FTT Very Off Topic: Boss Is Japanese For Sucker

Burning Money

As always with FTT O-T, this isn't about sports and isn't going to have an apology. Read or skip.

So I've been away from home on business all week, and had a decent night in the home poker game on Friday night, so I wanted to take the long suffering Shooter Wife and Kids out for dinner. And since they are kids, they have a favorite restaurant -- the local hibachi place.

Now, I *like* the food there, because it's pretty much impossible to not like the food at a hibachi place. You are, after all, eating nothing but carbs, with copious amounts of soy sauce and butter, with the chance to drink down sake, and nothing entertains the kids more than a Japanese guy making an onion into a volcano. I'm even OK with paying something of a premium for it, because, well, you are getting the floor show.

But should that premium go to, for two adults and three kids (the eldest brought her best friend with her tonight), $150 with a not terribly large tip?

In the words of my late great-grandfather, Hell and No.

But that's where you get to when you are charged $4 a glass for a glass of soda and refills, $6 and $12 for sides of shrimp and scallops (and having the protein portions of the meal consist of a half-dozen bits of sub-standard meat), and $91 for the five entrees.

Now, it this had been, say, $100 to $120 for everything? We'd be here a couple of times a year for special occasions, and I wouldn't be trying to avoid driving past the place with the kids in the car. Since all they know is that dinner there is fun and tasty, and if Dad has enough money to take us out for dinner occasionally (and, well, I do), why can't we just go to our favorite place?

And yes, I could just tell them how much it costs, and how much of a chump I feel when that check comes... but why ruin it for them, when I can just pay the check and move on?

Evidently, no.

Oh, and Japanese chef guys? Please, for the love of the chump paying the bill, come up with some new trick that isn't the volcano onion. Maybe make the grill show fire into patterns, or toss something on the grill that makes it pop like a firecracker, or burn out in different colors? I'm not asking you to break character and admit that you can speak unaccented English with more than a 50-word vocabulary here...