Yakety Yak! (Don't talk back)

We were both so proud of ourselves for getting our respective Saturday acts together in time to have lunch at one of our favorite places in town (one of the places that has joined that odd restaurant cabal that closes between lunch and dinner). In our seats well before 3:00, we looked forward to a delicious meal.

We ordered our favorite items, and were a little taken aback when one of our entrees was delivered. It was supposed to be three types of dumplings--beef, chicken, and vegetable. The waiter informed us that as they were short of vegetable dumplings, they had substituted dumplings filled with yak.

Yes, yak.

Now, poor Linda wasn't sure if a yak was a sort of vegetable, but I let her know that it was, instead, an animal. Perhaps a delicious animal, but when one has one's mouth set on vegetable dumplings, yak is not the first substitute that leaps to mind.

It's rather like a waiter saying, "I'm sorry, we were out of the veggie cutlet you ordered, so we cooked up a nice buffalo cutlet instead." Isn't it?

Well, we tried to be good sports, open minded diners, and so forth, and gamely (deliberate word choice) tried the yak dumplings. Didn't taste like chicken, I'll tell you that.

The one upside of the situation was that we were having all sorts of fun with the situation, coming up with idiotic advertisements: "When in doubt, serve yak." "Yak--the new dark meat." "Yak: It's what's for supper."

Well, perhaps you had to be there, but both Linda and I were having quite a bit of fun with it all.

We were having fun, I should say, until the owner of the restaurant brought our bill and told us he regretted that we didn't like the yak dumplings and felt terrible and that the dumplings were on the house.

We protested (while we didn't enjoy eating them, the comic value of the yak dumplings was immeasurable), but he stood firm. Oh dear.

Now we feel a bit bad about it. Oh well, it is always something.

After the yak debacle, we went to see the film, "The Squid and the Whale," only because Laura Linney was in it (we have been avid fans of hers since she was part of the "Tales of the City" franchise).

As movies go, it was a lot like a yak dumpling--without the fun.