by Sean Bonner
Warning: Obnoxious restaurant opening soon
October 2, 2006 at 2:44 pm in Food & Drink
This heads up comes via the folks at Curbed LA – Cafe Gratitude is coming to LA. Now, unfortunately I’m familiar with this raw food establishment as there is one is San Francisco a block from Jason’s house. We went there once, and talked about how annoying it was for the next month. While the food was OK, if a bit overpriced, their schtick will make you want to hit yourself in the face with a brick. See, instead of the menu saying “cinnamon bun” or “espresso” items are named with affirmations – items are called “I am joyful” or “I am delighted”. To make this worse there is no translation, so you have to read the item description and try to figure out what the hell the item is. For instance a veggie burger would be called “I am thankful: a handmade veggie patty with fresh lettuce and tomato between two whole oat buns” or something like that, so you have to reverse engineer the menu to figure out what you are ordering. But it gets worse, you have to order playing their little game. At least in SF when I said “I’ll have an espresso” the server responded “you mean you are delighted?” I said “What?” and he replied “If you want to order ‘I am Delighted’ then you are Delighted.” I refused to jump through the hoops and the server wasn’t pleased. (I think the staff must have had a drum circle or made dream catchers in the evening to cleanse the negativity I brought to the place) When they brought out our order it was the same thing, they’d say “you are enlightend” as they put the food in front of us. Needless to say we never went back, and I was happy knowing that was all the way up in SF. But now there will be one here to annoy folks in LA. I am not impressed.
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