Gestapo Soup
I had a humorous meal the other day. Vicki and I went to a restaurant in a very new, very beautiful lodge up in Geneva on the Lake. The restaurant tries for upscale, but really only accomplishes deserted. Let’s just say that town has an annual frog jumping competition, so the population is a little more of the “Steve’s Diner” persuasion.
When we sat down, I saw “Soup of the Moment” listed on the menu. Now, I like my side dishes ephemeral, but moment? Soup of the Hour is where I draw the line, and even that’s a tad obnoxious. Of course, about 50 jokes went through my head, but the one I decided to go with was asking the waitress what it was, and then as soon as she was done telling me, I would ask “Ok, what is it now?” I find that hilarious, plus I figured that depending on how many moments there are in an hour, if I kept asking for long enough eventually it would be that awesome chilled mixed berry soup I had on Holland America a few years ago.
But when she came to the table and I asked my lead-in question (note that at this point, it was more of a setup for a joke than an actual attempt to order food) she said “Gestapo”. It took me a second, but then I asked “Wait, do you mean gazpacho?” Luckily she did, because I don’t know what’s in a Gestapo soup, but I’d have been very glad the menu was changing momentarily.
Of course when she said that, the original joke flew out the window. I thought of about 100 more immediately, but given that she was probably embarrassed about mistaking a soup for the Nazi secret police (or maybe not, like I said, frog jumping competition) I figured I’d just end up insulting her and ensuring that the soup of the moment (in fact, the soup of all moments) would be a bowl of cold waitress spittle.
Gazpacho is one of my favorite soups to be sure. For those who haven’t had it, menus describe it as a chilled tomato soup, but really it’s salsa. Sometimes they blend it, and then it looks more like ketchup but it still tastes like salsa. The only reason they came up with a separate name for it is that generally to just fill a bowl with a condiment and serve it up with a spoon, your customer would have to be the sort of person who wears a helmet to bed. Calling salsa gazpacho is, to my knowledge, the only known way to turn a topping into a dish, though if I can come up with a catchy enough fancy-soup-name for grape jelly I plan on changing that.
Of course, after all of that I had to order it, and it turned out to be a very tasty gazpacho. The meal overall would have been great (the popcorn walleye appetizer was excellent) except both of our main courses were bad, and even though that’s only one out of four or five things we ate, it’s the one that counts. At the end Vicki said she was sorry that my birthday dinner wasn’t better, but I said “eh, at least I’ll get a good blog entry out of it.”
