Dumb: when your order is served according to gender
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. This week, she’s annoyed by how irritating it is when your order is served according to your gender. ‘Uh, excuse me, why am I getting the cappuccino and he the espresso?’
It happens to me often. I flop down on a lovely terrace or sit down in a beautiful restaurant, and then we first have to swap everything around before we can start eating and drinking. Because the gentleman/lady serving us has decided what I should drink (?) and what my dining companion is supposed to have. In fact, it happens to me almost every time. Maybe not out loud or openly, but you can spot the inclination somewhere in a movement made by the waiter in question.
Cappuccino for the lady
With cappuccino, the inclination is quickly towards the woman; with espresso, slightly towards the man, and with a double espresso, it’s no longer even a cautious inclination. So there you have it: I find it incredibly irritating that an order is served according to gender. It’s not even hopelessly old-fashioned, because I don’t think taste can be old-fashioned at all; above all, it’s very remarkable.
Serving the wrong order at the table
I love a good glass of beer, the standard draft variety but also a tripel from a dark brown bottle. I always drink black coffee, or preferably a double espresso, because I shudder at the thought of milk being stirred in. I love a substantial piece of meat, and it doesn’t even need to be cooked well-done.
And all these delicious orders are therefore a recipe for serving everything completely wrong at the table. It gets even more ridiculous when my other half orders a Coke Zero as well (when I want a pilsner), and it’s also confusing because he drinks cappuccino as standard (which makes me pull disgusted faces because I hate milk).
As if little clouds of milk in coffee were feminine. The last time I checked, a cloud was neuter. The cloud.
Secret code
People in the hospitality industry, why does this happen to me? Is there a secret code I don’t know about that causes this inclination? I don’t believe you can read someone’s taste from their exterior. If that were the case, I would certainly do something with it, because then you’d have gold in your hands. But until then, I mainly find it strange that I’m always swapping things around because assumptions are being made based on my being a woman and his being a man.
In the meantime, I continue demonstratively sliding the cappuccinos towards him and the espressos towards me. But I solemnly promise that if someone says one more time that you don’t see that very often, I’ll probably do nothing and laugh sheepishly while inwardly asking the host/hostess, with a voice cracking, why on earth that is.
Read also:
- If you shudder at bits in your food
- Food vocabulary: enough with the avocado-speak
- Shaving cheese is a precarious matter
