I’m always happy to eat a marschino cherry. One, maybe two at most.
The tricky thing about these cherries is that they’re typically found in drinks, which means at some point I have to fish the cherry out of the glass. This is particularly difficult if the cherry is in a narrow champagne glass in a fancy restaurant.
I encountered this delicate situation at a nice restaurant on the Norwegian fjord cruise. Megan was done with her drink and didn’t want the cherry, so I ran through my options:
- use my fingers to fish out the cherry
- stap the cherry with my fork
- pour the cherry (stem and all) directly into my mouth
- dump the glass upside down on my plate (this is what I did)
There was, of course, another option: Leave the cherry where it is. But wouldn’t that be a waste?
If you faced this situation at a nice restaurant, what would you do?
I’m a known philistine. I try to fish them out when they’re still on top of my (usually iced) drink. However, it would have been at the bottom of the bubbly from the start. Therefore, I’d use whatever methods I had at hand because I WILL have that cherry. I guess this is why I don’t go to places that would have me as a guest. (paraphrased from Groucho Marx quote)
I’d stab the poor cherry with my fork. It’s about to be eaten anyway. So just stab it!
I’m perfectly fine with that! 🙂
I appreciate your commitment to getting that cherry out of the glass!
What a barbarian! Jk.
You can swirl the glass and tilt until the stem is closer to the rim. No one eats cherries with a fork, so I think it’s fine to each a cherry by holding it by the stem. As long as your hand isn’t touching the glass I think it’s fine. I had one time where there was ice on top of the cherry and I couldn’t fish it out. I used a straw or something to swirl it out. If there is no stem, I would use a clean spoon to fish it out.
I think one time I was having so much trouble, the server came by and gave me extra cherries.
So you’re saying if I make a big show of not being able to extract the cherry, I might get extra cherries? Interesting…
I have to believe there’s an odd, physics-backed approach to this out there somewhere that can trump all of the aforementioned approaches. I don’t know what it is, but I am intrigued to figure it out!
Side note- I didn’t realize it was poor manners to fish the cherry out of a glass. Kinda makes me wish some movie, like the James Bond into movie (can’t remember the name) where he’s supposed to be more sloppy and hasn’t figured out his suave nature yet, would have featured him awkwardly fiddling with a cherry in a glass for a while before switching to a martini.
I bet Bond knows the proper, suave way to do it.