Restau”rants”

Pseudo-Poutine - That's fries, gravy and cheese for the uninitiated.

The two DFACs we select for dinner the most often are Luxembourg and Cambridge. They can generally be relied upon to be KAF-OK and reasonably often even achieve KAF-Good. On those nights when the menu is less than appetizing, you know you can always get a decent curry at Cambridge or some tolerable pasta at either of them. I even once managed to cobble together some pseudo-poutine using cheddar cheese from the salad bar. But enough with the accolades.

We’ve eaten at these two DFACS a few times over the past several days and there are a few things I need to get off my chest:

Chicken Ass

On skewers, on the other hand, I'm sure it would be lovely.

Stop serving us chicken ass.

This isn’t something one should ever have to say but I’m afraid it’s become necessary. What’s “chicken ass” you ask? It is, essentially, the ass of a chicken that somehow makes its way in with the rest of the cut up chicken pieces. It consists of the back half of the back bone and has that nasty little, sorta spade-shaped, bit of fat on the end of it which, if I’m not mistaken is the chicken’s tail. And what is right under a chicken’s tail? Right, it’s ass.

Now, I have to admit that the prevalence of chicken ass has decreased immensely since I first got here. It used to be that I got chicken ass served up to me about every second time I had the chicken way back in the dark ages of ’09. But it’s 2011 people, there’s no need to ever be serving up chicken ass with today’s technology.

Tradition, Schmadition

I realize that the traditional British Sunday dinner is roast beef. I understand that Cambridge is supposed to be the British-style DFAC. But please, for the love of god, stop making that shoe leather! Every Sunday night, the Cambridge serves roast beef. Every time I’m there on a Sunday night, I, like a damn fool, get the roast beef. Every Sunday night, the roast beef is so tough as to be inedible.

Face it, for whatever reason, the Indian cooks at the Cambridge DFAC can’t prepare roast beef. This being an Islamic country surrounded by Islamic countries, maybe the beef is Halaal. I assume that torturing an animal to death does little to improve the tenderness of the meat. Whatever the reason, I need them to stop making it as I can’t seem to stop myself from ordering it.

They should keep making the excellent Yorkshire pudding and KAF-good gravy though! I’m pretty sure the gravy comes out of industrial sized drums so the lack of beef will not affect its quality.

What We Got Left Salad

I get that we’re in a war zone and food should not be wasted. I rather like the bread pudding and rice pudding they make with the day(s)-old bread and leftover rice but there is a limit. There is, for example, no such thing as a cheese and pineapple salad. Nuff said.

CricketThey’re not fooling anybody. Nobody understands the rules of cricket. Showing it on the TVs in the Lux and Cambridge every goddamn day is not going to make people suddenly get this incomprehensible sport. I asked L, our British logistics tech to explain cricket to me one day. Apparently, the rules are something like this: Test matches last for like a “fortnight” (wtf is a fortnight?) and always end in a tie. Regular matches have wickets and stumps and overs and bowlers and one team gets a score that has two numbers separated by a hyphen, the other team only gets one number and no hyphen. They break for tea at, I suppose, tea-time and the Pakistanis cheat. Get it?

Bottom-line

Despite the occasional chicken ass, inedible roast beef, inappropriately creative salads and unending cricket, Lux and Cambridge remain reliably decent places to eat in KAF. If you’re ever there for Sunday dinner, come over and say hi. I’ll be the guy with the roast beef…