Every year around the holidays, some friends and I like to get together to commemorate Turtlenog—a party we started in our church youth group where we wore turtle necks and drank egg nog. We did this nearly every year I was in high school, and I’ve cherished those memories ever since.
Anyway, it didn’t happen this year—our friend Lincoln wanted to go to his family’s beach house instead. So a smaller group of us settled on grabbing a bite and a sundae from a local diner in Aloha, OR. I had never been before, but it was near our friends Nic and Courtney. Courtney was about two days away from delivering a baby, so we tried to make sure they didn’t have to drive as far.
Blue Moon Diner is a classic American Diner with some Thai influence. That influence didn’t stretch across the whole menu, mind you. I just got a basic burger, and my friends got some boiler-plate breakfast food. And lo and behold, they had a vanilla hot fudge sundae.
Listen, it was a basic sundae. What else is there to say? But the most entertaining part of the evening came when we tried to pay for our food. Skip ahead to “Level of Comfort” for that story.
Quality of Fudge
No fudge, just chocolate sauce. But can you blame a small business for trying? They had a huge selection of burgers and breakfast items for being a relatively sleepy diner out in deep suburbs of the Portland metro area. If they skimp on the fudge, who’s gonna notice?
Me. This as a warning, small businesses of America.
Quality of Toppings
Similarly nothing too special here. The cherry was fine and the whipped cream was clearly from a can. But sometimes there’s beauty in the simplicity of ingredients. Or maybe we shouldn’t romanticize mediocrity. Tough to say.
Level of Comfort Ordering the Hot Fudge Sundae
So it’s time to come clean—the service wasn’t amazing. Long wait time for our food, even when we were one of two groups there. And we weren’t massive, either! Five people seems quite manageable. But anyway, I’m not one to really complain about service. People are overworked! Sometimes servers have a bad day too! Should that influence how I compensate them in the tip? Of course not!
But then we got the bill, and the math didn’t seem to add up. By our quick calculations, it looked like they either overcharged us $30 or the sundaes were significantly more expensive than we originally thought.
Trouble is, we didn’t do the calculations until we had already put it on my credit card. It wasn’t until we asked for the itemized receipt to shell out Venmo bucks did we catch the issue, so there was no sense in disputing it now.
Onto the second trouble: I had already written out a 20% tip. But if they overcharged us? Forget it.
I scribbled out the tip.
But scribbling it out and not putting anything in it’s place seemed poor form. So then I wrote a significantly smaller tip next to my scribbles.
And then we realized we did the math wrong. They did not overcharge us, and now I’ve shortchanged them on the tip.
I scribbled out the tip.
I wrote a more dignified tip. And then we realized they also added gratuity to our check, so the tip was already included in our bill.
I scribbled out the tip.
It was not my finest moment by any means. My fellow patrons told me it was a bit rash to scribble out the initial tip. Which is true.
Would I Rather Get a McDonald’s Hot Fudge Sundae?
Absolutely. Tipping is much easier on those self-serve kiosks.
Final Score: 5.4/10
Hot for Fudge 