I dreamed I finally found a really good Tex-Mex place in Seattle. The food was just so good. And everybody was really friendly, and recognized me from my previous visits. But on this visit, I kind of decided I wasn’t ever gonna come back, because the service was friendly, but just so bad, and the place was kind of weird.
I was back for my third time, and I parked my white rental car in one of the barns that was available for Parking. the restaurant was back behind a kind of resort area that had a bunch of gold farm houses and barnes for rooms and parking, that the restaurant was allowed to share. Everything was more crowded than it had ever been before, because a lot of people were in town for the eclipse, and a bunch of people were at the sports bar associated with the resort to watch sportsball game of some sort.
I’d been there two times already and each time, I’d been seated at the same table in the same back room. And even the same family had been seated in a table near me. So when I got into the foyer area, that family was there! And we started talking about the coincidence of us always being there at the same time, since I’ve been there for there to visits, and how we were always seated next to each other. As we were chatting, the hostess came to seat them, and I just kind of followed them back. Until I saw that “my” table was occupied. And I laughed about how I just kind of figured I’d be seated in the same place too, but I headed back to the foyer area to actually get seated.
On my way back to the foyer, the owner of the restaurant recognized me and came and led me personally to an armchair that didn’t have a table in front of it. But this was my table. And eventually the waitress came to take my drink order, and she pulled over a little folding TV tray sort of table and set it up in front of me.
I ordered a Diet Coke with no ice, and just kind of looked around me to get used to the new room that I’d been seated in. I started to realize that I think the restaurant was situated in a building that had once been a pretty large home, and then I was actually in the den area, and it kinda looked like they were just using the furniture that had been there when they acquired it.
While I was waiting, I saw them bring an order to some fellow diners at a table about 20 feet away, and this was done with much fanfare because they had brought sort of the house family style meal specialty thing. Which was bucatini pasta in marinara sauce, served with a giant bowl of grated Parmesan, foot-long slabs of soft mozzarella, and little plates of clams served in their shell, topped with whipped ricotta. Because apparently it was also an Italian restaurant, and I started to get worried about the nachos I wanted to order because I overheard the owner telling one of the weight staff that they’d prepped too much for the chicken and spinach dish, so he wanted the waiters to try to really push that.
All this time, I was still waiting for my drink, and for the waitress to come back and take my order, and an acquaintance of mine came in, and we were happy to see each other because we hadn’t met in a long time. So she pulled over a chair from somewhere and put it across from me at my TV tray, and we got to talking.
Soon after my server did come back with my drink, and it looked kind of funny. I took a zip and it was something like half orange juice, and half Diet Coke. So for the next, while, we kept trying to call her back or get her attention as she walked past, so that I could get an actually good drink. And also order. Because by now it had been something like 15 minutes since she brought the drink.
Finally, I told my friend what I wanted to order, and she agreed to get my drink fixed, and my order placed if the waitress came back while I was gone, because I needed to use the bathroom. So I got up and went through the door to the ladies room And they moved the bathrooms so this was a new ladies room that I hadn’t been in before. And it looked like it had been installed in the kitchen and living room of the original building. It was huge. And… it was multipurpose.
There were about twelve toilets, but they weren’t installs. They were sort of arranged like seats around two kitchen islands with granite countertops. And there were TVs installed sports bar, style, and some women were just kind of sitting around watching the TVs. There was also a refrigerator and a dishwasher, a stove, and a kitchen sink, which, by the way, was the only sink. And in that area a big table for 20 was set up, there was a reservation for a group, and this was the private dining room they’d be seated in. It was also the smoking area, the granite topped island where the toilets were had ashtrays on them, and one woman’s gentleman had joined her at the bathroom to smoke.
So I kind of turned around and left to go back to my table, and when I got there, my friend was done eating and they brought, and then taken away my food, and the restaurant was closing soon so it’s time to go. I realized once I was out of the restaurant, and my friend had left, that I hadn’t paid for anything. But I kind of didn’t feel too bad about that, and I sort of remembered my friend mentioning that I only been charged for the drink and she got it. It was fine.
So I went to go get my car and leave. But all the Parking barns kind of looked the same, and I couldn’t remember which one I parked in. I vaguely thought that it was the one closest to the road, so I walked all the way across the entire resort and went to inspect the building closest to the road. But that turned out to be hotel rooms with no parking.
I went to look into the next building, and when I went through the door, I knew it wasn’t right because it looked like a restaurant. But I figured I’d just keep walking through the restaurant and exit the other side rather than go back out and go around the building.
So that restaurant was sort of set up where the seating was a level down from the ground floor entry, and I was walking along a gallery above the diners. The decor was kind of distressed farmhouse, naturally, so the gallery railing had all sorts of different antique fence panels along it. They were perched on, like, a one and a half inch ledge outside of the structural railings, but it turned out they weren’t actually attached in any way to the structural railings. Someone jostled me into one of these panels as I was walking, and this iron fence panel pitched out and fell down, and as I watched in horror, it knocked baby out of their highchair and onto the floor.
I ran down the stairs and began apologizing profusely, and the baby didn’t have any wounds or bumps or anything, it seemed unconscious and so I kept asking the family what I could do and I kept trying to get the attention of the staff to call an ambulance. But no one was paying attention and the family was super nonchalant. So I figured I would at least wait until the baby regained consciousness just to make sure. I was waiting. I also picked up all of the families things that the panel had knocked over and scattered, like the toys they brought for the baby and their older son, and then a bunch of cutlery that had been in a tray nearby. Eventually, the baby woke up and seemed perfectly normal somehow so the family told me I should really leave it was all OK. So I left.
I went into the next barn, and my car wasn’t in any of the stalls I could see so I went through a door that I thought went to another parking area, but it turned out. It was somebody’s room, so I backed out without waking him up thankfully. I did find my car in the next building. And as I was getting in, I realized I was being followed by a vampire. so fast as I could, I pulled out of the barn, and was trying to drive around the winding exit drive without hitting any of the people that were milling around, but also going as fast as I could. And I kept running into dead, ends like at the swimming pool, and at a marble Roman amphitheater, and when I finally got to the road, the light was red and I needed to turn left, and then I finally got on the road, but by that time the vampire was clinging to the roof of my car, and I was frightened and scattered to remember how to get to the interstate, and then I woke up.
