Restaurant Week Review #2: Hitting the sauce

Just about every Monday night, Christian, Ivan and I (and sometimes Susan and Tad) head over to a place in Arlington for half-priced burgers. It's not that there's anything really special about these burgers besides the fact that they're cheap; it's mostly just an excuse to get together. If there's any lesson to be learned about adult life, it's that when people say, "Let's get together for dinner sometime," there's about a 15% chance of it actually happening. At best. So if it's scheduled, it happens. God bless our overly-structured social lives.

What is most notable about the burgers is not the burgers themselves, but the condiment. At both our table and the table of my sister and her friends (yes, they keep a separate table on the same night), the amount of ketchup used is obscene. The burgers and fries are pretty tasty in their own right, but that doesn't keep us from putting ketchup on, beside and around the burgers and fries.

Has anyone looked into the possible addictive properties of ketchup? It's not like it has a particularly distinctive taste, and it's not there to cover anything up, but we just can't get enough of it. The first thing we do when we sit down is check the ketchup bottle to see if there's enough of the red stuff to get us through the meal. It's worrying, and it's carrying over to other burgers and other meals, to the point where I see a terrifying day in my future when I sit down to an entire meal of ketchup.

Whose idea was Restaurant Week anyway? You're fired.