The post that's not about the Rubaiyat

This blog post was going to be about the Rubaiyat—one of Decorah, IA’s finest restaurants. To some extent, it still is. However, I went there with my brother Andy, and afterwards I realized the restaurant itself was actually kind of boring compared to how incredibly smooth my brother is.

Let me start—we went to the Rubaiyat on Easter morning for a nice brunch. The restaurant serves brunch from 10am—1pm, and they offer dining that either is gourmet, or it’s too close to tell. They’re located on Decorah’s main drag, Water Street, and they have a pretty classy façade. If it’s possible to judge a book by its cover, then you can definitely tell the Rubaiyat has class. I’m not entirely sure what makes it classy, though. It could be the sign above the restaurant that is elegantly understated. They have nice, large windows through which you can see the dining area and the bar, which is fairly impressive as bars go. More on that in a bit.

When you enter the restaurant, two things strike you. First, the bar. I’m not much of a drinker, but when you see thirty some-odd taps mounted on the wall next to the bar I think you have the right to be impressed. They had some of the established brands, like Miller and Busch, but they also had some with odder names, like Blue Moon, Fat Tire, Open Book, Stubbed Toe, Betty Ford, Dirty Sock and Erotic Magazine. This time around, at 11 am on a Sunday, they also had a Bloody Mary bar, where you can mix tomato juice, hot sauce and vodka with a celery stick. Normally, I think if you start drinking before noon you might want to admit you have a problem, but there were people up at the bar, pouring vodka into their tomato juice, giggling as they applied a dash or two of hot sauce, and then going on their way. It seemed only slightly less sophisticated than having a brandy after dinner, and I was thinking maybe I had stumbled onto something, some etiquette of the upper crust. I was tempted to have a Bloody Mary until I remembered that I hadn’t really liked vodka when I tried it, and I’ve hated tomato juice as far back as the first grade. I almost went for a glass of hot sauce and a celery stick, though, which should be a good indicator of how curious I was to try it.

The second thing that strikes you is the definition of “Rubaiyat.” Just hearing the word puts you in the mindset of rubies somehow, but instead it’s a poetry collection written by a Persian named Omar Khayyam, and it celebrates living life to the fullest, with a healthy dose of food and wine. Actually, it’s more about how good food and wine can help you live your life to the fullest. Most people just write about how good wine can help you find the joy in life, but Khayyam went further and included food in the mix. In fact, Khayyam penned the immortal couplet:

                                That is not dead which can eternal lie.

                                And with strange eons even death may die.

No, sorry, that’s the couplet from Abdul Alhazred and the Necronomicon. The actual couplet is:

                                A book of verses underneath the bough,

                                A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou

Granted, when Khayyam wrote these lines, over a millennia ago, he probably didn’t use words like “thou.” The poems were translated from Persian (Persish?) into English in the 1850s by a gentleman named Edward Fitzgerald. I don’t know about you, but dining at a restaurant named for an ancient book of literature is somewhat comforting. It speaks of class and a certain artistic approach to food you won’t find at, say, Big Bob’s Eat ‘n’ Leave.

So Andy and I settled into a booth and were presented with a nice menu with several decent choices. I had hollandaise sauce for the first time in years, and I enjoyed it immensely. Good hollandaise sauce is an art in and of itself. Yes, you can feel your arteries hardening as you eat, but the taste is worth it.

We had a great meal, and when the waitress delivered our bill, Andy said, “Hey, my brother and I were talking and maybe you can help us out—do cute waitresses get tipped more than other waitresses? I’m asking because you’re pretty cute, so do you get more tips than the rest of the waitresses?”

I  should point out that before the waitress came up we were actually talking about Swamp Thing.

The waitress, however, did not know this crucial bit of information, and was definitely caught off guard. She mentioned she hoped personality played a part in the tips she got, too, but was very nice toward my brother. Very nice. If he had written his phone number down on the check, this waitress would have called him wanting to know if he was free at any point during the rest of the year. She smiled at him as we walked out. Not one of those polite, friendly smiles, but a warm, caring, “you made my day” smile.

When we were in the car I tried to imitate Andy’s delivery of the line and came off sounding more like a Brooklyn pimp. “So, my brudder an’ I, we were talkin’ an’ maybe yous can help us out, eh?” (Yes ladies—I am single.)

It was shortly after that my brother had to leave for Pennsylvania. I watched him drive off, and I felt kind of lonely without him. I had a great time while he was here, and I loved getting out and exploring northeast Iowa with him, and just talking about random things, like whether or not Swamp Thing would earn more tips than the other waitresses.