Business travel can often be hectic, bouncing from city to city, meeting to meeting, grabbing a coffee and muffin, a sandwich, a cookie, without stopping to think about my food choices… until dinner.  Business dinners tend to consist of at least two drinks, three courses and several colleagues.

Now, we have the misfortune of visiting San Francisco during a massive orthopedic surgeons’ convention.  Every hotel in the entire city has booked up solid.  Our company travel department does not go the extra mile to call around for us either.  They are perfectly content to leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere and not lose a wink of sleep over it.

“Sorry, everything within the city of San Francisco is sold out.  The nearest hotel is 12 miles South of the airport,” the travel agent flippantly retorted.

“I have business throughout the heart of the city – including dinner meetings.  It is very difficult to park and there are four of us traveling.  Isn’t there anything you can do?”  I implored.

“Sorry, the only availability we have is South of the Airport.”  For those of you that know the Bay area, the airport is already south of the city, so 12 miles south of the airport is at least an hour-long drive in the morning.

I arrived in San Francisco last night at about 10:00pm after a long day of meetings in Irvine.  My colleague Janine had timed her flight to meet me in the airport, where I would rent a car and drive to our hotel. 

I picked up my bag from the carousel and began my long journey through the maze of elevators, escalators and terminals toward the AirTrain.  All I wanted was a bowl of soup and a pillow.  

The train dropped me off 20 minutes later at the Rental Car building where I collapsed in a chair and waited for my colleague.  Janine informed me upon her arrival that she secured hotel rooms in downtown San Francisco after all.  Though my body trudged, my mind eased at the thought of avoiding San Francisco traffic, parking and driving the following day.  Both Janine and my focus then turned to food.  It was after 11:00pm when we arrived at the hotel.  We dropped our luggage and began a late night stroll down Market street in search of sustenance.

Ummm…. Well…. Perhaps that was not the best idea.  We headed toward the Embarcadero, past the plethora of homeless people, street gangs, pimps, strip clubs, and Donut Worlds.  

After about 10 blocks, we decided to catch a taxi.

“Take us to the nearest Diner,” I asked.

“Oh yea, I know where you can find male strippers,” the cabby responded.

“No, not strippers, FOOD, FOOD is what we are looking for!  Restaurants! Not strip clubs,” I clarified.

“oh.”

Deflated, he drove around for about 15 minutes before taking us to a Mel’s Diner, which is a chain of cheap 1950’s style diners all around San Francisco.  We walked into Frankie Valley crooning; a room filled with easter decorations hanging from the ceiling, positioned at every booth and draping the main counter.  We sat near the large glass exterior windows, behind the 20-something with the faux Mohawk whom was working very hard to impress his two lady friends. 

Our server, a middle-aged obviously gay man with a soda-jerk uniform and a pointy paper hat came up and fawned over my hair for a few moments before informing us that were all that stopped him from eating dinner and going home.

Late night hunger does funny things to a person.  Often, I end up eating something I might never have considered during the course of the regular business day.

So when our server finally took our order, I had the “low-fat” (yeah right) Chocolate milkshake.  Janine and I split the Blue Plate Special and a side of cheese fries.

“What is the “Blue Plate” special,” you may ask?  Well, last night it consisted of half a baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy and steamed vegetables.  The seasoned, baked chicken had enough moisture to be edible.  The mashed potatoes and gravy tasted much like I would expect a wet cardboard box to taste like, if it were pureed with a salty white glue.

The fries were drowning in processed cheese that had not fully melted on top.  I had flashbacks to the ABC Afterschool Specials on Schoolhouse Rock:

"I'm Louie the lifeguard, and I'm happy to say,
I saved a drowning potato today!
Don't drown your food! In mayo, salt, ketchup, or goo…
how can you eat what you can't even SEE? So don't drown your food!"

(I unsuccessfully tried to find this video clip for you, dear readers, but I struck out)

After sating our latenight hunger (neither one of us ate dinner), we cabbed it back to the hotel and passed out.