Fringe Benefits

Tonight the CHF took all the fellows out to dinner. Actually, I'm not a CHF fellow yet but they were generous enough to shout the PACHS fellows too. (The other PACHS fellow compared this to treating step-children well, which raises interesting questions about her childhood.)

We went to a nice Italian restaurant in the old part of town, Penn's Landing. The set menu had four courses and one of the choices for the main was saltimbocca, so it wasn't hard for me to choose. But I overheard some of the others muttering about the veal option; for some reason many Americans think that it's less humane to eat animals when they're young. Actually, when I gave it a little thought, I realised that it's probably been a few years since I've eaten veal because I never see it in the supermarket or on menus (we don't really go to Italian restaurants and pubs here don't sell schnitzels). I guess that makes it rarer than lamb even!

The other good thing about the dinner was that wine was included. In America it's pretty common for diners to offer bottomless cups of coffee and fast food places to have free refills on fountain soft-drinks but this was the first time I'd heard of a restaurant offering bottomless glasses of wine! Just like at a diner, the waitresses came around topping up our glasses whenever the level dropped.