i mean, for a long time, a chi-chis was arguably the fanciest restaurant i had ever been to

When I was in NYC, I had dinner at what was described to me as one of the hot restaurants in the city (Babbo). The food was, um, good, although my problem with fancy restaurants is that I feel like much of sophisticated cuisine is lost on my provincial palate, akin to a visually impaired person with a gorgeous spouse. Especially if someone like Nina isn't there to explain stuff to me.

The server used some funky serrated knife to shave off the cheese onto my pasta. I couldn't follow the physics of it, but I could tell it was classy. In any case, I am especially attuned to this as a status marker because it was only like five years ago that, in a Macaroni Grill, my mother had her first restaurant meal where a server put pepper and cheese on her food for her.

A couple years ago, I went with nine members of my family to dinner at my parents' regular Sunday night restaurant, the Tom Thumb Diner in Fort Dodge, Iowa. The total cost for the ten of us was less than what my meal cost at Babbo (and I didn't have a second course or dessert).