"You'll love this place." He said.
Across the street was a bar, yet another chain-experience with one of those differences that isn't really a difference at all but a lowest possible cost differentiator. In this case the cost saving was mostly in the waitresses uniforms. Imagine a Texan steakhouse where the waitresses wear stetsons to add authenticity to a bog standard American steak - admittedly delicious - or a mexican place with big-sombrero'd waitresses. This one was a girly-bar branded by breeding Scottish and Irish design cliches and hoping that no-one would notice the dissonance. The women wore kilts with hems designed to be within a millimetre of being crudely short and - I can see the big reveal in the pitch in my mind - the hem ain't straight. Their plaid tops were precision engineered to constrain heaving decolletage, even if there wasn't any decolletage to heave. The marketeers had turned the women to cartoons, killing any sense of the saucy, or sexy, or erotic. It didn't help that the place was huge and empty and the ladies were bored. They looked cold too, and their exposed skin was grey-white or bruised olive. Their expressions were similarly bored or icy which I personally prefered to the explosive fake smiles which crushed their eyes until they threatened to explode in a sparkly, perky, cheeky, zombie way. I ordered a margarita, raising a provocative 'ooooo' when I chose salt not sugar for the rim. Maybe I stumbled across some kind of code. Sometimes you look into someone's eyes and find someone screaming to get out. This was one of those places. The clothes are even designed to look half-stripped without the wear and tear.