So invading the Hotel George wasn’t the “cakewalk” we all thought it would be. But I my search for a free lunch wasn’t going to turn into a quagmire on my watch. Remembering that Zeta Phi Beta wasn’t all that was going down at the Hyatt Regency a few blocks away, I headed back to the old stomping grounds of the Campus Progress National Student Conference where I had some connections with the wait staff.

I walked through the nifty automatic turnstile door and then it hit me like an Ace of Base song. I saw the sign. And it opened up my eyes. I saw the sign.

No, not that sign. This sign:

I headed to the Congressional Quarterly forum focused more on a free lunch than on freeing our dependence on foreign energy. Let’s just say I struck oil. By the time I made it through the line of policymakers into Capitol Room B, I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Before my very eyes were endless tables of aged salumeria from prosciutto to pancetta and grilled summer vegetables – onions, peppers and eggplants, oh my! I passed on the heirloom tomato salad with fresh basil and balls of Bufala to save room for the chicken and lamb kebabs that surrounded pools of tzatziki and baba ghanoush. The chicken was expectedly dry but the lamb was as flavorful as I could have hoped for.

I eschewed the meat entrees for the first introduction of fish to this year’s Free Food-A-Thon. I tipped my hat to the chef responsible for the roasted red snapper chermula with artichoke rémoulade. For a farm-raised fish, the snapper did not disappoint and the artichoke was a welcome departure from the often-syrupy miso glaze that has come to dominate hotel kitchen seafood preparations.

Before I had a moment to digest, a waitress who could tell I had room for more walked in with a tray of bak lava.

“Come get your dessert, now,” she said to me with a wink as she placed the tray down next to a platter of oversized white chocolate chunk cookies and walnut-laced brownies.

“Man, these energy guys really shell out,” I mused.

“You’re with this party?” she asked.

Looking back, the question was innocent enough, but I panicked:

“Yeah, the energy conference.”

She hesitated for a minute and cocked her head.

“You sure you in the right place? They got some energy thing upstairs. This is Rubbermaid Commercial Products.”

My jaw dropped. I’d been eating with a bunch of plastics producers and had no idea that the kind lady I sat next to might have been responsible for the design of my favorite food storage container. It was all too much for me to take but I had no time to sit there in shock with a bak lava-carrying waitress staring at me.

“Oh. Uh. Thanks,” I muttered as I hurried out the door.

I couldn’t help but turn back, though, wishing I’d brought my Rubbermaid container to sneak some of those bak lava back to the office.