Travels in a Tin Can

either not a doughnut, or it was not cooked. Whichever was the case, it was
not nice. And we had rejected free stale bagels for this?
On this occasion we took consolation from the fact that we had not
wasted much money - and it was only our breakfast. A few days later when
we rolled into a San Franciscan restaurant jet lagged and hungry there was
nothing to console us.
We had flown from the east coast to the west, a long flight made worse
by crossing three time zones, and the only food we had eaten was on the
plane – so ‘food’ is a loose term. Nevertheless tiredness overruled hunger for
quite a while and we sat watching TV until early evening. Eventually we
roused ourselves enough to look at the various menus in our room. We
decided we wanted ribs and that we would go out rather than ordering in as it
would be cheaper.
Five minutes walk and we arrived at the Lyons restaurant, a dingy
looking place with generic leatherette booths and interesting looking patrons.
Our waitress was fairly rude, combining brusqueness and inefficiency
effortlessly. At one point she actually growled at us. Needless to say she got
our order wrong - or so we thought. We decided to share a starter dish and a
main course of a full rack of ribs. To make things easier and avoid explaining
that we would split both courses Emma just ordered the mozzarella stick
starter, quite a common eating pattern in the US, and I ordered the ribs. My
main course came with salad, which we also split. Then the mozzarella and
the meat arrived at the same time. Instantly we could see something was
wrong.
The ribs were a huge piece of very fatty steak. We quickly got the