By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Joining a friend for breakfast, I ordered espresso and a couple of croissants at a local restaurant last week. The waitress asked if I’d like some jam. "Yes, please," I said. "That’ll be fifty cents extra," she replied.
Good grief! I thought. I looked around, just to be sure I wasn’t flying at 39,000 feet and paying an arm and a leg for a bag of pretzels. Nope! Still, the pay-per-peanut process is very insidious. Service doesn’t come with a smile anymore. It comes with a bankrupting charge.
Time to take a stand, I decided. "No thanks," I said. "No jam."
But hey! It’s a new era, with profit centers so prolific you can’t find a fee free periphery. Everything comes at a cost used to be a killjoy’s cliché. Now it’s the way things are. A toll booth for every step you take.
By the time I’d stopped mulling over the prospect of principled jamlessness, the croissants arrived, with two absolutely monstrous slabs of butter. I’m talking the equivalent of three or four old fashioned pats per slab. Now putting butter on crispy buttery croissants is like 24/7 air conditioning in Greenland, so I thought of suggesting a trade. No butter. Free jam.
Then I thought of putting the butter in a doggy bag. Ha! Ha! You can’t use my leftover butter to make tomorrow’s batch of pricey croissants! Which, of course, I could have done with the unused jam, I suppose, if I were a doggy bag person, which I haven’t been, ‘til now.
But a doggy bag is better than the dumpster in these days of soaring prices, n'est-ce pas? So: Waste not. Want not. Every lost crumb or smear of jam is as precious as the gasoline that dribbles out of the hose when you extract it from your tank these days. Pure gold or liquid gold, it's a major loss to the gross national product, every smidgen of it.
But after protest comes acceptance. So this is what I expect the menu for le petit dejeuner to look like in the near future:
Sticky unbused table: no charge
Clean table: $3.00
Place mat: $2.00
Naked croissant: $1.00 plate charge
Jam: 50¢
Fraise or framboise: $1.00 extra
Butter: 50¢
Beurre from une vache qui rit: $1.50
Coffee in paper cup: as listed
Coffee in diner mug: $1.00 extra
Stir stick: no charge
Spoon for stirring coffee: $1.50
Lemon peel for Espresso: $1.00 extra
Meyer lemon: $2.00 extra
Cinnamon for latté: $1.00
Double sprinkle: $2.00
Plain espresso snob charge: $2.50 extra
Cheese omelet: as listed.
Omelette française: double list price
Ordering anything in bad French: $5.00
Bon jour! on entry: $2.00
Have a good day! on leaving: 50¢
Surly French frown: no charge
Complaints: $5.00
Oh yes! I almost forgot this: Service non-compris!