My least-favorite restaurant

Happy beef, and a not-so-happy tummy

Missvain, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Can you be allergic to a restaurant?

A group of people from my church goes regularly on Tuesday nights to a local Mexican restaurant, where there’s a trivia game, under the auspices of BrainBlast Entertainment, which operates trivia and several other types of games at restaurants in multiple states.

I love trivia night, and I love being with my friends from church. I try to make it every week, although I have a work conflict one or two Tuesdays each month. I live by myself, and this is one of the few purely social things I do on a regular basis.

There’s just one problem: I hate the restaurant.

I enjoy Mexican food and would happily eat at any of the other Mexican restaurants in town. But somehow, when I show up at this one (I’m not going to name them, because I don’t think it’s anything that’s the restaurant’s fault, per se), my appetite vanishes. I will sometimes order a plate of food and pick at it a little bit, but most of it will go uneaten. It’s weird, because it’s not even a matter of the taste; it’s … something else. I can’t figure out what.

Meanwhile, my friends are all devouring their plates and seem to have no problem. Lately, I’ve taken to just ordering dessert or a plate of french fries (which…