Pink Napkins

Thai food is messy. There's no question about it: little bones that you have to pick out, pieces of grizzled meat that you don't quite want to swallow, a bunch of inedible roots and herbs in the soups, and, of course, spiciness that makes you sweat as if it were 40 degrees instead of 30.

What you want when dealing with messy food is a big piece of toweling that is going to hold up the the horrible abuse that you're going to put it through: one of those big pseudo-cloth napkins that some middle-range restaurants use. Enter the dreaded pink napkin. They're so thin that you can't even pick a single one out from the holder at a time and that's a good thing because they are so flimsy that they just about disintegrate as soon as they touch a moist hand.

So you're left trying to mop up your sweaty, dirty mouth and face with these little pieces of disintegrating tissue. A single one wouldn't do any good, so you grab them ten or twenty at a time. By the end of the meal there are little piles of these pink napkins blowing all around the table. I swear, it couldn't be more expensive to give guests one or two good napkins, but at the local restaurants the only thing that is ever available are the pink ones. A more suspicious man would think that the pink napkin manufacturing company was owned by a man of great influence, but it's best not to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.