"Dining or whining... "

Waiters who keep you waiting
Your hot date who is so cool, but you have to pay for her as well.. (oh yaa, you remember those people who said, a thing of beauty is a joy forever, but only until your credit card bill arrives..)
Your hot date who can talk thru with an empty wallet.. (He is spending all his money to get his muscles toned and of course you fell for that muscles which are bigger than his brains or wallet.. )
Menu cards that have alien, tongue twister names ... (the complexity of the name is directly proportional to the price)

Fine dining in Chennai's stylish restaurants can be rather unnerving, where else do you dress up to get a dressing down... ,
"the probability of meeting some one you know (in these so called stylish cool eat outs) increases when you are with someone you don’t want to be seen with" ( I google’d to find out that this was called the Ruby's principle of close encounters")

All this can last only for a while, before there is a day when you are broke, depressed , suicidal , especially when you don’t have enough money to take your "real " date ( you had to pursue her for a year and she finally agreed) out for dinner ( you had spent all your money on those innumerable dates , they were just not worth it)

Dining Culture in this so called conservative Chennai has taken a 360 degree turn from what it was a few years ago, we can take "pride" in the fact that it is the software industry that has caused this revolution ( ok ok we might have just contributed for a 330 degree turn.. ), the multitude of hotels that have sprung up on the ECR is just proof enough, you know they also give you a 10% discount if you are from a software company but I wonder if anybody else (the non-software kind)has even heard of them ... This is for a weekday lunch. If you can manage to get the time to go out for dinner (your project manager is a major deciding factor, the day he has time, everybody else invariably has to be free) , the hospitality of some of Chennai’s best hotels will be judged by your team, even as the top management of these hotels will be holding meetings in some part of the world to discuss how to serve you better( which only means, they are discussing what are the other ways to swindle your money) and the Finance Minister is busy contemplating increasing the tax for food and beverages.

"Those fruit forks, steak knives, dinner tables, starched table linen, table manners" , have you ever thought of moving ahead of all these and try out Chennai's very own "Road side dhabbas" and "Beach Bajji stalls".. This is the real eating “OUTSIDE” experience. But then again remember Eating out will not kill you but it just might, but dont worry in the long run it might just increase your immunity. You dont want to be like those paranoid people who think of the innumerable diseases even as they read the menu, you dont want to be called those overprotected, mineral water spoilt people, dont you??

Whatever is your style, eating out is just another way of spending some “quality time” with people, unwinding, or just chilling out …. and an excuse for people who just dont want to cook at home.... Happy Dining :)