Tower of the Americas

In our ongoing effort to get out and do things Kent and I thought it would be nice to go to the Tower of the Americas over the weekend. The TotA is like the Space Needle of San Antonio. It's 750 feet and supposedly that makes it taller than the Space Needle. However I don't care enough to actually verify this.

Anyway, the neat thing about it (besides the height) is that at the top there is a rotating restaurant. That sounds like a great idea, huh? Enjoy an upscale meal while also getting a panoramic view of the city. Kent and I sure though so, so we planned to go on Saturday night.

Sadly, when we awoke on Saturday it was to cloudy skies, rain, fog and cold. As much as we wanted to get dressed up and go downtown it seemed like a waste to go to dinner at the TotA when we wouldn't get a nice city view. We ended up going out near our house and had a nice time but...we still wanted to go to TotA for dinner.

Sunday was beautiful. We got up early and went out with dog on a hike and decided that we'd try to do the TotA that night. We got home from our hike about 2:00 and I got online to make dinner reservations for 6:30. Do you have any idea yet where this might be going? The only reservations open were for 4:30 and 9:15. Obviously no one wants to eat dinner at 4:30 unless they're 87 and no one wants to eat at 9:15 unless they live in New York and planning to go clubbing afterwards. Reluctantly I called the restaurant to see if they had reservations open at any other time. They did not but told me to feel free to just come in.

Since we didn't have reservations we took our sweet time getting ready. We were ready to head out around 7:00 and I figured that we would certainly be eating by 8:30. When we got there and handed over our $6 to park (!!!!) and got inside the snotty hostess told us that the wait was currently two hours.

Here's what I'm willing to wait two hours for: the birth of a baby, my work day to end, and my flight from Denver to London to finally land. Nowhere on that list is waiting for any type of food, if you'll notice. When it comes to being seated at a restaurant or having food delivered there are three time periods: now, in the next 30 minutes and we'll go somewhere else.

We were given the option of going up to the bar and deciding there if we wanted to wait for dinner. Since we'd paid for our parking already we figured the least we could do was go up and see the view and the rotation. When we got up to the restaurant we had to go up another flight of stairs to the bar. We sat down and the bartender immediately launched into a diatribe about how shitty the night was going. UH-OH! Usually that's not the first thing a customer wants to hear.

We sat down and tried to enjoy the sparkling city vista. As we sat we tried to see if we could see the rotation at all. We both though that we could faintly detect it. We didn't expect it to be all that fast, since the restaurant only makes one full rotation an hour. After many confused minutes we finally asked the crabby bartended which way were spinning. As it turned out we weren't spinning. Only the downstairs rotated. In hindsight I suppose this makes sense. The last thing you want to do is make life harder for people drinking.

We continued to wait. At this point we figured we were already there plus I truly think we didn't believe that it would actually take two hours to be seated. We ordered appetizers at the bar, as I was becoming increasingly crabby from hunger and distressed by the idea of going to bed after 10:00. The appetizers arrived in relatively short-order and our moods improved. Our bartender turned out to not be such a jerk (he said our snarky remarks cheered him up). We figured we should enjoy being able to go out to dinner at 9:00 PM on a Sunday since someday we'll have kids and that will become impossible.

At 9:15 we were at long last paged for our table. Our wait had been almost two hours on the nose. But it would be worth it. We'd have a delicious meal and enjoy a great view.

First, as it turns out a rotating restaurant isn't such a fun idea. I was stone-cold sober and needed to grip onto the table for several minutes before my head stopped threatening to fly off my body. I mostly adjusted but for the whole meal if I moved my head too fast from side to side I was dizzy.

The we had to wait for an unacceptable amount of time for our waiter to come over. When he got to our table I was pretty sure he'd spent a few minutes in the bathroom with a couple lines of cocaine. He took our orders and told us his life story. While I enjoy learning about people and chatting with them, I must be honest and say that 10:00 PM on a Sunday night when I'm waiting for food is not my most chatty time. I kindly told him that if he wanted to continue his employment he would shut the hell up and get our food order in. No, I didn't really say that but wouldn't it be a great story?

Our food finally arrived at our table at 10:30. I'm sure you can imagine what our meal was like. We ate in exhausted silence while blankly staring out the window. I was too tired to complain that my shrimp were overcooked and the garlic mashed potatoes we gross. The steak was delicious though and other than being too well-done the shrimp tasted fine. The whole ordeal was finally over shortly after 11:00. I would never compromise my journalist integrity by telling you the restaurant where we were so poorly served was the Chart House so I won't.

Up next time: why we ate meat on Sunday! Tune in!