The other night Bill and Jen and I decided to go out for pizza. By time we got to our favorite pizza place in the East Valley, it was past 6, so there was a long wait – about an hour and 15 minutes.  We patiently waited, and finally were seated at a table.

We ordered our standard pizza – a large thin-crust with sausage and capicola. As I have mentioned countless times, Bill LOVES pizza. He would tell you that his favorite pizza – the one against which all pizzas are measured – is from Fox’s Restaurant and Pub, several of which are located on the south side of Chicago. The pizza is thin-crusted, the sausage is delicious, and best of all, it is cut it in little squares .

As an aside, I recently learned that the reason the pizzas on the south side of Chicago are cut in squares is that the steel workers would have to grab a quick lunch at noon, and so they would come into their favorite pizzeria and the small squares on the pizzas sitting on the bar were easy to grab and eat. No mess.

Anyhoo, as a nod to good health, we also ordered a Caesar salad to split among us. We were famished because of the long wait. The salad came, and Jen served it up amongst us, leaving some on the original plate. We all ate the salad with great relish.

Bill finished first and took a bit more. When my plate was empty, I began nibbling off the original plate. At one point, I went to grab what looked to me in the dim light like a piece of lettuce from the white end of the Romaine lettuce. Bill grabbed my hand and said, “Don’t eat that. It’s a tissue.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “What did you say?”

“That’s a Kleenex in the salad,” he said.

“ARE YOU BEING SERIOUS?” I asked (and you can tell I was animated from the capital letters).

“Yes Kris,” he said. “I’m afraid I am. There is a Kleenex in our salad.”

There aren’t enough W’s in ewwwwww to express our disgust.

We called our server over.

“There’s a tissue in our salad,” Jen told her. The server was justifiably surprised.

“Well, that’s not good,” she said, and grabbed the salad bowl. “I’ll be right back.”

She wasn’t right back, but her manager was.  What I’m going to tell you she said to us is the absolute truth. I promise you.

“I’m very sorry about the tissue in your salad,” she said. “We checked the kitchen, and there are no tissues kept in the kitchen, so I don’t know how this could have happened. We also checked the tissue, and it appears to be clean.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaat?

“We are very sorry about this incident, and we won’t charge you for the salad,” she said.

Seriously. She agreed to not charge us for the salad IN WHICH THERE WAS A TISSUE.

Bill, Jen, and I are nice people. In fact, my whole family consists of nice people. I think every single one of our kids has worked in food service at some point or another. We know that stuff happens. So, we nodded stupidly, and she left our table.

The server brought us our pizza (which was absolutely delicious and did not have a tissue) and we ate it. But you could tell that the incident weighed on all of our minds.

I began thinking about the tissue in the salad. It seemed to me (and still does) that there should be kind of a checklist located somewhere in the kitchen of a restaurant that reads something like this….

Compensation for Food Issues

Hair in your food………..Free dessert
Food Not Prepared the Way You Asked…………Bring new meal
Drinks Dropped by Server onto Your Lap…………….Free drink
Tissue in Your Salad……….You Don’t Have to Pay For Any Single Solitary Part of Your Meal Not Now Not Ever

Doesn’t it seem like that to you?

So at the end of the meal, the server came to our table and asked, “Will this be one check or two?”

Now if you look up the word coward in the dictionary, you will see my face. I go out of my way to not cause anyone any problems. But I was on my very last nerve.

So I said, “Miss, here’s the thing. I’m 61 years old, and I’ve never even found a hair in my food. But tonight I found a Kleenex tissue in my salad. I think we don’t have any check at all. Don’t you think so?.”

The server looked like a deer in the headlights. She quickly ran away, and came back to tell us we were good to go.

Boom.

But here’s my question to you, my good Readers. What would you do in this situation? Has anything like this ever happened to you and what did you do?