Over the years, my family and I have occasionally eaten at IHOP on Sundays after church. IHOP isn’t the only restaurant like this where we eat on Sundays. Most of the time, we eat at home on Sundays. But this story takes place at a time when we were eating at IHOP more often.
One Sunday, I was a little more hungry than usual and decided that I would order the country fried steak meal. We placed our order and in a short while our waitress came back and told me said “We are out of CFS”. I was confused so I replied “What?” Then she told me, “We are out of CFS, country fried steak.” Since it’s not listed as CFS in the menu and I have never heard it referred to as CFS, I was surprised when she told me this and didn’t really understand what she was talking about until I got the explanation. I quickly ordered something else from the menu and didn’t really think anything about it. There was nothing else noteworthy about that trip.
A couple of weeks later, our family was back at the same IHOP and my family joked with me that I should order country fried steak. They even referred to it as CFS. I decided to give it another try. Again, the waitress came back and told me that they were out of “CFS”, referring to it by the initials. This was not the same waitress from the first time but at least I knew what she was talking about. And again, I ordered something else.
By the time we went to IHOP on our next visit, ordering CFS had become a thing. There was no way around it for my family. I had to order CFS. I told them that this time I was going to try and order CFS instead of country fried steak and see if that helped. Our waitress was different from the ones that had taken care of us on the first two trips. When she took my order, I told her that I wanted CFS. She didn’t blink an eye and wrote it down. And that week, they had CFS. My family speculated that the first two times, they didn’t take my order because I didn’t know the correct thing to call CFS. I now had inside information that could get me in good with the wait staff. I ordered CFS at other restaurants where I usually get breakfast food and they knew exactly what I wanted too. Now more than ever, ordering CFS is a thing for my whole family. Not everyone orders it, but everyone expects someone to order CFS when we go to one of these places. They always know what we are talking about. And now you do too.