Salad Days

Are you getting tired of waiters coming to your table with a 3-foot-high pepper grinder asking if you'd like "fresh ground pepper" on your salad? Well, so is Nora Ephron, who unloaded last month on the New York Times Op-Ed page, God bless her. Ephron's a much better writer than I am, so I'll let her do the talking:

Many years ago, they used to put salt and pepper on the table in a restaurant, and here's how they did it: there was a salt shaker and there was a pepper shaker. The pepper shaker contained ground black pepper, which was outlawed in the 1960s and replaced by the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill and the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill refrain: "Would you like some fresh ground black pepper on your salad?" I've noticed that almost no one wants some fresh ground black pepper on his salad. Why they even bother asking is a mystery to me.

Ephron tackles some other restaurant annoyances in the column, which you can read here.