When I was in college, my friends and I would often make late night runs to restaurants that were opened all night. One night my friend Mark suggested we go to a place called GG’s. It was a locally owned diner in a building that was previously a Sambo’s chain restaurant. The Sambo’s had closed because of the racially insensitive name and imagery used in the stores. I only remember going to this place once when it was Sambos and maybe once before this after it had changed names.
When we arrived, our waitress took our drink orders. I ordered tea and Mark ordered Sprite. Soon after they brought our drinks, Mark took a sip of his Sprite. The look on his face told me something was wrong. He told me his Sprite tasted like root beer. It was obvious that he was not a fan of root beer. Even if you do like it, I don’t think you want to taste root beer when you drink Sprite. It was a little while before our waitress returned and he was able to complain. When he told her about his drink, she replied “Oh, all our soft drinks taste like root beer!”
My tea didn’t taste like root beer. We could think of no good reason why all of the soft drinks would taste like root beer. The best explanation we could come up with was that the drink machine was cross contaminating the drinks. The worst explanation we could think of was that they didn’t clean their glasses good enough. Tea might have been strong enough to hide the root beer flavor, Sprite was not.
I don’t remember what Mark ordered to replace his Sprite. Maybe he got tea. Maybe the water glasses were safe. I do remember that we never returned.