Drinking Coffee out of a Tea Cup

(I know this is way longer than a blog entry should be but it was just so good I wanted to share it all with you.)
This Saturday Amanda and I found the greatest restaurant we have ever been to. If anyone reading this ever comes to KC (and we hope every one of you does soon) you have to check out this place. We went down to the city market just to walk around, we didn’t need anything and just felt like getting out of the house. We decided to get something to eat and this Actor/Comedian that I met, and had a great conversation with about Bob Dylan, at Espresso dell’Anatra told me about this place called Succotash that was on the market so we decided to try it.

We walked up and the place was packed. It is half inside and half outside divided down the middle by one of the main walkways at the city market so it was hard to tell who was waiting to eat and who was just walking by. In fact it was hard to tell where the restaurant actually was and where it wasn’t. Nothing at Succotash matches. There are some high tables and some low ones and some booths and some big wooden spools that serve as tables. The chairs are all totally random and the paintings and posters on the walls and columns don’t make any sense at all. And the entire bizarre mismatch is painted in bright colors or covered with very cool, very original, 50’s or 60’s vinyl.

It’s like looking at a mix between a yard-sale at a junkyard owned by an old woman who never gets rid of anything and the kind of crazy dreams you have after you’ve been awake for a couple of days but insist on eating half a large supreme pizza before you go to bed.

We saw a sign that said please wait to be seated but there was no one standing by it to take our name. Then we realized we couldn’t really tell if there was anyone working there at all. There were some people standing there and we asked them how to get a table; they pointed out a guy wearing jeans, a buttoned up shirt that was only buttoned half way, and a apron that hand been made out of an old green dish-towel with flowers embroidered on it. He was smoking a cigarette and holding a little stack of papers on a little tray. We gave him our names and he told us it would be about a 20 minute wait. We sat down on a bench that had the words “Waiting Area” stencil spray-painted on it.

The guy which we gave our name to called out a name, and the people stood up and came over to him. He pointed over to the other side of the restaurant and said they could have the open table that was over there. He never made eye contact with them, just told them where they could sit and walked away. He kept walking around and watching for tables and taking people’s names and smoking cigarettes. He would call out names and point where people should go but never took them to their table. One time he told them that there weren’t enough chairs at their table so they would have to get some extra’s from some of the people sitting around them.

We also noticed the other people that were working there after we sat down. They were all younger and wearing jeans or cut-off jean shorts and T-shirts and old dish-towel aprons. This one guy had a rat-tail and another guy had a fu-manchu mustache. They were running around like crazy but they looked like they were having so much fun doing it.

There was a lady sitting at a table across from where we were waiting who asked one of the girls that worked there if she could have a plastic zip-tie. And since it was a restaurant, of course they had bags of them and she went in the back and got her some. She used them on her backpack that we hadn’t noticed. There was a ferret in there that kept unzipping it from the inside trying to get out. We watched it for while until he clawed through the zipper and got out again. So the lady just held him in her shirt until she was done eating. The people that worked there would pet him when they walked by.

Our twenty minute wait turned into an hour but we really didn’t mind because it was so cool just watching the people there. It was like being in the picture on the back of a Hi-lights magazine and trying to figure out everything that was wrong with it. When the guy with the cigarettes called our name he pointed us to the table where the lady with the ferret had sat.

We sat down and a guy brought us two cups of water. Then our waiter, a guy named David that called me “hon”, came and asked if we wanted coffee. Yes. He brought two cups, one was a normal coffee mug and the other was a little tea cup. Amanda took the mug and I got the tea cup. A couple minutes later he brought the coffee pot by. We told him that we were ready to order so he sat down at our table and said, “Okay let’s talk about what you want to eat today.” We told him and he said we made great choices, and then Amanda asked if she could have a spoon to stir her coffee. I assumed he would bring us both silverware since we didn’t have any and she asked for a spoon bringing his attention to it. But he just brought us one spoon… that’s all we ask for. So we shared our spoon and drank coffee. I drank very slowly since my tea cup didn’t hold very much. The host with the cigarettes came over and talked to us some about some dogs that people were walking and we waited for about 20 minutes for our food to come out.

Amanda got a meal called “the kitchen sink” because it had everything in it; eggs, potatoes, ham, cheese and God-only-knows what else. I ordered the Monte Cristo because it had the word “gooey” in the description and I was in the mood for something gooey. It could have been that we just waited an hour and 20 minutes for our food and we were hungry or it could have been that we were in such a cool place or it could have been that the food was just that good, but it was the best meal I have had in as long as I could remember. We ate and drank some more coffee, talked to David some more, paid him then we left and talked about how great it was the rest of the day.

After thinking about it, I think the coolest thing about Succotash was the fact that it works so well. Not works as in sense of efficiently (which I totally believe they are but there were probably 80 people there, because Saturday morning is their busiest time… the best time to be there). It works in the deeper sense… that it is honest and genuine for what it is. None of the dishes match and the people are a little strange and at a glance you might think it is dirty or weird. They aren’t trying to be like that, they are just being themselves. There would be plenty of things to complain about if you wanted to, but you don’t really want to there. Succotash was cool because it made me think about my life. Let me be honest for a moment; inside my head my dishes don’t all match and I think there are some strange people in my head that smoke cigarettes while they work and have fu-manchu mustaches and call me “hon”. Sometimes life is like drinking coffee out of a tea cup. Sometimes things are dirty and weird. And we try to ignore the fact that the ferret just won’t stay in the backpack while I am trying to enjoy my meal. This is all the stuff they try to hide at all the other places we’ve gone to eat… but it is almost like they celebrate it at Succotash. Maybe that’s how life is. We try to hide all that stuff inside, but if we would just celebrate it and embrace it because it is life, it would be a memorial experience. The kind of thing that we want to tell people about. The kind of thing that we would want to share with everyone we know. The kind of thing that we think people from all over the world should come and experience because we know they would love it.