, lets call him Chip,  was saddling himself next to me when he turns to me and says that his friend “Just hit me in the knee”.

“I’m sorry” I say, thinking he was saying that I had hit him in the leg as I was moving out of the way.

“Not you.  My friend.” He replies, “He is warning me not to fuck with you, since you are a big guy.     Do you fight?”.

“A little”  I respond, trying to get my bearings. Chips is about my size, though shorter. 

When some punk asks you if you are a trained fighter, its probably a good idea to answer in the affirmative.   In retrospect I should have tried Poorly Feigned Ignorance.   You know,  tell him no, but make him worry that I was holding something back.  Like Swayzee would do, if they ever made a sequel to Road House. Like maybe I Killed a man once, and was trying to put all that behind me.

But since I answered his opening gambit truthfully, Chip spent the next 10 minutes trying to size me up.  

Enough of that Story.  Last night, I went to Dolce to pester some friends who were bartending there for the night.   (I don’t like to make ‘Bartender’ Plural  for some reason, so can’t I simply say “Guest Bartenders”) 

Anyhow, the last time some friends were guesting they resisted the challenge of making me an  Old Fashioned.  Amanda, however, was game last night. Unfortunately my plot was foiled by a lack of oranges.  Then the  dillweed house bartender tells me that there is no orange in an old fashioned repeating in his malformed Regan English “You put a cherry! You put a Cherry in an old Fashioned”.

I left, shortly after.

If you want a good bartender, go to The Last Supper Club out in the mission.  Dude with the Jesus belt buckle doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but he can make some refreshing beverages.   And he can talk shit too:  I blanched after he told me that the Vodka concoction he just served was a Negroni.  Maybe I harumpfed too.  Yeah, there was blanching and harumpfing.  So he had the whole bar calling me a curmudgeon.

Which I am.

But I think I have a right to upset about this. I have learned to accept that people are going to screw up the present. But do they have to go back in time and screw that up too?   Did people sit around with a bartender’s bible looking for old drinks they can put Vodka in?

You watch, my old Fashioned is next.