The 250 Square Foot View

Earlier this week, I caught the latest Freakonomics podcast in which co-host Steven Dubner described an unpleasant dining experience he had at a Le Pain Quotidien in New York City, where he used to go at least once a week to eat and play backgammon with a friend. At the table behind him, he heard a scream followed by crying. It was a woman in her sixties. The impetus for her visceral reaction? She found a dead mouse in her salad.

Dubner characteristically turned this experience into a sociological study about how customers and businesses react in catastrophic situations like these. In this particular case, LPQ cited its organic approach, i.e. it doesn’t use any produce that has been sprayed with pesticides, the kind that keep mice away, as the primary reason why a dead rodent might find its way into one of their salads. Of course, this doesn’t explain why it went undetected all the way from farm to table. Still, the woman accepted LPQ’s apology and explanation and continued to eat there after the incident. (Personally, I would have held out for a minimum of free salads for life.) Dubner summed up the whole incident as a learning experience for us all, in which LPQ limited the damage by just being candid about its mistake and using it as an opportunity to examine its processes. But the story also got me thinking of my own unpleasant dining experience about six years ago.

In 2006 I was working in Manhattan but still living and commuting from my mom’s apartment on Long Island, a two-hour trip each way, five days a week. This didn’t give me much flexibility to hang out in the city after work on weeknights, but sometimes I made plans to go out and then stay with friends who lived nearby.

One Wednesday night, I was meeting an old college friend for drinks and dinner. We did a little barhopping and eventually landed at Mario Batali’s then-new restaurant, OTTO. I was 23 and it was the first time I can remember having a “grown-up” dinner—just two friends catching up over a meal and a few glasses of wine. It all felt so adult. We ordered different wines by the glass and different entrees, but couldn’t resist ordering two of the same dessert, the hazelnut gelato.

After dinner, my friend took the subway back to Brooklyn and I walked to 14^th and 5^th, where another friend from college was staying at his grandparents’ apartment while they were away for a few months. It was around 11 when I got there but we stayed up for a bit and had a few beers before I eventually dozed off on the couch.

A little while later, I woke suddenly with an overpowering urge to vomit. Generally I’m not much of a vomiter, even after a night of drinking, but in this case I couldn’t even make it to the bathroom. About ten feet from the toilet, red wine started spewing from my mouth like an Italian fountain, hitting the closed white bathroom door on a fly. As I alternated between gagging and gasping for air, my friend came out of his room to the mess I had made. I felt terrible not only for what I did to his grandparents’ home, but also for being such a lightweight drinker!

I continued to throw up and then dry heave for a few hours, afraid to stray too far from the bathroom. At some point I managed to stumble back to the couch and fall asleep, waking a few hours later to a massive headache and a terrible stench, reminding me that the scene from last night was not just a bad dream. Had I been closer to Long Island I would have called in sick for work, but since I was already in the city, I sucked it up and went into the office. After chugging a few gallons of water, I wrote an email to the first friend to tell her I had a great time at dinner and couldn’t wait to meet up again soon—I left out the part about throwing up, still embarrassed about getting sick from just a few drinks. The whole day passed and she still hadn’t responded. I was starting to think I had been so drunk that I didn’t even realize I was drunk, and that maybe I said or did something during the course of the night to offend her.

The next morning, her reply was waiting for me in my inbox. It was something to the effect of, “Hey, sorry I didn’t respond. I had awful food poisoning the other night. I called in sick yesterday.” Food poisoning, of course! I’d never been food poisoned before, so I didn’t really know what it would feel like. But it made perfect sense—it was that damned hazelnut gelato! I told her I had a similar experience and that I planned to call OTTO to complain and see if we could get a refund on our dinner check.

I spoke with a manager at OTTO who handled the situation coolly, offering to compensate me and my guest with gift certificates to the restaurant, which they would put in the mail right away. The next day I received a heavy package from OTTO, which included: two $50 gift certificates, two bottles of Champagne, two bottles of olive oil, and two copies of Mario Batali’s cookbook, Simple Italian Food. I couldn’t help but be impressed with their expedient handling of the incident.

A year passed and I still hadn’t used the gift certificates (or the olive oil or the cookbook), so I decided to treat a friend from high school to dinner. Enough time had passed that the idea of going back to OTTO no longer turned my stomach, and my guest didn’t seem to mind the reason behind the free meal. The food was terrific, as it had been the last time, and I even ordered the hazelnut gelato again. (It was that good.) I monitored my progress for the next few hours and came to the conclusion that OTTO hadn’t food poisoned me this time.

To this day, when someone mentions OTTO, Mario Batali, or any other notable chef’s NYC-based restaurant, I tell my story. I talk about the great meal, the projectile vomiting, and the “Sorry we poisoned you!” care package. It was a nice gesture for OTTO to cover the cost of my meal considering I didn’t really get to keep it for very long. But for the cost of $100 in gift cards and some olive oil, Champagne and cookbooks that were probably collecting dust in their supply closet, it made sense just to placate me, to make me feel like my complaint was heard and addressed. I have no idea if OTTO examined its processes like LPQ did, or if word got back to Mario Batali that some guy threw up because of his hazelnut gelato.

I typically like to wrap up these posts with a clever turn of phrase or tie the beginning paragraph back to the end. But in this case, I’m not sure I can. Is the moral of the story, “If you eat organic, beware of dead mice in your salads”? Or, “If you get food poisoning from a restaurant, make sure they give you a free copy of the chef’s cookbook”? No, I got it: Sometimes crappy stuff happens to us in restaurants and in life. If your worst problem is a dead mouse in your salad or a violent bout of vomiting, you’re probably doing pretty OK for yourself.