Enter as Strangers, Leave as Friends..my blankety-blank!

Eating German food for me is an act of love. Not because my mother's family was German, or that German cuisine very much influenced the food I grew up with. Eating German food is an act of love for me because my Baby loves German food.

Considering the basic menu at most German restaurants, you can imagine how poorly I fare with my meat- and cheese-restricted diet. Before I broke down and started eating fish again, the best I could hope for was home fries and a half-decent salad. What I usually get in the vegetable offerings is overcooked green beans (usually "flavored" with meat products), mushy, vinegar-laden cucumber-carrot-onion salad, or German style potato salad (which I loathe).

Like I said—I love my Fey, so I eat the stuff now and then.

Recently, we've fed Fey's German food needs in a very predictable way – we schlep over to Vine Grove/Flaherty and eat at Caroline's Schnitzel Barn. I always order the same thing—the fish sandwich with home fries. Fey goes wild with schnitzel and spaetzl and all those other things she likes that I don't eat.

The restaurant itself is small—just a few tables, and we go often enough that the staff knows us well. Recently, though, we've noticed a few trends that we don't like—so much so that our dinner there last night is probably going to be our last for a long time.

One benefit of small, independently-owned restaurants is that they reflect the personality of the management. In some cases, this is also a detriment. We've been to Schnitzel Barn many times and have had perfectly acceptable service—sometimes even great.

And then, we've gone in there and come out so furious that we raved all the way home. Usually it's me raving. I don't know—I find the fact that I'm ignored and treated like an intruder to be highly insulting when piled on top of the fact that I can only order one thing on the menu.

Last night, it was so bad even Fey was raving. We got there at approximately ten minutes to six pm, fairly advanced of any dinner crowd. We ordered, exactly, two brochen, a bowl of soup as an appetizer, a fish sandwich, and half a schnitzel sandwich.

While we sat…and sat…and sat….the restaurant filled up with people who the servers called by name and greeted as old friends. These people were buying alcohol and, (surprise, surprise!) their glasses were never empty. Several times our server passed us up to go to the other tables.

After forty minutes had passed and we'd only gotten our drinks and the brochen, I went up to the bar to ask about our soup. After all, it's soup. It's made before hand. All they have to do is scoop it up, right? I was told, in a rather impatient manner, that they were doing the best they could.

So I went back and sat down, while tables that were seated after us were getting their meals, and we were still waiting on our soup.

Finally, at about five minutes to seven, our entire meal—soup and sandwiches—arrived in one lump sum (even though we'd asked for the soup as an appetizer). To top it off, the soup was ice cold.

So at this point, we're both livid. If I had not gone to ask about the soup, or if the service had not been so obviously biased, we could have let it go as just a fluke (the restaurant was very packed). But the bottom line was that we were passed over to give preference to larger tables ordering alcohol. Our soup was completely forgotten, even after I made a special trip to the bar to ask about it. Our meal was barely edible, and we felt like gate-crashers at some bizarre country family reunion.

So of course, I go up to the owner herself, who is behind the bar, to ask her to take our cold soup away and remove it from the bill. She proceeds to give me a hundred excuses and basically calls me a liar to my face when I tell her we've been waiting for the better part of an hour to get cold food. (I was facing a huge clock for the whole meal. I know exactly how long we waited.) She then grudgingly agreed to remove the soup from the bill. I paid the bill and we left.

In the car home, we reviewed the math and realized, she had not taken the soup off at all.

Why? Because she didn't have to. There are about three restaurants in the Vine Grove/Flaherty area, which means this woman has no competition. She doesn't have to care one whit whether people who drove for thirty minutes to give her money for services actually get the service they paid for. She doesn't have to be polite and friendly and courteous to people she hasn't known since they attended Vacation Bible Camp together in second grade.

There is a big sign up at Caroline's Schnitzel Barn that reads, "Enter as strangers; leave as friends." I suppose Caroline has a different definition of the word, because I certainly don't treat my friends the way we were treated last night.