The reopening of the world proceeds apace, but in random fits and starts.
Most restaurants now offer at least limited indoor dining, but amenities differ. Some places use regular silverware and ceramic plates; others make use of paper and plastic; sometimes there are random combinations of both.
One of my regular breakfast haunts recently transitioned from paper to ceramic and from plastic to silver. A welcome development. They still, however, are not placing salt and pepper shakers on tables: Little paper packets are the order of the day. This isn’t so bad. But I like to put a little Tabasco on my eggs, and here’s where the difficulty comes in.
Instead of bringing out a bottle—which, as far as I can see, would be perfectly easy to wipe down between customers—the servers pour a little bit of hot sauce into a small plastic cup. Now, the amount is fine, but one can’t really shake or sprinkle an appropriate amount of sauce, or distribute it properly around the surface of an egg. Instead, one must very carefully pour the sauce out of the cup, which inevitably leads to large splotches of sauce in some places, and nothing in others.
We’ve gotten rid of masks! It’s time to free the hot sauce!
