#berner platte

I have only one pic for y'all for this, and frankly, it's just as well.

We were passing through the area with some work connections. We had walked and walked and WALKED and WALKED between the 'Lakens until we found a resto that our travel companions (both rigorously white&straight&oblivious to other signaling) liked the looks of as well as we did. It was a fondue place.

We went in and got fondue for those who wanted it. I think Peter was a little bored with cheese at this point, and wanted something more solid.

Now, there's a famous Bernese main dish called a Berner platte. It's a descendant of the meat dishes that used to be constructed when somebody's husband or boyfriend came back from the wars (for the Bernese were far-famed exporters of fighting guys). You'd spread the word that Your Guy was coming back, and the neighbors would do—as they say in the UK—a "whip-round," and see who had choice bits of meat they could contribute. "Look, you killed a pig last week, and you killed a goat, and your cow's sausage is ready now, and... (etc, etc)."

Now this traditional dish has, at the restaurant level, grown into an amazing thing (depending on where you are). There's steak and pork and stewing bacon and sausage and air-dried beef and gods know what else. There. Is. MEAT. (And big sides to go with.) You will not walk away from one of these, in this region anyway, feeling like you need something else to top it up. (And then they will try to give you dessert, but that's another story.)

Here's a goodish looking one.

So you get the picture.

Now, everybody at the table is ordering. (It was fondue for me. I hadn't yet gone lactose-intolerant.) But P's eye lit on the Berner platte, and lit up. And he looked up at the waiter, and asked for it.

(...And we must now cast our minds back a bit to an earlier time. P. was... in his mid-thirties? But still had a lot of hair. And was pretty lean. And had (as always) THAT SMILE, and those winning manners. He was, frankly, hot.)

And his waiter... who was a handsome looking blond gent in, I guess, his late-to-mid-twenties? ...looked down at Peter, and bent down lower over his shoulder, and gazed into his eyes, and batted his eyelashes at him. ISTG.

And murmured—in a tone impossible to reproduce well enough here—"Haben sie eine grosse hunger??" (i.e., "Are you really hungry??")

That utterance had to have exhausted the entire Bernese daily cantonal quota for innuendo in a single sentence.

Our tablemates were fortunately utterly oblivious. I was not. I glanced sideways at P. I glanced at the waiter. I lifted my eyebrows just that wee bit.

The waiter lifted his right back. It was a "hey, nothing ventured, yeah...?" look. With a side order of, Hmm, if he asked, who knows? Maybe I could work you in as well.

Peter, having smiled back most genuinely and acknowledged the compliment, said, "Enough for the Berner platte, yeah." :)

And so the food arrived; and all was consumed, and we had dessert and drinks and wandered away afterwards, and our tablemates never copped on to what had happened. Because of course it was impossible that a waiter should actually humorously proposition one of us (or who knew, more than one) at table without the other screaming bloody murder?

...yeah?

"...That was a nice place," Peter said to me, some weeks or months later.

And that was true. :)