ahi!

last night we went to a nice restaurant that sits right next to a river. i had never been there so i started looking for something local and fresh on the menu...no such luck, no local fish only ocean fish probably frozen. on the appetizer list they had ahi tuna which is one of my favorite things, so i asked the waitress if they could put it on a salad for me. she said they had such a salad on the lunch menu and they could give me that. so about 20 minutes later out came my salad. i could see that it had been encrusted with something along with the usual sesame seeds but it didn't occur to me to wonder what it was. i just took a big bite and started chewing. well, my eyes started watering, my nose started running and burning, my face turned bright red, i started considering my options which didn't seem to include spitting it out in a crowded restaurant and the only thing that could run through my head was what in the world did they put on this salad, the dressing was on the side, there wasn't any strange veggies on it, then i realized as i painfully tried to swallow the last of the huge bite in my mouth...ah, wasabi, the tuna is green on the outside...why oh why would they want to put that much wasabi on a piece of fish. i know there are people out there that like it and i even like some when its in dressing or mixed with soy sauce, but i couldn't taste the fish or anything else for that matter. this was a fairly expensive restaurant and i couldn't exactly just order something else. after a little while of me pushing it around on my plate wondering if i could scrape enough off to eat it the waitress came over and asked how i liked it. i don't complain about food after its already been brought to me unless its really bad. like if i ask for no tomatoes and they show up i just take them off and never say a word. but what was i going to do, i told her i didn't think i could eat it because there was so much wasabi on it. she asked me what i wanted to do and said she would ask but she might have to charge a portion of it too me. i told her to go find out and give me salmon or something to put on the salad. she did, and she was actually really sweet about it and didn't charge me which is a good thing because i was sitting there thinking wasabi is something a waitress might want to mention when giving something to someone when its not on the menu. the moral of the story is, don't order ahi tuna without knowing what its going to be drowned in, and if its wasabi, probably go for something else...unless you like tasting wasabi and nothing else at all.