This post is not so much about food as it is about my adventures in Block E the Saturday prior to Valentine's Day.
Between my second and third course at
Cosmos at Graves 601, I decided to take a trip to the ladies' room. "Go before the food gets here!" my husband quipped. Well lo and behold, the restrooms in the restaurant were out of order and I was instructed to take the elevator up to the fifth floor and use the restroom there. So up I went. All of the bathroom events went just as planned, but as I returned to the elevator lobby on the fifth floor, the
Eastview High School Girls' basketball team (or some other sport - I really wasn't paying attention to the patches on the letter jackets all 50 of them were wearing) had clustered in front of each and every elevator (as well as in the hallway leading to the lobby) and the wait for my trip back to the restaurant was looking longer than I had hoped. A gal who exited the bathroom right behind me verbalized my thoughts and suggested we might use one of the three stairwells within view.
I was a bit wary of using a stairwell for fear of setting off a fire alarm, but there were no signs warning us of emergency-exit-only or alarmed doors to be seen. This girl and I randomly picked a door and pushed. No luck; it was locked. We chose another door and pushed - it opened! So into the stairwell we went. Now we probably should have had one of us stay behind to hold the door open just in case the doors below refused to open, but I had consumed a cocktail and glass (or two?) of
Shafer One Point Five with my meal thus far and my new friend would tell me later that she was at
Bradstreet Crafthouse with her boyfriend, celebrating Valentine's Day, most likely having had a few herself. We were both a little under the influence and probably not thinking as clearly as we normally would be!
Well you can predict that we got stuck/trapped in this stairwell. We stopped at every floor, desperately pounding on each door (except for the one that said "ROOF ACCESS") but to no avail. Finally, a set of double doors looked a little promising than the rest. There was a 1-inch gap between the doors..."We're in the Block E movie theater!" Thank goodness a movie was just getting out, because a steady stream of people were walking right towards us...and then taking a right turn. Damn it! I grabbed the handles and shook the doors as hard as I could (they were still latched shut and locked), hysterically screaming "Help me!" through the 1-inch gap. A kind samaritan finally heard me or saw the doors and was able to let us out. I'm sure he thought we were absolutely out of our minds. We walked out, only to be approached by a security guard who asked us if we had our tickets. We tried calmly to explain our situation to him...dinner at the hotel...bathrooms out of order...fifth floor...girls' basketball team...not seeing a movie...
We finally made it back, but not first without introducing ourselves. My new friend Mandy and I parted ways at the first floor elevator lobby in the Graves and wished each other a Happy Valentine's Day. When I returned to our table (a good 20 minutes later), Vince needed to use the restroom. While he was away (just for a short moment really) our waiter, in his frantic French accent, told us that we were "driving the chefs crazy!" Vince told me that the food had come out but had to go back into the kitchen because it was getting cold. He also told me that he was wondering where the f*ck I could be, thinking I must have crapped in my pants. That my damn skinny jeans couldn't hold in my turd. (It was a #1 actually.) Wondering what he was going to do now.
As we left the restaurant, I briefed the hostess on my adventure. She apologized profusely and shared that it's one of the first things they're told when they start working there. "Never enter a stairwell because you'll end up at the Hard Rock Cafe!" The whole debacle really made for an exceptionally memorable Valentine's Day and the series of unfortunate events really overshadowed anything we ate at Cosmos that night.
