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I’d like a sproutburger, sproutjuice, and a side of sprouts — hold the broccoli

Friday night I was drifting around the house, not really sure what I felt like doing, and suddenly thought, gad, we haven’t been to Todd’s favorite restaurant in months. On the good side, it’s a health food restaurant, which means they have yummy vegetarian options and know what the word “tofu” means, but on the bad side it’s a health food restaurant, which means that they have non-junky vegetarian options and know what the word “tofu” means. In other words, I don’t like sprouts.

Am I making any sense yet?

I have a theory, which I’ve talked about here before, that people who eat health food as children (sprouts, tofu, steamed broccoli — oh no! Not the broccoli story, anything but the broccoli story…) are more likely to love junk food as they grow older. And vice versa. Me, I will turn my nose up at a spicy hot lentil dish in favor of Taco Bell any day. I ate my fill of what my friends christened “brown food” as a child and I definitely do not need to eat any more. Not that I thought the advent of Spam in my father’s household was any improvement over the sprouts, you understand. Todd, on the other hand, grew up with parents who were quite happy to make him any junky thing his heart desired. In fact, his mother would make up menus of dinners he liked and he’d pick out the things he wanted to eat. It’s amazing that he didn’t grow up into a spoiled monster. And Todd, who assumed for a long time that vegetables only came in cans, adores sprouts. He loves tofu. He would be happy to eat steamed broccoli every night for a year. Which is why this restaurant is his favorite one and why I’m not particularly fond of it.

At first I thought I’d ask when he got home if he was on about going there, and then I thought hey, why not be a little fancier about it, and I decided to put a note on the computer monitor saying something like, “Let’s go to your favorite restaurant, want to?” Then I remembered the way my elementary school teachers used to have the class make books of coupons for their families with gifts like, “Free Foot Rub, Redeemable Any Weeknight” or “Garbage Removal, Good For One Night Only”. So I gleefully sat down at the computer and created the graphic on the left, cut it out, put it in an envelope, wrote “Todd” on the front, and taped it to the computer monitor. When he arrived home and found the coupon he was a little teary, and said it was a great present, I was really glad I’d done it.

And I’d forgotten how good the food is there — like I said, I prefer Taco Bell, but I can appreciate delicious food when it comes my way. The proprietor, a beautiful woman, and I mean beautiful in the sense that she positively radiates warmth and comfort and her eyes are always crinkled as if she’s about to laugh, came over and said hello and I almost told her the story of the coupon and then thought better of it, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by starting out the story with something like, “I’m not as fond as this place as he is…” We stuffed ourselves silly. A great idea all ’round, if I do say so myself.

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