Sunday, May 4, 2008

Enter the Twilight Zone

Jon has been talking for weeks about trying a new restaurant on the Coast, Soul Food Kitchen. It’s a Deep South Creole restaurant with a chef who is a real live Bayou boy that has gotten phenomenal reviews. All day, he’s been talking about how he is going to have ribs and cornbread tonight.

dinner

Now, as we pull into the car park it is not looking promising. The restaurant is dark. I see the outside tables stacked inside before Jon does and when he does his face drops. His fate is sealed; no down home cooking for this boy tonight.

He was so shattered that he sat down on the sidewalk to contemplate how the Soul Food gods could have let this happen. It was heartbreaking.

I rallied him by suggesting that we go and see if the Moroccan place down the road had an available table. He’s been keen to try this place since we moved here, but weekend bookings are nearly impossible to get; since it was a Sunday night, I thought we might get lucky.

Lucky would have been an understatement. There was only one other table in the restaurant when we arrived. I quickly ascertained that “they talk like me.” This is my choice phrase to alert Jon that someone in the vicinity is speaking in a North American accent. My shining moment was when I came home and told Jon the PA system on the train to Brisbane talks like me.

After Jon confirms the accent, we then have a bit of fun trying to deduce whether they are Canadian or American. The tip off tonight was that a guy at the other table said, “If you are in any large city and find yourself on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., you are not far off from getting shot.” Definitely American. Our assumptions were confirmed when they referred to the lettuce as iceberg and not cos.

As our food arrives and another couple enters decked out to the nines in University of Illinois gear. Jon and I smile at each other thinking this could be a really weird turn of events; in the year and a half we have lived here on the Coast, we have not met another American outside of Brissy. Is it possible that there is some weird stroke of fate that had assembled 12 of us into a random Moroccan restaurant in Cotton Tree?

Apparently, yes. As soon as the Hoosier opened his mouth, it was confirmed he was one of us and more than likely from a “red state.”

I never realized there was a correlation between Yanks and Moroccan food or that were actually 12 of us residing on the Sunshine Coast. Randomness.

PS ~ minted yoghurt and lamb are not my cup of tea, but I did try!

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