Baked Alaska

I grew up in a middle-class household where we had enough to get by with daily necessities. So I never experienced sleeping on an empty stomach, and I was a bratty kid. I was always devising schemes to skip school. I had zero interest in anything remotely related to studying.

My father was a wise man. He saw through all this and decided to set me straight after I grew up a little. One of the interesting things he did was to make sure I experienced both how poor and rich people eat.

Some days, my mother would try to make me eat some vegetable, and I would furiously protest because it didn’t taste good. Then my father would tell me stories from his own childhood - usually something like they didn’t have the means to eat that vegetable regularly back then, and it was considered a delicacy by them. And here I was, being a little brat, refusing to eat it. That sometimes set me straight and I ate it, and after a while I got immune to it and didn’t stop protesting.

He also sometimes took me and my little brother out on his motorcycle, and once in a while we stopped to eat at fancy restaurants in my town that we definitely couldn’t afford regularly. There I learned the concepts of eating an appetizer before the main course and tipping waiters. My father sometimes showed me the final bill after our meal so I knew how much eating at a place like that cost (and that overtime taught my brain that in order to have nice things in life, I better start paying attention at school).

I remember one particular restaurant outing when I was, like, maybe 14-15. It was my birthday, and we also had to take my Mom out with us, but the four of us couldn’t go on a motorcycle. So we just walked (the restaurant was probably 2-3 km from my home).

I remember being excited because this was a restaurant right across from my coaching institute. I always wondered how the restaurant looked from inside when I was going for those classes, and the actual experience did not disappoint. I remember walking back with a full stomach and a full heart, with my family by my side.

Probably a year or two after that, I moved out of town for college. There, I was dependent on the food available in my college hostel’s dining hall (which sucked big time), and I was always eating junk food from outside whenever I could. I used to run out of my pocket money soon, and I hated the food at my hostel’s dining hall, so I always skipped meals and attended classes sometimes with a growling stomach.

On days with no classes, I had this little trick of sleeping late and not waking up till very late in the evening, so I could skip the meals without consciously experiencing hunger. Sometimes I just couldn’t control it, so I bought Lays and a biscuit packet from a tiny store near my hostel, and that was my lunch and dinner many times.

Then I graduated from college and got an entry-level job in an MNC company that I wasn’t very thrilled about. I attended the onboarding session they arranged in a fancy five-star hotel, and that was where I was introduced to the concept of an “all-you-can-eat buffet.”

I was excited to see all those things I considered delicacies arranged in a row, so I loaded my plate with everything I could. My next task was to find a place to stand and eat my food (it was just an open hall with no seating).

Everyone was huddled in groups of people who knew each other from college, and I knew no one there, so I just stood alone and ate my lunch, hoping no one noticed how lonely I was feeling inside.

And then, a few years from that, I made this grand decision to come to the United States for my Master’s. I barely knew any cooking (my mom tried to teach me, but I forgot everything by the time I reached the airport).

So in my initial days in the United States, I was always starving, relying on my kind friends who were good cooks or crashing campus events where they had food. Eating outside was too expensive for me, but my friends and I figured out McD sells sandwiches for 2 USD. So we regularly ate there and declared to each other that it was the best sandwich to have ever been made on this planet Earth.

I started speaking to my mother every day on the phone from when I landed in the country, and she would ask me every day, without missing, what I had eaten. It was difficult for me to tell her the truth sometimes, so I just lied and told her that I was a great cook.

I also had to take an “etiquette lunch” session organized by business school during my Master’s since we might be at networking lunches where we needed to have good etiquette to not put people off. I remember seeing a thousand different spoons and forks and plates, and my brain instantly switched off at that point. The only thing I remember from that session was that tomato basil soup tastes lovely.

I eventually graduated and landed a job and started making some money, which I could spend on eating out regularly and not get to zero balance in my account like during my college days.

But it was during this time that I realized the entire concept of eating food has two important components - first is the food itself, and second is who you are eating it with.

And I realized I was eating food by myself almost every day, and it sucked.

So I tried to get out, touch the grass, and make some friends. I went to a social dinner with strangers organized in a fancy American restaurant. I remember looking at the menu and thinking, shit, I don’t recognize anything on this, I don’t eat a lot of the meat in the foods there, and I don’t drink alcohol.

A waitress went around asking everyone for their order, and I was dreading it as she approached me. She asked me, “What drink would you like today?” and I was like, “Do you have a Diet Coke?”

She stared at me for 5 seconds, gave me a strange look, and was like, “Alright.”

For food, I could only order a Caesar salad with chicken, which I hated, but it all cost me like 50 USD, which would have let a broke me from college lavishly eat out for an entire month without starving.

Anyways, that’s why I hate eating at fancy restaurants. And as it turns out, I have to attend a work dinner in a fancy restaurant with a dress code today (their dress code can be summarized as this - "don’t wear anything Asif owns").

I looked at their menu, and it had a 100 USD steak and a fancy dessert named ‘Baked Alaska’.

But the thing I am most excited about is to see the look on the waiter’s face today when I ask for Diet Coke.