What's with you? Why do you think that people who care about food and drink and won't be content with eating reheated corporate crap and drinking rerefrigerated corporate crap are 'pretentious?' And why do you need to misrepresent what was said in the article you reference? The author asked for information on a certain beer (in a beer bar, a place that prides itself on the craft beers it offers on tap) and the waitress had no idea. Asimov doesn't protest anything. He merely notes the discordance between an establishment built on a certain concept and an employee of that establishment who knows nothing of the concept.
And mendicants are far more likely to sleep under or on top of the Post or the Daily News. I don't know if either offers restaurant reviews, but if so they would surely be more in line with your unpretentious tastes.
"Other times, it’s simply a clueless staff, as at Spitzer’s Corner on the Lower East Side, which calls itself an American gastro-pub and offers 40 craft beers on tap. A waitress was mystifyingly insistent (maybe because it's her second day and she's doing what she's told?) on carding a certain gentleman whose graying temples lent him a distinguished air (hint: he’s not the fruity-beer type). But when he asked her about Coney Island Sword Swallower, described on the menu as “steel hop lager,” she pleaded ignorance, saying, “It’s just my second day here.”
Could you imagine a waiter at a steakhouse who could not explain the difference between a rib-eye and a porterhouse?
No I can't. Nor would I expect to quiz a just hired waitress. I'd not be a douche and go ask the owner or the bartender who is probably making more than a subsistence living from clowns whose goal in life is not to be seen as a fruity beer type.
but he gets his comeupance (unwittingly as he included it) from his final sentence,
I dropped by recently and ordered a Sly Fox Chester County brown ale, which was mellow and subtle, fitting my mood perfectly.
When I asked about food, the bartender handed me a sheaf of delivery menus. “We leave that to the experts,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/dining/reviews/24pour.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=diningI think he left out the bartender's final word, "asshole". Beer's "serious context" is in a glass.
