Crappy Food - a fictionalized visit to a real restaurant

I was in Reno, for depositions.  Reno is like a home away from home for me.  There are restaurants there that probably think I am a local, I eat there so often.   I love new restaurants and especially love to eat in dives.  

We took a break for lunch and I asked the local attorney for any recommendations.  "The Gold and Silver [Inn] is an INSTITUTION!  It's just around the corner, it's great!"  I had heard him talking about it earlier and raving about how great it was and how often he goes.  "Perfect," I thought.  

I pulled up to the Gold and Silver and was concerned.  I had eaten here before for breakfast on my first trip to Reno.  The gravy for the biscuits and gravy had sucked.  But, I ventured in.  The Gold and Silver Inn has been around for about 50 or more years.  It shows.  I love dives and the condition of the interior of a restaurant doesn't really get to me.  But at the Gold and Silver, it looked like the entire cafe had been smoking two packs a day for 50 years.  In fact, the air itself looked like I was looking through smoke-stained eyes.  

I still wasn't nervous enough to bail.  I sat down and ordered a Diet Coke (it's like black - it goes with everything).  My waitress came.  I was encouraged to note that she had all her front teeth.  She also had her back teeth.  She was missing, however, her middle teeth.  What?  Judging by her appearance, she either had been smoking for the last 50 years, or she had been in the restaurant for up to 30 minutes more than I had. 

My waitress was friendly enough.  "If this is my first time here (which it wasn't), what is the dish i need to have?"

"I don't know, what do you want?" She said.

"The dish that is your best one, your signature dish.  Is it the chicken fried steak?"  The menu said "it may be the best in Reno."

"I like the pork chops."  She offered.

"Ok, I'll have the pork chops."  

I am not a salad connoisseur, but this is literally old iceberg lettuce and nothing else.  Ok, I didn't come for the salad.  A greasy spoon isn't usually known for fresh leafy greens.  My pork chops are probably kick #$@, right?

Well, there they are.  They don't look 

bad, but they don't look good.

That bowl contains, I think, some sort of corn.  I had hoped it was some hominy/grits type of concoction, but it was, I think, a creamed corn abomination.  The pork chops were tough and lacked discernible intentional flavor.  The potatoes were acceptable, the gravy was edible, but nothing tasted special.  However, I think the dinner roll was of particular interest.  

I think this roll is actually an infinite quantity of matter, that has been contracting and contracting over the last few million years.  Ultimately, I believe it will contract into an infinitely small and infinitely dense dot, at which point it will explode and expand for a few billion years.  In the meantime, I could have put some butter on it and rented a forklift to raise it to my mouth.

The corn abomination was scary.  I tried it.  The cook hadn't heard of pepper by the taste of it.  But by looking at it, I could only pray that the black specks were pepper and not cigarette ashes.  If they were cigarette ashes, I am not saying the cooks were smoking over my food.  I am saying that there was so much smoke in there that ashes precipitate like rain or snow from the cafe's atmosphere.

When I was through, but the food was in no wise gone, my waitress returned, presumably from siphoning the emphysemic fluid from her lungs into a storm drain, she asked how it was.

"Good."  I lied.   I hope I don't go to hell for that.  If I do, I know what I'm having for dinner.