Lunch Story

To celebrate the fact that our Australian coworker's Visa finally went through and he was able to join us in the office, a small segment of the office went to lunch today. We went to a restaurant called "Claim Jumper", which specializes in extremely large portions.

That's an important part of the story, so I'm going to emphasize it in the hopes of stretching this anecdote out a bit longer. The portions are just laughably huge. By the time you're done with your soup, biscuit, and baked potato, you're definitely regretting your decision to order a main course to go along with it. Even if, as in my case, your boss usually pays.

I said "usually", because we go to Claim Jumper a lot. Several of the waiters know us by name, and we've ordered pretty much everything on the menu. Sometimes, we order a single slice of cake, and four of us are unable to finish it. Because it's big, you see. Seriously, it's seven layers and twelve inches long. A whole cake is just silly.

So our Australian colleague offered the boss fifty bucks if he (the boss) was able to finish an Appetizer Combo by himself. There are seven types of food in this thing, all but one deep-fried. At least a pound of it is onion rings. Frankly, it's really, really unapetizing. But if your thing is deep-fried mozzarella sticks, deep-fried stuffed jalapenos, and some other unidentifiable deep-fried stuff, this is for you. And for three friends, because, as I keep telling you, there's a lot of it. The plate's piled about, I would say, nine inches high. And it's wider than it is tall, because it's more a platter than a plate.

The bet was made, and my unwise boss started gnawing away. After 45 minutes, he was almost halfway done, but everything was cold. And it turns out that buffalo wings aren't very good when they're cold. And potatocakes stuffed with something suspicious are worse than that. So he asked the server (Ryan, who had never had us before, although our regular servers had warned him) if it could be heated back up. Because maybe a microwave will make everything better!

So Ryan took the huge platter (did I mention it was huge?) back to the kitchen. And then we ran into a problem. It seems that Claim Jumper, along with having extremely large portions, has excellent customer service. Instead of briefly nuking the platter and bringing us back a reheated tray of deep-fried artery-cloggers, they brought us a brand new, fresh-from-the-hot-fat platter. Which normally would have been great, except that it nullified the bet, since even for fifty bucks, no one had the heart to force the boss to start over.

We explained all this to Ryan, and he displayed another gift for customer service and, to our surprise, took the appetizer combo off our bill. This, even though half of the first one had been eaten and the second one was already boxed for us to take back to the office and feed the deskbound masses. It was a good move on his part, because we ended up raising his tip far more than the appetizer combo's price.

Oh, and we're coming back next week to try again. Because my boss doesn't learn.