Those who appreciated the chicken salad sandwich scene in “Five Easy Pieces” will enjoy the following story.
While the scene in “Five Easy Pieces” is an analogy about power in society and the new guard vs. the old establishment, literally, the scene is about getting what you want to eat in a restaurant.
I arrived in Baltimore a little sad since I was up there on the one day that the Lexington Market wasn't open. But I was delighted to see Ethel & Ramone had a booth at the outdoor farmers market underneath the highway, east of the market in downtown Baltimore.
In my first trip to Maryland, I wanted to have as much crab as I could, getting the true sense of this seafood selection. Usually, crab is mixed in with something else, such as a crab cake.
Ethel & Ramone was selling breakfast sandwiches, Cajun style: egg, Andouille sausage, and vegetables, kind of an omelet sandwich between two pieces of ciabatta bread. And the $7 sandwich could be as is, or you could add crab for a $2 charge.
Now the sandwich did sound good by itself, and would have been nice to wrap up and take with me. But I saw this as the optimum time to get a true crab experience. So I asked them if I could get just a crab sandwich, nothing but crab.
While they weren't used to this request, they pleasantly went along. The guy said he'd have to charge me $9 given the price of crab. I thought the whole point was that crab was local, but I smiled and said sure. His point wasn't unreasonable, and we were all in a laissez-faire attitude at the moment.
The person making the sandwich misunderstood the request, and they tried giving me a sandwich with egg and crab. I politely pointed out that I just wanted a crab sandwich, nothing else. Everybody was cool, and minutes later, I had exactly what I wanted.
Even though I waited to eat it until I was in Oriole Park for the baseball game, the sandwich was totally worth the effort and wait. They added a bit of the Old Bay spice that you see everywhere, and I added a little bit more from the canister inside the park.
In the Midwest, you see crab but it doesn't taste like this: simple, clean, and very nice. I was very happy.
When we go out to eat, and we want something unusual and offbeat, some can get intimidated by wanting something that is off the traditional path, whether that is asking to not having something fried or not cooked in butter.
But we have a right to food prepared in whatever way we can get to stick with our eating plans while out. Push for a side salad instead of fries if that is what you want. You won't get every request, and you won't always get people as nice as the ones at Ethel & Ramone in Baltimore, but you'll never get what you want unless you ask for it.
As the folks at Ethel & Ramone said when it pointed out that I wanted something different, “Different is good.”
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.