A wonderful find for lunch in Stuttgart on a business trip at the end of last month: a fascinating, innovative Italian restaurant called Vapiano – new to me, although it seems to be part of quite a large chain. You’re handed a smartcard and menu on arrival, before queuing up at the counters for a chef to cook your selection to order in front of you. The food’s great – pasta made freshly on the premises each day, with some innovative dishes in addition to the usual favourites. (I went for the sauce comprising rocket, pine nuts, salami, garlic, chilli, ricotta and white wine – but the pizza with gorgonzola, smoked cheese, parmesan, dried tomatoes and figs sounded incredibly tempting).
Once your dish is ready, you head off to sit around large communal tables – charging additional items (drinks, desserts , side orders) to the smartcard as you go, then paying as you leave. The place was buzzing – and deservedly so.
As ever when faced by a concept new to me, I started to wonder how I could introduce spanking into the mix. The obvious idea – that the group of cute girls treating themselves to a hearty meal with wine at the next table might sneak out without paying – seemed too, well, downmarket. No, I decided: they’d wait until the gentleman enjoying a rather more frugal selection at the end of their table wasn’t looking, or had popped to the restroom, and they’d surreptitiously switch smartcards. The girls would escape merrily onto the street for a mere ten Euros; the older chap would be shocked to find his bill totalling nearer a hundred.
No doubt they’d be caught in due course; the University authorities (for they must surely have been students) would send them down for a week, in the certain knowledge that each would face a difficult discussion on their return home, followed no doubt with an excruciating encounter with a doubled-over belt or a freshly-cut switch. Or maybe the gentleman whose card they’d swapped would be given the opportunity to invite them into his home, whipping them soundly in turn in the drawing room with a riding crop?
So, my first thought upon reading this was: “Oh, to be one of those schoolgirls!” Followed closely by the realization that I wouldn’t be capable of stealing from the poor old man, so no spanking for me
@Emma – I think what worked for me in this scenario, tending as I do to avoid theft as an offence (it not being something that good girls would do), is that charging something to a smartcard hardly feels like stealing. It’s far too modern – not at all like, say, walking out of the restaurant without paying, taking an item from a shop or burglary.
@Emma– I’m sure if the old man were Abel, you could manage. 😉