Last Meal

I had a depressing dinner. A friend and I went to a new chain Italian restaurant in Durham called Johnny Carino's. It is next to P.F. Chang's which is busy around the clock. The parking lot at Johnny's was near empty. When we got inside it was slow. The atmosphere was like a tinny reproduced 70s' Italian restaurant. The menu was so uninspired. I ordered the safest bet which was the lasagna and a salad. The salad came full of iceberg lettuce with two hot-house tomato halves and a plop of dressing in the center. It was up to me to toss the salad myself. Bad tomatoes in summer are a sin. These were the same crappy tomatoes they use all year round. During the salad my waitress came back to tell me the kitchen was out of lasagna... at 6:15 with over half the tables empty and no one else I can see eating lasagna. "They make only so much and when it's gone, it's gone," she explained. They couldn't even plan for a small crowd. She asked if I wanted the three cheese ravioli instead since that's the closet thing. I asked to see the menu again and settled on the four cheese mannicotti. One more cheese! When it came it was so hot I had to sit back in my chair. You'd have thought it was London broil or something but the pale color of the cheese on top told me what produced it - a microwave. When I tasted the sauce it had all a freshness of the canned tomato paste it came out of. Then came the questions. "How is everything?" I could handle the waitress. "Fine." She can handle that. Then a guy in a too-tight double breasted suit came around acting all manager like. "Did we fill you up tonight?" I nodded. What the hell am I supposed to say? "I find your entire approach to food and dining, outdated, packaged and wrong." The place will be closed in six months. The only comforting thing about the experience was that it wasn't busy. If people were lining up for this crap I would have been totally depressed.