I accidentally ate a $36 steak.

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The eating part wasn’t what was accidental. I very much intended to put all of that glorious meat in my mouth. The “accidentally” part was my forgetting about that certain timeless axiom: if you have to ask for the price, then you can’t afford it.

Of course, my first warning bell was the fact that I had no idea how to pronounce the name of the restaurant. Another thing I now regret not asking.

Emily and I had been lured by the siren song of those restaurant.com vouchers, promising $25 off a purchase of $35 or more. She’d received four of these vouchers thanks to some unused airline miles: two for this restaurant, and two for a local Thai place. For just a moment, consider: over the last couple of years she’s traveled to China and back. Then to India and back. A couple times around the world, really. And what she got for her trouble was some glorified coupons.

But I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. We made the trip to this unpronounceable restaurant – which I shall henceforth refer to as “Obnoxiouslie Fancie” – deciding after a brief discussion that we “deserved” something nice once in a while. That we should “treat ourselves” now and then and remind ourselves that this whole wide world is full to bursting with wonderful things that we have to ration amongst ourselves.

After we sat down at a pleasantly lighted table, our waitress rattled off the six or seven specials for the evening from memory, none of which I could reproduce accurately here. When she arrived at lucky number seven, I heard only the words “porterhouse,” “sun-dried tomatoes,” and “mushrooms.” I made my choice, price be damned.

The menu was full enough of these wonderful things, each with a price tag that, if converted into something the United Nations could airdrop, would feed an African village for a fortnight. Our kindly waitress picked out an appetizer for us at our prodding and it turned out to be a wildly expensive… salad. It was an exceptional salad, though, I’ll admit that much.

And we decided to go for broke and order drinks as well, deciding to pick out a wine from their extensive selection. Emily deferred to me and I selected one of the four that I’d heard my father order on special occasions throughout my childhood. I went with a Montepulciano. I figured that at $9 per glass, it had better be extraordinary. And it was. I realized right then, as though from some revelatory communion with a burning bush, that I’d really been buying the wrong wines since I was old enough to drink legally. As with choosing a restaurant, the quality of a wine is evidently measured by your difficulty pronouncing its name.

So the steak arrived, and I was greeted not by some miniature doll’s house-portion of meat, but by something fully the size of my forearm. I was amazed – in awe, really – and dove in. And it was just… well, it was damned spectacular.

Never eat anything bigger than your head. Never shoot pool at a place called Pop's. Never eat at a place called Mom's.

While I’m thinking about it, I’ve become really curious about our fetishization of food. Let’s be honest: the act of eating is an animal’s impulse. It’s something we do to stave off death, and in some certain cases – based on our culinary choices – invite it. What’s with this business of eating the puffer fish – a wholly unappetizing-looking thing – that could kill you if you prepare it just a little bit improperly? Certain Asian civilizations have made a series of decisions that have resulted in the puffer fish becoming a sought-after delicacy in certain corners of the globe. On some sunny afternoon many years ago, some industrious Asian gentleman spotted one of these ugly little bastards through the floor of a glass-bottom boat, looked past the hundreds of scary, poisonous barbs, and felt a little twinge of hunger in his belly. His eyes grew wide with wonder and he patted his growling belly thoughtfully. He made it his life’s work to capture this magnificent creature and perfect the art of putting it inside his body. And after his inevitable and probably embarrassing death, someone decided to carry the torch for him and learned not only how to remove the highly venomous barbs and internal organs, but how to safely extract what precious little meat the fish actually possessed, all without screwing up and sending his body into a painful and brief coma followed shortly by death.

Honestly, it’s all enough to blow the mind, the lengths we go to and the herculean efforts we undertake to eat more and more outlandish and unusual foodstuffs. All of this in the name of dressing up a thing we do everyday anyway just to survive. In the name of human progress, I’m going to devote the rest of my life to improving the act of taking a leak. There has got to be room for improvement there.

But at the end of the day, this comes back to indulging ourselves, and allowing ourselves to believe that we deserve all of the fine things the world has to offer. And from time to time we’ll taste splendor and hereafter everything else will just taste bland. And once in a while we forget to ask up-front for the price and we’ll be just a little bit shocked at the price tag that extravagance carries, when a six-dollar home-cooked meal will fill us up just as well and stave off death-by-hunger for another day.

That's good, old-fashioned, phallic family cooking.

I don’t know if it’s the most important thing, but it’s worth noting that I didn’t really regret it. I didn’t spend all that much time thinking about what else I could have done with that money. I paid as much for that food as for the experience of eating it. And if I had the means to eat such food on a daily basis, I’d lose any hope of objectivity. It’d just be food to me – like a $1.80 loaf of bread at Giant – rather than something worth looking forward to.

But at the same time, we’ve still got one more voucher for that unpronounceable restaurant, and so I sleep a little less soundly now, knowing that someday soon we’ll have to return to Obnoxiouslie Fancie and I’ll go in, this time, knowing what it is I’m getting myself into.