The One Where We Go Broke

28th October 2018 will go down as the day I found out the true meaning of fine dining...at a cafe😅
If this sounds like an oxymoron, it is probably due to us,the morons(friends and I). We decided to head out to this restaurant-the name of which is protected for security reasons (*cough Amelie's Cafe cough*)- without checking its affordability.
So there were 13 of us- all from insti (Institute lingo for IIT Madras). The very fact that there were thirteen of us should have served as a prelude to the travesty that was to unfold later that night. We were all  dressed up in our finest clothes to flaunt our wealth. In hindsight, it was really good that we did flaunt our wealth before paying for the food because after doing so, there was nothing left to flaunt.
But up until we opened the menu book that was so cruelly offered to us, we had no idea that the prices would be so freaking insane! Even so, the prices could have been justified had there been more food or rather had they provided sufficient food to satisfy at bare minimum a rat, if not a human😖!!
Every dish that was on the menu was priced north of  ₹200 (A steep amount for an engineering student(Not CS😅))!! No sooner did we see the gargantuan prices than we began to scan the menu for the item with the lowest price.
 I shall walk you through this step because it will seem alien to most- unless you are a Malayalee, in which case you have been reading menus from left to right since birth (Pls take offence😉!!)!! So this is how the process goes... You run your eyes down the prices side of the menu without bothering about the item which you are going to order and the moment you see a item which you like price that is lower than the lowest you have encountered till then, you replace the former with the latter and continue until you reach the end of the menu. For the (unemployed,obviously) techie, this is selection sort and proof that we, Indians invented selection sort long before Babbage had even been conceived- Mr. Satyapal Singh , please note that this is a joke and not true.
So we started our "Journey to find the Cheapest Dish" - Still a better movie than Journey to the Mysterious Island!! All hope seemed to be lost when all of the prices we came across were above      ₹ 200...Suddenly we spotted a lifeline!! An item priced at just 60 bucks!! We were so thrilled that we yelled in unison - our efforts had not been in vain!! We could finally order.......A bottle of water😑 So in the end we had to shell out a fortune. We had ordered items keeping an eye on the total amount which would be snatched away from us in the end. So by the time the bill had arrived, we estimated the total to come to around ₹7000. But the bill had other ideas and like a Lata Mangeshkar fan at a Justin Bieber show, we were caught unaware. It stated that the total amount was ₹8432.50 - a number that will be imprinted on my mind as long as I exist in this form or otherwise!!
What created such a huge difference between the expected value and the actual value,you ask? This is the time I introduce you all to Mr. GST- the add-on at every party and meal. In our rush, we had forgotten that not 13, but 14 people were going to be eating at the table- the Indian Government being the other 😞 - and ultimately we paid the price -quite literally!!
So that was an experience none of us will forget anytime soon-unless we go there again!!
It also taught me the difference between dining and fine dining as I mentioned at the start. I realized that dining is a momentary experience that goes away once the food has been consumed but fine dining is the culmination of several days or maybe weeks of struggle to save money for that one experience.
So basically fine dining is dining with a lot more zeroes added to the bill!!!