$10.99

I had an extended lunch with Jeff Mitchell today at Longhorn Steakhouse in Fayetteville today. I am normally late to most meetings, with friends or family. That wasn’t always the case when I was much, much younger. If “we” had a doctor’s appointment and we arrived 10 minutes before the appointed time, then mom considered us as “being late.” That is how I grew up as a child, but I think it was sometime about 1977 that things changed, and I didn’t intend to start arriving late, but it wasn’t important to me to stress out and arrive way ahead of time. 

So, I arrived about 15 minutes early for our 11 am lunch meeting. When I drove into the Longhorn parking lot there were no other cars in the customer parking area at the front of the restaurant. I went online and found that Longhorn opened at 11 am. I looked at several other things on my phone to bide my time, and a couple drove their truck into the lot and parked about one space to my right. I was facing the front door.  A short time after 11 am, Jeff drove up and parked in front of me, closer to the restaurant entrance. He was driving his white Toyota truck.

We went inside and were seated shortly in a booth.

I already knew what I wanted to order for lunch having gone online last night. Jeff came prepared for me to order whatever I wanted, but what I ordered only cost $10.99 not including tax, or my drink, unsweet iced tea. At Longhorn, especially the Longhorn in Goldsboro, NC, I normally go by myself, and I order their cheeseburger, and a bowl of their Shrimp & Lobster Chowder. I often order water as my drink, and I eat the whole loaf of freshly baked bread with butter that they bring to the table. I’ve also started bringing several slices of sweet onion and several sweet pickles (to replace the dill pickles the restaurant provides with their burger). But, today I ordered the 7-Pepper Sirloin Lunch Salad Combo. 

The salad wasn’t that special. I think it had Romaine lettuce and some anemic tomatoes and I don’t recall anything else in the salad but the sirloin strips. And I found this steak was a little tough to chew. Maybe if it had been cut into thinner strips the toughness would have been less noticeable. *And, I planned ahead and brought my own salad dressing (my Italian dressing mixed with a little of the Cilantro-Lime dressing I had made several weeks ago for my salmon excursion.) and I put a couple of Castelvetrano and a couple of Kalamata olives in the same bottle of dressing. I used a empty glass spice bottle to transport my salad dressing & olives. I ordered the steak salad without their dressings. Online I had seen that the Longhorn dressings (except for no dressing) to be high in calories and/or high in salt. My dressing & the olives made the salad palatable. The Shrimp & Lobster Chowder was okay. I still think that this bowl of soup has better flavor at the Goldsboro restaurant even if it comes from the same can as other Longhorn restaurants.

Jeff and I talked about different things, some in the present, some from the past, and even about updating wills. Jeff has been a good friend and “like a brother” for many years. I first met him, about 1985 when he was stationed down at Camp Lejeune, as a young Marine. I knew him before he met Robin and got married.