May was a high end month for the Knights and as they neared the one year anniversary of the "third Thursday" tradition they selected the relatively new
Lark Creek Steak at 5th and Market.
HEB and yours truly rode to the event together and ended up parking around 6th and Mission. As they left the car they were hoping that the car was there when they returned and they also hoped they would make it back to the car. The neighborhood quickly turns to the dark side along 6th street.
The restaurant had reserved quite a long table for the Knights which made it difficult for all of the Knights to fraternize with one another. As the waiter introduced himself and started rambling through his lengthy introduction, small classes of lemon basil soda water arrived and were perfect for cleansing the palette. The waiter's introduction and description of the menu, the history of the restaurant and the method for cooking steaks continued in a Russian novel-esque fashion. It was certainly the most verbose introduction to a restaurant and its menu that we've experienced to date.
Many of the Knights had started to glaze over as the epic menu description wound to its conclusion. Therefore, it was a welcome change to have a little relief from the slightly overbearing waiter. Various threads of conversation started up, with the north end of the table, focusing intently on discussing manscaping (lead by JLM who had a "very good story" about manscaping) in their outdoor voices. The other end of the table was giving HEB a hard time for his strong preference of the "upstairs" on a woman as opposed to the "downstairs". HEB tried to divert the conversation and talk about how his dad has lately been having him drink Manhattans but the proverbial cat was already out of the bag as the nearby Knights discussed his preference in disbelief. As HEB unsuccessfully tried to qualify his preference, the Knights moved on to discuss:
1. Since we have a significant number of Jews in the group, should the 13th SteaKnight be a Jewish SteaKnight?
2. It came out that MPH had never shaved his legs before and he "had no knowledge of this".
3. JB discussed his beard shaving technique.
4. The armpit...an ersatz vagina?
5. HEB revealed that he had caused his roommate to break down in tears regarding the addition of his Twilight Zone pinball game to their already formidable arsenal of existing video games. Wait until she sees where he puts the 4 person Gauntlet coin-op.
6. Once the manscaping conversation became entirely unbearable, the other end of the table started mocking the manscaping discussion with faux-shocking statements like "If we all ended up in baby oil, I would be pissed if you weren't manscaped!!" This was downhill movement.
7. Your humble correspondent presented each member in attendance with an enigmatic multiple choice question that will be soon be posted in this very space.
After the manscaping conversation had reached a crescendo and considering that JLM almost bowled over several waiters at El Raigon in his zeal to recreate several scenes from the Borat movie, some considered making it a rule of high end that "One needs to be aware of one's surroundings". However, aside from the difficulties in enforcing this new mandate, it was also agreed upon that you can take the Knights to high end but we are truly a low end group.
At the end of the evening the waiter was quite persistent about wanting cash for the bill but many of the Knights had already produced credit cards to pay so it was settled with only a minimum of oddness.
Some concluded that the only way this SteaKnight could've been any better would be if live nude women had been present. Maybe next time.
Total bill: $1037.80.10
HEB (tenth Knight)
STB (tenth Knight)
ATG (ninth Knight, first FalseKnight)
JB (ninth Knight)
RMD (ninth Knight, first FalseKnight)
MPH (ninth Knight)
JLM (eighth Knight)
ATM (seventh Knight)
FH (fourth Knight)
MP (second Knight)
CS (first Knight)
