Saturday 20 May 2006

Wrapido - Japanese for dyslexic

I had a really fun start to the weekend this morning - an 8am appointment with the dentist to get the fangs cleaned. The tooth scraper tapped away on a few teeth, ordered up some x-rays, removed a tonne of tartar and presented me with a bill for $350. And an appointment to come back in a month to get the rest of the tartar removed. And an appointment to come back in July to get a crown installed.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I hate going to the dentist. I didn't mind it in the old days when they just pulled out some wierdly shaped tool like something out of Scary Movie 9 and dug into your gums and scraped gunk off and you ended up with a mouth full of blood and tartar chips. These days, they want to use some new-fangled sonic gizmo, and it sets my teeth on edge. I always end up with a stinking headache afterwards because my neck has locked up from the tension. I must remember to ask for a bit of laughing gas - not for the pain of the gum prodding, but to reduce the tension in my neck.

That said, my dentist has some nice features. For starters, they have a big fuck-off fish tank in the reception area. It must be 5ft by 5ft, with glass an inch thick. I just love looking at fish in a tank like that. I don't like catching them though - I love to eat them, and I love to swim around looking at them, but the catching and filleting bit is just not my scene. Why anyone would want to spend their free time fiddling around with fish guts is beyond me.

Secondly, my hygenist (who does all the work) is a member of a running club that runs around the Bay at least once a week - they run pretty much past our front door. The spin out is that they do 2-3 laps of the Bay, and it is 7km a lap. That's not bad going. She told me that they never run in the cycle lane (very bad form) and that she hates packs of women who wander around yapping to each other and filling the path from side to side and they never, ever get out of your way. Ha! Nice to see a bit of solidarity between the runners and the wheelies.

All the staff at my dentist also speak English, and they speak it really well. That is a huge bonus.

However, those good points don't make up for the fact that she spent the first 10 minutes poking a bit of metal right into my gums and making me leap around in the chair as blood spurted hither and thither. She had read my records before I showed up, and noted that I never asked for an injection when they did that. I never knew you could get an injection! Fuck, what kind of wimps need an injection for a simple scale and clean? Lots obviously. I might try it next time....

After a good fang cleaning, I needed a feed to take my mind off the horror ......the blood, the calculus, the drool....... That involved dropping into Crows Nest to a place called Wrapido. As the name suggestes, they specialise in "wraps", ie wrapping stuff up in pita bread. They do a basic bacon and eggs for breakfast during the week, but on weekends they go all out with lots of very special specials.

The menu has changed since my last visit, so I had a ricotta hotcake with poached eggs, smoked salmon and - yes, you guessed it - hollandaise sauce. However, the hollandaise was made with dill and lime, and it was a stunner. Smooth, lots of it and very tasty. It also came with a few spears of asparagus, and no fucking roast tomato or mushrooms. It was good - really good. The salmon was almost red. I don't know what they are feeding those little fuckers in their pens down in Tasmania, but they must be producing fish that glow in the dark. It was so red, I could have been forgiven for thinking that I was eating thinly sliced, raw steak.

Just one problem - breakfast was about half the size of what I needed for breakfast, and it cost $15.50. I was not about to order another one, but I was famished afterwards. I tried to dampen my hunger with a chocolate brownie, but it was nowhere near as good as the Lashings brownie, and somehow a brownie is just not the right thing to have after breakfast. I go their famished, and I left hungry. Not the way a visit to a cafe is supposed to work.

My tall buddy Ian joined me for a feed, as he was in the area, and he struck two problems. The first was the ordering system - it is one of those establishments where you order at the counter, pay and get given a number. There were only 3 or 4 people in front of him at the counter, but they were the indecisive type - the kind that you just want to kill if you are stuck behind them. Instead of reading the menu and then deciding what they wanted and then going up to the counter to order, they stood in line holding menus yapping to each other, then got to the counter and decided to read the menu and work out what to eat. That then involved a long and tedious discussion about what they felt like that day, whether they were doing a yoga class later on, whether Jupiter was occluding Venus, whether they were on a soy protein only diet that week etc etc. Indecisive menu pondering shits me to tears. I can look at a menu and work out within 10 seconds what I want. Something always stands out and says, "eat me". I might spend another minute reading the menu in detail to see if something else trumps my first choice, but it is a rare feed when I change my mind. You look, you decide, you eat. If you can't figure out whether you want your eggs scrambled or fried, then you really have some serious problems with your decision making abilities.

Ian eventually emerged and joined me at our table, only to watch what he thought was his breakfast getting carried from table to table by the waiters. He managed to flag one down and enquired as to whether the wrap he was carrying was his, and the waiter figured out that although Ian had been given number 16, the dopey cross eyed idiot at the counter had written number 19 on the docket. The poor old waiters were running around looking for a non-existent customer. He got a luke-warm coffee and a luke-warm breakfast, but he was very happy with the taste.

So apart from the dyslexic, cross eyed idiot running the place, and the stingey chef out the back, it was good. In some ways, it would have been good to have eaten two breakfasts, as the other specials looked pretty tasty. I'm not sure the budget will stretch that far though.

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