By Sarina Rowell
If I'd saved all the money I've spent buying breakfast, lunch and dinner since I started working full time, back when it was routine to pay close attention to the results of magazine quizzes about which Friends character you most resembled, I would, no doubt, now be surrounded by huge bags of bullion and dripping in jewels. However, as someone who will hand over almost any amount of cash to avoid exertion, I don't regret having missed out on these El Dorado-style riches. I do, though, regret certain other hardships into which my incessant, albeit unspectacular, eating out has plunged me.
It is my practice, once I've found a meal that pleases me, to eat it every day for, approximately, a two-year cycle. For example, at one time I breakfasted exclusively on banana bread, because if there's one thing I like, it's chowing down on a foodstuff that calls itself ''bread'' but is actually a slice of cake. For me, the most satisfactory thing about ordering the same breakfast from the same place every day is that eventually it becomes a transaction for which there's no need for words: it's like a drug deal in Starsky and Hutch taking place in the pages of Cheap Eats. On the other hand, when the person behind the counter is justifiably proud they can anticipate your every need, you don't feel you can rock the boat by ordering something new. The last occasion on which I steeled myself to change my breakfast order, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks happened overnight and derailed the whole enterprise. Basically, if you want something new, you either have to start going somewhere else entirely or wait for this human to get bored with their job and leave.
There's also the problem that if you frequent an institution, the day will come that someone is going to want to present you with a loyalty card. The difficulty I have with this promotional tool is that while I am, indeed, tight-fisted and greedy, I feel the need to pretend to people in the hospitality industry that I'm not the kind of individual who'd give a tinker's damn about saving herself $3. Therefore, on a morn that I can finally benefit from the loyalty card's lavish promises and get my hands on a free coffee, I always find myself executing a ludicrous pantomime of surprise that would be appropriate if the person behind the counter were informing me he was actually Lord Lucan.
But the main horror involved in ordering the same dish from the same place usually only makes itself known once the sun goes down. At dinner time the unspoken understanding that you enjoy in the morning is, for some reason, dispensed with and you have to brace yourself, in the manner of Anne Boleyn mounting the scaffold, for a helping of attitude from the staff about your tendency to shy away from innovation. According to my study of this disheartening phenomenon, you generally have a mockery-free month of which to make the most before some flat-cap-wearing hipster starts making fun of you. Imagine my chagrin, though, when in one particular eatery, after a mere two weeks of ordering the same food on a Saturday night, the young woman behind the counter was already breaking out the noisome query, ''No point in giving you the menu, is there?''
And, speaking of which, if there's one thing that fills me with disgust and fury, it's hearing the words, ''We've changed the menu''. It's a certainty my dish of choice will be one that's been unceremoniously killed off, like people aged over 30 in Logan's Run. At best, my old friend will have been relegated to the specials board, on which I will see it about as often as I do a fictionalised account of the actions of Tony Blair in which he isn't played by that actor from The Queen.
''We've changed the menu'' is a sentence that ranks second only to ''We've made a few changes to our website'' in making me wish I'd never been born. And if I'd never been born, a lot of wait staff would have been denied their night's entertainment.