My father and I attended the Galt View today for an early supper. Anyone from Cambridge already…read moreknows of the Galt View Restaurant (the one across the street from the hospital), but it's now under new ownership/management and while they were closed to renovations the past few months, not much has changed inside. This was the first I've been there since the changeover.
It's a big restaurant and they have good food. Today we both had the banquet burger, and it was quite good. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the best, but it was good. The menu is small, but it offers all the standard comfort food you'd expect from such a place.
There were only two other parties dinning in the 40-plus table establishment, and as a result our server was attentive and the food was served quickly. I wonder how that might change if it were busy. I will say that our server was very cheerful and pleasant, which made it a nice experience.
Then there was the mystery of the empty bowl.
On our table was placed a small, white, ceramic bowl. It was the same as the bowl used to hold the sugar packets for coffee or tea, but this one was empty. I looked around and there was a small, white, empty bowl on every table. I was perplexed. I commented to my father that maybe it was a tip jar. He joked saying that it was empty, so maybe we should go elsewhere.
As the meal wore on, I became increasingly worried about the meaning behind this empty bowl. Why was it there? Why a white bowl? Why not green, or brown, or whatever other colour is fashionable for bowls these days? What were we meant to do with it? Did it have a deeper existential meaning? Was it the owners symbolic commentary on the nature of the universe? A view thus imposed on the unsuspecting diner, most of whom would just think; "hey, an empty bowl."
My head was spinning. I began to wonder if I was losing my mind. Imagine that, being brought to the brink of sanity (or is that insanity) by the presence of a small, empty, white, ceramic bowl. I again commented on the situation and my father insisted that it was there to hold creamers for those cups of coffee and tee, for which the sugar waited. I was dubious...it didn't make any sense.
In the end, I declined to ask the waitress why there was an empty bowl on every table. I figured that the mystery had taken me places I hadn't dreamed possible, and whatever her answer, a mind cannot be un-blown, once it is blown.
We gave her a good tip.
