Coventry, RI: Denny's

Italian Chicken Melt - 0 stars
about $7 with fries
June 7, 2005

In some ways, it was a prototypical sales call. I was working on a demo in the hotel, trapped in a huge but strangely desolate strip mall complex: a Hampton Inn, a Wendy's, a Denny's, a gas station, a Home Depot, and vast expanses of nothing more typical of Arizona than of Rhode Island - no forests, no farmland, no towns, just nothing. The first day's 7-hour demo had gone very well, but instead of feeling happy I just felt exhausted at the prospect of preparing for the next day's 7-hour demo.

I actually have a soft spot for Denny's, although I'm not sure why. I think it's because of the menus - they were one of the first chains to realize that it doesn't matter how bad the food is, as long as you have big juicy photos of the food in your menus. Anyway, the Italian Chicken Melt seemed safe enough - essentially a chicken parm sandwich, as we call it back home in Massachusetts. The chicken was fine, the tomato sauce was acceptable in a kind of canned and fruity way, and I was smart enough to order it without lettuce (lettuce on a breaded chicken breast covered with tomato sauce and cheese?), but the cheese was just ... weird. It was thinly sliced in perfect triangles, except it had a flavor I could not place, as if someone were trying to make mozzarella cheese who had never eaten mozzarella cheese, based on a verbal description by someone who didn't really like mozzarella cheese. It was one of those things where I would try to isolate the cheese so that I could figure out what that flavor was, but all I could determine was that I didn't like it.

It was not a prototypical sales call because I almost broke down crying during lunch (grilled cheese and tomato, if you must know) while talking to my wife because my dog had vomited again that morning after vomiting the night before. But he made it through that week, and the week after that, and now he seems to be largely recovered from his pancreatitis. He is ravenously hungry, and he wakes us up early in the morning asking to be fed (no doubt a by-product of our feeding him every two hours during the night while he was sick), and he barks angrily at strangers, and he goes for walks, though not quite as long as before. According to the official diagnosis he still has pancreatic cancer, which means he has only a few months left to live, but it seems like at least a few of them will be happy.