Editorial Note: In April, I took a month off in Medellin. For me, this meant an interesting and diverting month. For you, this means 30 days of posts about my vacation. I’ll try to make them somewhat amusing.
In Medellin, I visited my first Hard Rock Cafe. (I did decline to purchase a T-shirt.) Now, most correspondents would have simply assumed that the place was a tourist trap and passed it by. I, however, am filled with love for my readers, and so elected to spend the time and money to verify that it was a tourist trap. (Also, it appeared directly in front of me coincidentally with the onset of hunger.)
It was pretty empty when I visited, which wasn’t surprising considering that the joint’s primary mission seems to be the introduction of the $10.00 cocktail to Medellin. I elected to drink a simple water, which turned into a bottled water due to my limited Spanish and the HRC’s untrammeled avarice.
The upside was a fairly reasonable steak, cooked to a proper medium-rareness. (Lots of places bump the “doneness” level by a notch; rare becomes medium-rare, medium-rare becomes medium, medium becomes medium-well, etc.) Not to be overlooked, the waitress was also cute, and tended to dance about the place in the most enchanting way.
Said waitress told me that the Spanish (or Medellin-specific) phrase for “medium rare” was “medio raw”, or a homophobe thereof. Note that I couldn’t independently verify this at the time of writing, so this could just have been a bit of tease-the-gringo fun. I suppose I’ll just have to get another steak elsewhere to check the information — truly my diligence knows no bounds.
The total bill came to 58,000 pesos, or about $29. This included $6 for an ice cream dessert (I’ve heard that ice cream is both very popular and absurdly overpriced here) and a 5,000 tip on account of waitress cuteness. I’m such a sucker. (Tipping is not much of a custom here.)
This puts the meat bill at just under 40,000 pesos. By coincidence, that was about what I’d spent the day before at a restaurant in the Oviedo mall. (The place was called Cafe le Gris, despite not seeming overtly froggy.) The mall place’s meat was vastly superior (two filet mignons, topped with mushrooms, served with potatoes, string fries, and some really tasty veggies), and you got real cloth napkins, as opposed to the HRC’s cheap paper approach.
Overall, I’d say that the Hard Rock Cafe was a bit more of a ripoff than I expected.
