grand lux cafe

date: july 28, 2005
bet: whether olive would spill the beans
stakes: lunch
winner: olive
loser: mason
destination: grand lux cafe (600 north michigan)
cost: $50


olive: first, some clarification on the bet. thus far, the office romance has remained a secret, though mason was quite certain i would spill the beans to a co-worker during an office happy hour, either purposely or accidentally. and so a bet was born. but i kept my wits about during the happy hour and managed to last the evening without the beans being spilt.

the reward lunch took place at grand lux. this is a popular lunch destination, so it's difficult to squeeze into an hour. the seating system is quite garbage, if you ask me - you have to wait to be escorted from the downstairs lobby to the upstairs dining area. but oh my lucky stars, we were seated in a giant booth, which is the best kind of booth to be sure.

the menu is extensive. i decided on the lunch sandwich special consisting of the french country soup (chicken broth, curly noodles, veggies, yum), a half portion of the turkey b.l.t. and a small house salad with a light vinaigrette dressing. i washed it all down with a draught amstel light. gulp!

we skipped dessert because i don't generally dessert after lunch, but i say! the waitstaff must make commission on after-meal treats. our waiter might have cut off his own arm if he thought it would help sway us to order dessert. i'll leave the rest of the service review up to mason, but overall, the food was very tasty and the helpings were generous. i'm generally a fan of grand lux, so this makes one of my favorite lunch outings.

mason: right. so yeah. first and foremost, i need to qualify my forthcoming rant by saying that just because i've thought that the waiters were hitting on olive at every lunch we've reviewed so far doesn't make me some sort of a raving loony tunic. on the contrary, i think i'm actually quite sane -- grounded even. i've even heard people say things like "man, that mason sure is grounded." except they usually call me by my real name, which as you know, i cannot reveal. sometimes i've even heard people say something like "man, that mason is almost TOO sane." which got me to thinking, am i so sane that these waiters look at me and think to themselves "that guy's way too sane to wait for me to get off work, follow me to the train station, sit next to me on the train, then cut my throat when we pass through a darker than normal portion of track just because i'm hitting on his lady-friend right in front of his very (sane) eyes?" perhaps. and they would be correct. i would not do that. in fact, it's hard for me to even imagine. i didn't even imagine it myself just now -- i saw it in a movie. my brain is too sane to give flight to such a dastardly deed. way too sane indeed.

but i have to be honest, this waiter at grand lux was driving me a bit crazy. first of all, he all but ignored me when he greeted us. that is until after he stared at olive for a verging-on-uncomfortable number of seconds and then said, quite seriously (and as best i could tell from my vantage point, a bit seductively), "you have a beautiful smile." then, to add just the proper amount of insult to an already excessive amount of injury, he turned to me and said "doesn't she have a beautiful smile?" that's right. the first time he acknowledged me was to ask me if i thought my own girlfriend had a beautiful smile. so i said what any completely sane guy in my position would have said: "ummmmmm, yeah. that's why i'm currently dating her and also plan on making out with the mouth in question later tonight." okay, so i didn't say that exact thing, but regardless of what i said, it was accompanied by a look that resembled the look of someone who had lasers for eyes would have looked at his prey just before eye-lasering them to death -- my prey being the waiter.

so then, after we ordered some water and beer, i thought maybe i should simmer down a bit because 1) the people we work with every weekday of every week don't even know we're dating, so why should this dude, and 2) perhaps this waiter was in fact a spy hired by our office to try and get us to admit, through no fault of our own, but rather, as a reaction to an apparently overzealous but actually merely "hired" food industry employee (in the employ of not only grand lux, but also our very own office), that we were in fact throwing (see post "start!" for explanation). but then i realized that 1) this is ridiculous and 2) i was beginning to act a bit insane, which is so not me.

so anyway, we proceeded to place our order, which as olive mentioned began with two crisp, cold, super delicious but deceptively low-calorie amstel lights, and of course, two icy glasses of chicago's very best H20. from the menu, i chose the Spicy Flat Bread Chicken Sandwich, which was nothing short of outstanding. thing is, this menu at grand lux is like a freaking phone book, but instead of being filled with names and numbers of people you don't know/have never heard of, it's filled with names of some of your favorite people. like that little old lady who's always walking her dog when you stumble home at 7am and she probably thinks that you just ran out to get the morning paper or have just returned from church or something when in actuality you just had drink number 28 of 28 and cigarette number 32 of 32 from the prior evening about 20 minutes earlier when you decided you should try and get in bed before the sun comes out. meaning that just like this lady is someone you recognize and like, even though you haven't really ever talked to her before, the menu at grand lux is filled with items whose names are not only familiar but also include below them a very detailed description of what the dish entails, for instance:

Spicy Flat Bread Chicken Sandwich
Grilled Chicken Breast Topped with Pepper-Jack Cheese, Avocado-Corn Salsa, Red Onion, Lettuce, Tomato and Mayo on Our Grilled Flatbread.
Served with Fries

so the point is, it's kinda hard to decide what to get and very easy to get caught up in reading each and every item description. after careful deliberation, however, i was happy with my choice, and so was olive cause she got to eat some of my fries.

the service, inappropriate flirtations aside, was pretty good for the most part, but as olive alluded to, they're really pushy about the "baked-to-order" desserts. what are we, my mom and grandma? have we purposely left approximately half of our tummy real estate vacant so we can order cheese cake and a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert? no, we're a couple of high-powered executives with a dirty little secret. a secret, you'll find out, that becomes the very subject of our next couple bets. let's just say that this is where things start to get interesting and where that can of beans starts to become dangerously unstable...

olive (rebuttle): whoa, whoa. let's not blow this dirty secret bit out of proportion, mason. i'd hate to mislead our reader(s). and, let's not go overboard on claims of sanity. this entire blog borders on the edge of crazy town.