ahh, memories...

when i was a kid, the fam used to go out to brunch at a long forgotten place called the rocking horse.  i think it was a nightclub that had food and only served breakfast on the weekends.  i know it had a galaga machine, and tokens with pac man on them.  anyway, i used to love that place.  pops always let me and the bro drink coffee (i was like, five or six) and what i remember most about the place is there was an omelette station in the middle of the dining room.  you walked up, and there was all these bowls of ingredients, and dude would knock out an omelette while you watched.  at five years old, i thought that guy was awesome.  rock star status.  i don't remember ever ordering anything but omelettes when i was there.  it's sort of a fleeting memory, but whenever i think of it i always go "oh yeah!  the omelette guy!  that guy was rad!"

i also have a lot of fond food memories from when my dad took me and my brother to hawaii when i was seven.  for the first half of the trip we were in honolulu in a huge beachside hotel (my dad was at a conference) and we ate at the hotel most of the time.  they had a jumbo hotdog on the kids menu and i think i had that every single time we ate.  my brother just ate pineapple.  (i dunno, he probably ate other stuff but i just remember piles and piles of fresh pineapple).  then one night we went to dinner at that place where there's a grill at every table and dude flips and chops and cooks right in front of you...you know the one...anyway, i remember being amazed at the cook, and he ninja chopped a ton of shrimp and as a joke deposited all the tails on my plate.  being seven, (not sure if i'd ever eaten a shrimp before that) i had no idea i wasn't supposed to eat the tails and i grabbed one and popped it in my mouth.  it wasn't bad.  i kind of remember the chef going "oh, no no no, sorry sorry, not for eat" and my dad laughing hysterically.  our last night in honolulu we ate at some posh seafood place right on the ocean...right on the ocean, it was built on a pier and had fresh seawater running in a moat right through the dining room and that's where they kept their lobster.  i remember walking in and standing on a bridge above the water and literally getting motion sickness from watching all the lobster move around.  i didn't know what i was looking at, but it was moving all funny and wierd and made me super dizzy.  also i fell asleep at the table.  come to think of it, i had a virgin daiquiri while we were waiting to be seated.  maybe it mistakenly had booze in it.  it actually makes sense to me now.  anyway, this place didn't have a menu, it had a huge, circular, salad bar type apparatus full of ice and fish.  there was a whole fish and a fillet for you to look at for every fish they served.  as a kid who grew up eating trout out of the river i loved fish and was excited.  i thought the fish were pretty, and i ordered mahi-mahi.  my stubborn brother, in the nicest seafood place in honolulu, ordered a steak.  then i fell asleep at the table.  i don't remember how my food tasted.  but i will never forget that restaurant.  the final memory involving food from that trip is we were on the big island at a family friend's house, and her backyard overlooked sugarcane fields and the ocean and was full of banana trees and palms.  i was trying to break a coconut on a stump but it was kinda soft and my skinny little arms couldn't hit it hard enough so i found a big rock and put it on the stump but it was kind of wobbly so i held the rock with my left hand and bashed the coconut down with my right hand.  my left thumb was right on top of the rock and i absolutely smashed it with the coconut.  the nail fell off and it turned black for a while.

i think it's kinda funny that years later, working with food, my left thumb still suffers all the punishment.  i've cut the tip off twice.