A blog exploiting my recently acquired singledom by documenting my exploration of local Bay Area night life hot spots while observing the reactions to some of my favorite pick up lines as I cast them out among the bar and club going men I encounter.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

What the Hub bub's about at Menlo Hub, Menlo Park, CA

The Spot: Menlo Hub
On Friday evening my coworker and I decided to take advantage of the 5pm – 7pm happy hour at Menlo Hub, a stylish little bar/restaurant on El Camino in Menlo Park that boasts an outstanding happy hour menu featuring $5.00 personal pizzas (which are quite satisfying both in taste and size) as well as a few other appetizer and tapas selections and $5.00 drink options including several wines or your choice of a margarita, Lemon drop, martini, Manhattan or cosmopolitan. They also host live music several nights a week, so it was a rare find- a place to enjoy a sophisticated libation (or two or three or in my case last Friday 5 or 6?) in a classy fun atmosphere while paying hole in the wall prices. How quaintly awesome!

THE LURE: a healthy serving of meat OR the beef slider that wasn't on the menu
 While perusing the menu, we put our heads together to come up with a pick up line for the evening. As it turned out, our menus were actually a good muse for crafting lurid lines. The “beef sliders” appetizer sounded like a pick up line in itself. As in: “have you had the beef slider here? … ‘Cause I heard the beef in it isn’t nearly as thick and juicy as the beef slider you serve up. I’d sure love to get one of those in me.” As we were giggling about how that establishment really knew how to put “happy men” in their “happy hour menu”, I caught a glimpse of a tasty dish that wasn't on the menu, but seemed to come with two good sides (front and back): our tall, lean, neatly-bearded waiter.

When he approached and asked my friend and I if we were both 21 and when we both said we were, he seemed satisfied, but my co-worker, who is 22, and still seems to enjoy the novelty of being carded, eagerly presented her ID to him despite his not asking to see it. I couldn’t be bothered to rummage through my pockets for mine (and didn’t want to feel old compared to my young friend), so I didn’t offer mine up, but after he returned my coworker’s license to her, our waitor looked at me expectantly with his twinkling green eyes and said with a playful smile: “Well since I checked her ID, I think I should take a look at yours too.”
“Fine.” I relented as I fished my driver’s license out of my jacket pocket, adding with exaggerated candor, “There goes my anonymity and sense of mystery.”
“You’re still mysterious” he said once again flashing his adorable smile, adding that he was born a year before me.

As we got to the bottom of our first round of drinks, my newly single coworker, enlivened by the healthy splash of tequila in her margarita, mentioned that she was a little excited about the idea of taking a dip in the local dating pool or perhaps, as I teased her, letting a local date take a dip in to her. I offered to take a night off from my own man-fishing to be her wing man, but she said she didn’t really see anyone at the bar that was her type. I’d been so dazzled to that point by our cute waiter that I hadn’t really taken stock of the crowd, but as I looked around, it did seem like we would not be likely to hit anyone in our target demographic in that bar. There were certainly a lot of men there, but the majority of them were probably between 40 -70 years old.

“What about our waiter, he’s cute!” I offered to my co-worker.
“Yeah he is cute.” She conceded.
“but he talked me out of getting pepperoni on my pizza and now I really wish I hadn’t let him. I want meat.” she complained
Laughing, I told her that she should say exactly that to him – “just tell him that he’s going to have to find some other source of meat to satiate you since he talked you out of the pepperoni”
She reciprocated my laughter and added: “Yeah, seriously, I should just tell him that I was really hoping to get some meat in me and he’s just the one to deliver it.”
I continued to laugh, but I was starting to feel like a traitor to vegetarianism at that point for harping so hard on the meat/ penis metaphor, but I guess sometimes you've just gotta take what you're given.

THE CAST:
We were still giggling as our waiter returned with the second round of drinks we’d ordered. I looked at my friend expectantly as he asked if there was anything else he could get for us. What a perfect set up, she better go for it I thought to myself.

“No, we’re good. Thanks.”
She replied to him.

“Wait, wasn’t there something else you needed?” I said to my co-worker, cajoling her like a mother prompting her child to say ‘thank you’.
“no. I don’t think so.” She said, clearly annoyed with me.
“What? I thought there was something missing on your pizza.” I coaxed.

“Oh. Was there something wrong with your pizza.” Our waiter asked, brow furrowed with polite concern.
God, he’s so adorable when he’s thinking about customer satisfaction I mused…  then giggled inwardly about how much satisfaction he could bring to this customer.
Meanwhile, outside of my pervy brain, my coworker was telling our waiter that she was sorry her friend (that would be me) was being rude, but her pizza was really good. We ordered another round of drinks and our waiter disappeared again.

After a sharp, “I can’t believe you just did that” from my coworker, we went back to enjoying our drinks and talking about work, and were after not too long interrupted by a guy who’d been sitting next to us. He introduced himself and asked about our jobs... then he started leaning over and jumping  into our conversation 
intermittently for the rest of the evening. He was nice guy, in his mid 40s and seemed fairly interesting, but neither of us wanted any part of his beef slider, so we weren’t too engaging with him, especially after the return of our waiter who, by the way, became even sexier to me when,  he revealed that he too was a vegetarian* (which I decided was why he’d taken it upon himself to talk my friend out of the pepperoni pizza and was therefore, I decided, both chivalrous and smooth). It was hard to refuse such an attentive, chivalrous, golden tongued, good looking guy, so every time he asked me if I wanted another drink, I flashed him the most adorable smile I could muster and gave a resounding “I sure would!” ( Which is one reason why hiring a super attractive waiter is an excellent business strategy for any barkeep). He definitely put the hubba hubba in the Menlo Hub that night!

Disappointingly, our waiter’s shift ended around the time when the "rock and roll band" (if they can even be called that after refusing my coworker's behest for them to play Led Zeppelin), started to play. He did say, before he left though, that all the tip he wanted from us was our phone numbers. The man was smooth!

We of course obliged him, each scribbling our phone numbers on the receipt when we go the check (but still leaving a generous tip as well), so despite the lack of meat, I think my coworker was still satisfied with her evening and I know I was! Which is why, I would definitely recommend to anyone that they should come check out the Menlo Hub and see what all the hub bub's about! 

*Apparently my drunkenness and smitteness deafened me when the waiter later recanted his claim to be vegetarian, telling my coworker the he actually loved meat...sigh...perhaps my quest for the perfect male specimen is not over.

No comments:

Post a Comment