Gwen Styles In The City

One night earlier this year, my ex and I went to dinner at Jerusalem Restaurant. It’s one of my favourite restaurants – it’s a Mediterranean buffet. The food is incredible. Several different kinds of chicken and lamb, tabbouleh, seafood, grilled veggies as far as  the eye can see (asparagus, zucchini, eggplant, cauliflower), saffron rice, salads, roasted garlic, lentil soups, Warak Enab,  hummus and baba ghanoush, falafel, hot freshly-baked pita bread, and more!

Even better, they feature belly dancers every night of the week! We love watching the belly dancing.

So we were just sitting down to our first plate of food. Our table was in the aisle that had a direct path from the kitchen to the bar. A busboy was coming from the kitchen with a dolly, and the dolly was stacked with five crates of clean water and wine glasses. The stack was about four feet high. Suddenly, the wheel of the dolly caught on the rug right in front of our table and all of the crates tipped forward, crashing into Stuart and I with a booming  sound that almost shattered my eardrums! The plastic crates smashed into my left knee and Stu’s right foot and over a hundred glasses broke all over us! I was literally ankle-deep in broken glass, and couldn’t even move because of the sea of jagged glass around me.

The manager of the restaurant comes rushing over yelling “Oh my god are you okay? Oh my god oh my god!” She was snapping her fingers for staff to clean up the glass, calling the head waiter over to move us to another table, promising to bring us replacement drinks (we were just drinking Coke) and apologizing profusely.

The indicent scared and embarrassed me. Not only was everyone in the restaurant was looking at us, but it happened so fast that I thought I was going to be hurt! I had no time to move out of the way. For several minutes afterwards my heart was beating a mile a minute and I had a mild panic attack on the way home. Imagine if we’d been cut by a falling shard of glass, or if my knee had actually been hurt by the plastic crate that hit it!

So we were moved to a new table (a MUCH better table, might I add) and were offered free unlimited wine for the evening to make up for the incident (would have been better to offer us our meal on the house, but I am NOT one to pass up free booze!). The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly, the highlight being towards the end when we watched the belly dancer coax an old grandpa up to dance with her. The guy looked just like Frank Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond. This guy gets up and starts dancing with the belly dancer, and he’s better than she is! He even taught her some sexy moves! It was fucking hilarious.

What’s the scariest or most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you in a restaurant?