Princesses are Not Necessarily Classy...

I knew a girl once who told me that her and her friends "put the ass in class."

That's kind of how I felt last night.

I went out with an Aunt and a cousin. All we knew was that we were going to dinner and a movie. So we ended up trying this new place called "Dacquisto." It's run by a management company that has all sorts of different restaurant "concepts." This one was authentic Italian. OK.

So we start perusing the menu which is only marginally in English. I was good with "Antipasti" and "Insalata." Not so much with "contorni" and "Piatti." But there were explanations, so I soldiered on.

The server hovered. The second one of us would lay our menus down to look at each other or ponder the situation, you could see him inching forward. We allowed him to get us drinks. Diet cokes all around. Several cherries for me, one for my cousin, none for my Aunt. He dropped them off with a flourish proudly proclaiming which had one cherry and which had several. And he was wrong. Switch.

We examined the prices more closely. This place was kind of pricier than we expected. We compromised and decided to just order appetizers and then stop at Mcdonald's on the way to the movie if we had to. (See? Classy.)

The second all three of us lay down the menus he was right there. It was mildly alarming. That coupled with an Italian accent that we all suspected was more than a bit put on...by that point we were thrilled to be rid of him.

We concluded that we would get maybe 5 prawns, a pizza the size of a saucer and a fist-ful of calamari.

Wrong.

There were only 3 prawns.

Apparently worth $4.00 each.

He started clearing the table before we even finished the last piece of pizza. Is it just me, or is that rude? We had been told when our table was needed for the next reservation. We were WAY early, but I guess by then the server decided that we were a lost cause. As it turned out he was right, we were so annoyed by the whole thing, that he only got a $5.00 tip.

My Aunt was mortified that she had suggested this place, so she insisted on picking up the bill. Lovely. And then we went here for some dinner and music. A lovely cafe in a bookstore that has live bands on Friday and Saturday evenings. Perhaps we should have just gone there to start with? It was in the same mall as the movie theatre and gave us a much less uptight experience. And it was far too packed to allow for any hovering. My cousin picked up that bill, so I got the movie.

All in all, a lovely evening. But it proved to me yet again- am I sophisticated? Not so much. Classy? Barely at all. Fun? Yeah, I can pull that off.