Fine-dining restaurants attract a lot of entitled clientele. I’m not saying everyone who eats fancy food is a monster (I like fancy food and I’ve been called a monster only once . . . by one of my kids, and that just simply doesn’t count), but fancy restaurants do seem to experience a higher concentration of people who’ll ask their server to leave the restaurant and walk two blocks to a specialty store to pick up a specific cheese they’d prefer to have grated onto their salad. And because some of the finicky customers were regulars who would drop a thousand dollars every week at the restaurant, we’d comply with even the most outlandish requests. The restaurant was a true establishment, a place where customers wanted and expected special attention, and any alteration to the menu inevitably resulted in complaints from those who missed the way it used to be.
Most of the managers would handle complaints from tables by either blowing them off or comping part of the customers’ meals, both of which are a bummer for the server because we lose out on tips. But Philip had this way of changing people’s moods. He’d go to a table that had been angry and impossible to please all night, and by the time he left, the diners would be smiling and cracking jokes and complimenting the server who couldn’t do anything right just moments earlier.
Everyone liked Philip.
So Daniela and I were happy to invite him to our karaoke night.
The day before the karaoke outing, Philip called my cell phone. He had never called me before. In fact, we had never even spoken outside of work.
“I’m calling because I was thinking that we should grab dinner before karaoke,” he said.
“Oh, that sounds great!” I said. “Let me call Daniela and make sure that works for her.”
Daniela informed me that she already had dinner plans, so I called Philip back. “Unfortunately, Daniela can’t make it to dinner.”
“Perfect!” Philip sounded happy. I was perplexed, followed quickly by feeling annoyed. Maybe Philip wasn’t such a good guy after all. Maybe he was a big two-faced phony.
“Perfect? Perfect?!? What do you mean ‘perfect’? Do you not like Daniela? You don’t want to hang out with her? So let me get this straight. You pretend you’re fine with her to her face, but then behind her back, you think it’s ‘perfect’ that you don’t have to be around her? Listen, she’s my friend and I think you’re incredibly rude, and I just want you to know—”
As I was going off, standing up for Daniela, Philip interrupted, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there. I have nothing against her. Nothing! It’s just that when I said I wanted to have dinner with you, I meant just you.”
I very quickly and awkwardly ended the conversation and called Daniela back, frantically asking why Philip would want to have dinner with just me.
“I mean . . . is he suggesting a date? Like, a real date? Does he like me? Like, like me like me? More than a friend? Ugh, this is so uncomfortable. I’m just not interested in him in that way. I’m not having dinner with just him!”
I’d never thought of Philip in a romantic way. Because America was in the middle of the Great Recession, business had slowed at the restaurant, and so I’d gotten to know him a little better than I might have otherwise, while we chatted during the downtime. The restaurant employed several managers, so I never really felt like he was my boss, and I thought he was a nice guy, the kind of guy I’d want to set up with a really great girl. But I wasn’t that girl!
The next day I did everything I could to make sure Philip knew our dinner was not a date. I put on jeans—my least favorite pair of jeans!—and a loose shirt with no shape whatsoever that had a permanent brown stain on it. (I am 98.2 percent certain the stain was not from my children’s fecal matter. Let’s just assume it was chocolate.) I didn’t worry about how my hair or makeup looked. I drove myself (because if he picked me up, he might think this was a date, which it definitely was not) and spent the whole ride thinking up ways to get out of this dinner if it started feeling like a date.
Philip had chosen a small Vietnamese restaurant called Gingergrass that didn’t take reservations, and when we arrived, there was a forty-five-minute wait to be seated, so we decided to get a drink at a wine shop across the street. We wandered through the aisles of crates, sipping our wine and looking to see if they had anything Croatian.
At one point, I glanced up at Philip leaning against the wall with his glass of wine and something in me shifted. I’d never really seen him outside of work and the change in setting allowed me to look at him with fresh eyes. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear him anymore. What is going on? I thought. Why do I suddenly feel attracted to this guy?
Philip had always been warm when we’d spoken at work, but also entirely professional. I’d never gotten a flirtatious vibe from him, which I appreciated given his position; I was starting to realize it might be why I’d never thought of him romantically before. He was going to be leaving soon to manage the new restaurant, so I didn’t really have to worry about whether my feelings toward him would affect my position at work, and I trusted his character enough to know that if things got awkward he’d be mature and gracious. I sipped my wine and allowed myself to enjoy the unexpected new feelings I was having in this man’s company.
Later that night, as I sat across from Philip at the tiny restaurant, stealing bites of Shaking Beef off his plate with a fork, I felt like myself. And for some strange reason, “myself” didn’t feel so complicated or overwhelming when I was around him.
Most people try to sell themselves on first dates, highlighting their best features and trying their hardest to hide their insecurities and failures. But Philip came across as so genuine and comfortable that I managed to bring him fully up-to-date on my dreadful mental state the prior year, the various conflicts with people in my life, the state of my stretch marks, and even the fact that sometimes I pee myself when I laugh.
The dinner ended with my fighting him for the check. We were going to split it because if he paid this would be a date and, despite my new curiosity about him, THIS WAS NOT A DATE!!!
I lost. He won. He paid. But still . . . not a date.
When we met up with Daniela at the karaoke bar after dinner, Philip surprised me again. He’d always struck me as the quiet type, but he performed a shockingly good rendition of George Michael’s “Kissing a Fool” in a delicious baritone. I sang a New Kids on the Block song, and then we sang a duet of Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” (He later saved my name as “Kiki” in his phone, which also happens to be a nickname for Kristina in Croatia.) Over the course of the evening, I went from seeing him as a really nice guy to seeing him as a really nice guy I wanted to make out with.
The THIS IS NOT A DATE evening ended with a kiss and a “Thank you for such a great date, Philip,” and a plan for the next date. With each date, I was liking this Philip guy more, and he was getting to me. He was really getting to me.