Dill-etante

They're pernicious. No one seems to know how it got started, but now they're everywhere.

They're not Starbuck's--they're pickles.

They appear by default on most burgers, and even on Chik-Fil-A's sandwiches. They nestle next to your double-decker club. And they put forth a smell that could fell a moose at ten feet. And yet, one has to issue the clearest and strictest of instructions to keep the little green buggers at bay.

Miss Vinegar hates pickles with a passion she usually reserves for snobs, bad spellers, and the movie An Awfully Big Adventure*. The basic reason, of course, is that she finds the taste abhorrent. But there's also the fact that pickles, as a restaurant staple, make no sense.

Economically, they're a non-starter. People don't seem to ask for pickles, so why have them? For garnish? What other garnish smells so strong? No one cuts a decorative garlic clove or edges a plate with ornamental arrangements of anchovies, for pity's sake. Nor is any other garnish likely to leak its stinky essence all over your fries or the bread of your sandwich.

Hear this, chefs of the world: there is no such thing as a "stealthy" removal of a pickle from a plate where one has accidentally been placed. We are, collectively, on to you.

Which is why at every opportunity Miss Vinegar sings the praises of restaurants who forgo the viridian menace, and particularly of the Bear Rock Café chain, where pickles are available only by request.

Take that, dillweeds.





* A comedy about suicide, thwarted love, war and incest. Wonder why it wasn't funny?