How not to make a salad!

Yesterday, I did what friends told me couldn't be done in my new hometown - picked a bad restaurant!  It was one I've admired many times when walking round the centro storico, with its impossibly grand front doors, triple height rooms and sophisticated lighting scheme so I thought I'd treat myself, figuring it was mid-week so they'd hopefully let me in, even wearing jeans and without a reservation.

I was greeted and shown to a table, too late to realise there was a projector screening a giant football match onto one of the walls and speakers spouting the commentary in every corner!  I appeared to have walked into the only sports bar in Puglia!  Inside were just the young man who had greeted me and his friends, all loudly cheering on the football!  The DJ booth and inadequate toilet facilties in this otherwise refined building all re-inforced that this was a man space!  Still, I was here now and too British to get up and walk out so I chose a salad and pledged to use the time to find design inspiration for my new house.

My food arrived and I'm not one for photographing my meals so I hope my description will do it justice: white bowl heaped full of chopped lettuce, small cubes of cheese and slices of cured meat - so far so satisfactory.  On top of this were (not sure how to put this) "deposits" of squeezy cheese!

I have never seen a restaurant in UK use squeezy cheese in a salad.  I imagine you'd have to work hard even in America, the home of squeezy cheese, to find a restaurant who thought it was okay to use squeezy cheese in a salad.  But here in Puglia, famed for its organic, home-grown produce, this restaurant has squeezy cheese!  I picked my way around it but unfortunately one of squeezy cheese's qualities is its ability to "smush" into gaps and stick to everything it touches.

I felt queasy at the thought of it all evening and my dream involved huge spots being squeezed and white gunk coming out in long continuous stripes a la squeezy cheese!  Ugh!  This ragazza is traumatized!

P.S.  A quick google of squeeze cheese and the urban dictionary definition adds a little something extra to this subject.  This was not the squeeze cheese deposited on my salad - I hope!