Friday, October 05, 2007

Touristic menus in Rome

Is there ever enough time to see what you want to see in Rome? We're always rushing around trying to get somewhere before it closes. On this trip, food was at the bottom of our list of priorities as we prefered to spend every second available to feast the eyes (instead of the stomach) on the beauty in the eternal city. When we got hungry we plopped ourselves down wherever we saw an empty chair and as a result, we crowded in with our fellow tourists (no Italian would be caught dead in one of these places) and ate plenty of bad pizza, cold lasagna and other items from the touristic menu.

One day we were rushing along and we noticed one of those fat plastic chefs about 4 feet high placed outside a restaurant. Usually they have outstretched arms with a place between them for the touristic menu to be posted. Horror of horrors, this chef had lost both arms. They looked like they had been wrenched out from the shoulders - talk about your rotator cuff injury! Still, the proprietor of the restaurant chose to leave the poor crippled wretch out in front. We asked ourselves, "How bad could the food really be?". It's one thing to complain about the food, but for someone to dismember this benign plastic symbol? We hoped that perhaps the plastic cook had been ravaged a bit at a time. Perhaps someone removed a finger, then a hand went, then a forearm and finally the last bit. Somehow, this is more comforting than the thought of some diner going "postal" or "cheftal" and ripping the arms from poor plastic Genio, touristic menu chef.

Although, one more round of touristic menu offerings and we might have been tempted to attack a chef ourselves.

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