high dive

date: march 26, 2007
bet: will mason finish the disgusting margarita that olive ordered before the end of dinner?
stakes: dinner
winner: olive
loser(s): mason
location: high dive (1938 W. Chicago Ave.)
cost: $39.00

olive: first, i think we should explain this most irregular o&m betting scenario. on this particular evening, we decided to grab dinner at high dive prior to having a bet for which to dine. i admit, we're a little rusty at this betting and eating thing, and no one had less faith in our ability to follow through on the meal + review than me. so, we launched into the dinner first and decided to make a quick bet in case our efforts actually resulted in a post.

it was a monday night and high dive was offering $5 dollar margaritas -- a seemingly irresistible deal on this summer-like day. but oh, how i should have resisted. the margarita was -- how can i put this? -- utterly disgusting. a regrettable waste of tequila. blech. fortunately, it was not a complete loss, for from this liquid horror, a bet was born. a challenge for mason to guzzle the remaining margarita poison before dinner's end. i'll leave it to him to recount his failure/my triumph, but i do applaud him for trying (G-R-O-S-S).

mason: i should mention at this point that although i am considered by many to be darn near a professional drinker, i simply cannot handle tequila. i don't really like the way it tastes, my stomach doesn't really like the way it feels, and the general public doesn't really like the way it makes me act. if i am a superdrinker, then tequila is, without a doubt, my cryptonite.

sorry for the interruption. back to olive...

olive: now, about the venue. the name is pretty spot on. it's a very nice bar with a very dive feel. plush red booths, dimly lit, walls covered with fantastic screen printed posters for very respectable bands, a vast selection of gluggables and a very decent bar menu.

i ordered a miller lite and the turkey bacon club sandwich (panini style, tomato, lettuce, muenster cheese and roasted red pepper aioli) with ranch french fries. i was starving and my flavor hopes were running high. the sandwich arrived about 20 minutes later and my flavor hopes plummeted. the turkey-to-other-ingredients ratio was way out of wack. piles and piles of turkey versus one piece of bacon (ONE! see photo) and not a drop of the red pepper aioli which had been the deal maker on my order! such disappointment. the french fries were an even bigger disaster. they were excessively soggy, as if they had just been plucked from a potato swamp. i'm talking completely devoid of all crispiness and basically inedible. luckily, we were able to capture it on film. behold: the bendy, soggy fry specimen.

the best part about the meal came in the form of delicious, crispy pickle slices on the side. i tacked them onto the sandwich and was able to take down almost half of it, but i don't think i'll be a repeat diner anytime soon.

mason: me neither, and i actually really enjoy this place, at least as it relates to sitting around and drinking at a place other than someone's living quarters. the music at high dive, first of all, is top-notch. jukebox driven, i don't think there's a single bad record to choose from, though i'm using the word bad to mean bad like john mayer, not bad like wilco's last two albums. anyway, in the course of the hour or so we spent there, we heard "head on" by jesus and his mary chains, "everyday is like sunday" by formerly smiths, and "heart shaped box" by one dead guy, one microphone swallower, and one other guy, just to name a few.

olive: i'll interject to say they also have board games here and i've successfully played them and drank drinks with great success in the past.

mason: yes, anyway, i safely ordered a miller lite, which was, as always, delicious (little did i know what was in store for the remainder of my beverage consumption that night). for dinner i ordered the steak fajita wrap, which was reported as coming with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, cheese, and some kind of sauce, all wrapped up in a sun-dried tomato tortilla. for the most part, it was pretty good, but the steak was a bit undercooked for my liking. the highlight of the meal was actually the $1 upgrade from fries to tater tots that i opted for. how wise, it turns out, was i? after all, no one likes swamp fries, except maybe the swamp thing, and that dude's a moron.

another highlight was that for the first time since watching goodfellas a few weeks ago -- and i've been wanting to try this ever since then -- i got a chance to gently massage heinz ketchup from a brand new bottle the same way deniro did when he, joe pesci and ray liotta were eating a late night snack at pesci's mom's house on their way to bury that guy they killed at liotta's bar. he did so by holding the bottle upside down perpendicularly between his two hands and moving said hands alternately up and down quickly so as to rotate the ketchup right out -- kind of like how you used to make long skinny strands of play-dough as a kid (olive maintains that liotta was the ketchup twirler, but what does she know? she only saw goodfellas for the first time ever last month). so it turns out that method does in fact work, although i continue to prefer the method of putting the bottle on the edge of a three-story building's roof and then running down all the stairs to the sidewalk just in time to catch the ketchup on my plate like heinz advised in one of their commercials back in the 90s.

finally, i'll echo olive's sentiments about the pickles -- i only wish there were more than just two meager slices.

now, on to the bet. olive won. i thought i'd be able to take down the marg, but this is as far as i got. it was just too gross. plus, it's my cryptonite, remember? so whatever. i lost the first bet of our resurgence to blogdom, but there will be others.

it's great to be back!!! (only two exclamation points worth of great, actually. not three. i don't want to get ahead of myself).