My family and I went out for lunch over the Fourth of July weekend to a restaurant in Annapolis that was large and welcoming enough to easily accommodate children (word search placemats for everyone!) but was nicer than taking them to, like, a Chili’s. And I know this was a slightly fancy restaurant not merely because of the tab, but because of the ketchup situation.
I had a bacon cheeseburger, because I deserved one. I always deserve myself a burger. My sons got chicken tenders and fries, the way they always do. The three of us needed ketchup, so I asked for some, and they brought us four little stainless steel cups, each one oh-so-tastefully filled three quarters of the way up. We finished off that round of ketchup in nine seconds: gone as quick as a tray of kamikaze shots. I had to ask for more. It would not be the last time I did so.
I know why restaurants do this. Putting a bottle of ketchup out on a table looks like shit, and if you give customers total control over the bottle, they’ll likely cost you dough by overusing it. This is especially true of children, whose eyes are far wider than their stomachs. One squeeze from a 7-year-old, and you got a lake of ketchup on the plate that a fucking alligator can swim through undetected. That’s why high-end restaurants give you a metal cup of it, and why your local beach/pool snack shack forces you to fill tiny paper cuplets from a gallon ketchup pump on the fixins bar that has always, without fail, run down to tomato fumes. Or worse, it’s the pump that is just a slightly different shade of red and is actually a barbecue-sauce dispenser. DIABOLICAL.
Again, I get why some places ration out their ketchup so daintily and why other places force customers to bus their own. But I don’t like it. Just gimme a fucking bottle of ketchup on the table already. Make it a plastic one, so that I don’t have to tap the 57 on a glass Heinz bottle and boast that it’s a flawless hack for getting the ketchup to flow out (it is not). Like every other American raised in the upper Midwest, I use enough ketchup on my food to kill Tom Brady. My blood is 90 percent lycopene. Therefore, a tiny cup of ketchup is NOTHING to me. It barely begins to cover my ketchup needs. At lunch on Saturday, I dumped two of those little cups directly onto my bacon cheeseburger and, naturally, half the ketchup in each one clung to the side and never bothered to drop. I had to clean those sides out with a couple of fries, like a squeegee guy wiping away grime from your windshield.
If I had my own bottle of ketchup at the table, none of this would be a problem. I could use as much ketchup as I like and not have to badger a poor waiter for more of it, to the point where I feel embarrassed for liking and wanting so much of it. If that costs the restaurant in question an extra half-penny for every three heads at a table, well, I bet they can make that up on the back end by not having to buy all those dwarf ramekins, and by not forcing the dishwasher in back blast-rinse those 500 miniature ketchup receptacles so that they can be reused over and over. That’s bad for the Earth, folks. Giving me all the ketchup I want will save us from the coming climate apocalypse. All scientists agree.
I understand the aesthetic qualms about having a table at, like, Per Se be adorned with an economy-size bottle of Heinz next to a requisite vase of Cattleya orchids. But last I checked, chefs were the Fantastic Neo-Visionaries of the American hospitality landscape. So put the ketchup in ANOTHER bottle. Put in a squeeze bottle made of shark cartilage if you think it’ll improve the feng shui of the table. Whatever. All I know is that these tiny-ass cups aren’t doing the job. Fucking Denny’s puts a bottle of Heinz on your table, and I don’t see their profit margins tanking because of it. Adding a ketchup bottle to each table, preferably tucked into a little side caddy that has a laminated dessert menu sticking out of it, is not an insurmountable bit of overhead cost.
It’ll make all our lives easier, and it’ll allow me to ingest enough vinegar to sear off every nerve inside my mouth. That’s what God wants and what America needs right now. Itty-bitty ketchup cups are for the weak.
