Super Flashy Raft

Restaurant.com seems to perenially have these massive sales on gift certificates to various local eateries.  Normally, the $25 gift certificates go for $10, but lately they’ve been offering 70% to 80% price cuts on their already heavily discounted prices.  So a $25 gift certificate will cost $2, $4 will buy you a $50 gift certificate, and so on.

Of course, with these severely depressed prices come draconian limits on the products.  For example: only one coupon per group per month, $100 minimum food purchase (on a $50 gift cert), not applicable to alcohol, only able to be used Sun-Thurs, dinner only, etc…

I have never appreciated the mantra “an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work”.  However, when it comes to getting more than my fair share of goods and services through illicit means, I am the Tyrannical Titan of Scamming.  Hence with a little HTML wizardry and some elaborate flourishes many of those pesky restrictions like “minimum amounts”, “frequency limits” and “included gratuities” are replaced by a much more generous set of rules that favor me and my dining partners.

Fast forward to our soiree at Gonpachi, one of Beverly Hill’s ritziest new dining establishments.  Reportedly costing over $18 million dollars to assemble from wood shipped entirely from Japan, my girlfriend, my friend and I went through seven pints of Sapporo, two lychee martinis, and a bottle of ozeki sake, not to mention thirteen orders of Japanese tapa-styled menu items for the princely sum of $17 after the now heavily doctored gift certificate was applied.

This scene from Kill Bill was filmed at Gonpachi in Tokyo. The Beverly Hills location is an exact replica.

 I found it highly amusing when all three of the restaurant’s managers conferred together, poring over the gift certificate to see if this… heinous thing would have to be honored.  I can assure you that there was much gnashing of teeth and curses in their native tongue - I understood several of the more choice selections - hurled our way, but eventually keeping with the age old Japanese tradition of inscrutability, the manager presented us with our bill and thanked us politely. 

This is the last straw, these goddamn Koreans!

 It was only after I got home drunk from happiness at a scam well done as well as the alcohol, did I see that Gonpachi immediately rescinded its membership from the Restaurant.com website.  And here I thought we were going to make this a weekly tradition, but I guess this was just another example of killing the golden egg-laying goose. 

Goddamn Japonais, they sure do act quickly when provoked…  now I know what Pearl Harbor felt like.