Bad Decisions at Brooklyn Dining Week

On the way home I clutch his arm and lower my voice so the rest of our party can't hear.
"Never let me do that again. I'm serious."
"I did try to warn you." (He hates to say he told me so)
"Yeah I know you did. But I thought you were making some sort of ethical objection."
"Well that, and I just thought it would be boring. Which it was, wasn't it? My steak was amazing though."

I try to think up some witticism about our party skate-ing on thin ice but I've already had a couple of bourbon cocktails and while I'm cooking up some quality punnage the conversation has already moved on to methods of cooking turkey (barbecued/injected with rosemary/stuffed in a buttered paper bag) and the manifold charms of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal.

It's Brooklyn Dining Week, where for $23 you can have 3 courses at the sort of restaurants that usually charge $20 for a disappointing bit of fish and some flaccid artichokes. To be fair to the restaurant - Chestnut, on Smith Street - mine was the only bum dish. It was hard not to feel that I wasn't being deliberately punished for being the only person not to upgrade to the $30 option - where you can also choose dishes marked with a sinister little smiley face. I was unpleasantly reminded of the Watchmen logo as all around me people tucked into bloody hanks of cow or rabbit while I mumbled fish bones around.

Well, Chestnut, despite your best endeavours I still had the last laugh. As two grown men fought over slivers of Gorgonzola in the large-plated, small-portioned 'cheese platter for two' I had a ginger cookie, a coconut cookie, a chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich, a chocolate fudge cookie, a butter cookie and a cookie with a heart of jam. It was a multi-dimensional cookie paradise that even second-class dining citizens were allowed to wonder through freely. Viva la revolution.