On La Mesa: Thanksgiving Options In The Village

A Rational Choice For Thanksgiving Excesses

By Chris Lavin

La Mesa Today Editor

LA MESA -- Okay, let's agree that we all would love the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving (see above). Loving family all scrubbed and nice. Turkey moist and brown and side dishes displaying the richness of America and our own cooking talents.
If you got this, flaunt it and stop reading. Good for you.
But in an unofficial and unscientific survey of residents of the Jewels of the Hill, La Mesa Today estimates that for roughly 52.56 percent of us, there are a few predictable clumps in the Thanksgiving gravy, including:

• The congregation of relatives who share, it seems, only DNA. Differences in politics, religion, and NFL affiliations mix with long festering family wounds that react in many ways, all of them bad.
• The tendency of family members to revert to childhood patterns in which Mom does all the cooking, sisters do all the cleaning and parenting and men sit and watch TV while drinking too much. (There is a reason why male honeybees -- called drones -- are driven from the hive and to their deaths each winter!)
• Guests who impose their family's long-honored side dish -- some gelatinous concoction from the deep Balkan woods -- and insist everyone celebrate the goo!
• Orators who let the food cool as they share a list of annual thanks that includes, it seems, everything but an appreciation for brevity.
• Visitors who believe that it is acceptable, post meal, to lay on your couch while emitting a variety of bodily utterances, the least offensive of which is a deep snore.
• The long list of excuses -- usually involving the other side of the family -- that keep anyone from helping clean up a kitchen covered in dirty dishes and pans.

In sum, you get the picture. 

The very good people of Bo-Beau Kitchen + Garden and Centifonti's Restaurant in La Mesa Village -- perhaps to avoid their own families -- have agreed to work this holiday. We have done the math and the money you will spend on the professionally prepared feast Bo-Beau or Centifonti's is offering is immensely less expensive than the home-cooked version that will be extruded from most amateur kitchens.
Seated comfortably at Bo-Beau, your guests will naturally keep the anti-Obama rants to themselves and, when the food is gone, you simply walk away from the table and the dishes and to cars that take everyone to their own homes. And dessert is included at both restaurants!

CLICK HERE for the full Bo-Beau menu.

CLICK HERE for Centifonti's contact information.