I went to Happy Bar &amp; Grill for the first time in Sofia.  It's like an Apple Bee's Restaurant in the States.  I've walked by it a hundred times but I've never been in.  It seems kind of like an American traveling abroad and then eating at McDonalds or KFC.

Turns out though, I had a great time and the food wasn 't bad either.    There's a good selection of salads, potato dishes, main meals including chicken, pizza, pasta, a smattering of Chinese inspired dishes, a sushi menu and dessert.  The menu I had was in Bulgaria, although I am sure they have English menus as well, so I read the names of the dishes and looked at the pictures.

Every dish has a picture.  So I kind of felt like I was ordering off the kids menu.  Anyhow, by the time I was eating dinner last night, I was really hungry.  Normally what I would do if I was this hungry would be to order something that I know already I like.  But this was my first time to the restaurant so instead I ordered food with the name Happy in it.<!--more-->

This means I had the Happy salad and the Happy Potatoes.  And guess what? I was very happy with this decision.

There seemed to be a lot of other good choices on the menu but it's hard to make a good decision when you're hungry.  Sometimes, I think that I am not making the best choices when my tummy is growling but this time I was very satisfied.  The Happy Salad had tomatoes, lettuce, boiled potato, chopped egg, peas, and slices of ham wrapped around serine cheese--oh and a creamy dressing.  Now that I write out the ingredients maybe it sounds a little bit weird but I thought it was great.  I also had the Happy potatoes.  These were basically jo-jos--potato wedges with spices on the outside.

I would like to think that the salad balanced out the potatoes but I am willing to bet that my mother--the nutritionist--would disagree.  Still I was happy and had more than enough food to eat. So there are no complaints on my end.

Well aside from the fact that the girls who were working as waitresses were all wearing the same tiny skirts with little slits up the front and matching shirts.  There's something so demeaning about that.  I thought wearing a vest with lots of silly pins and buttons was bad but this it seems to me is even worse.  You can check out their outfits <a href="http://www.happy.bg/" target="_blank">here</a>.

The one strange thing that happened to me last night was that in the middle of dinner a Bulgarian girl stepped on my foot.  She was climbing out of a booth behind me (but not very close to the table I was sitting at) and tripped a little bit because of this she ended up stepping on my foot.  I was fine and she was fine but she looked at me, I looked at her and without skipping a beat she apologized in English.

Wowa.  She was clearly a Bulgarian.  Okay, maybe she heard me speaking English earlier but still, it was very weird and totally unexpected to hear her apologize in English.  Tripping and stepping on someone happens so fast that if it were me I thing I would have been so embarrassed by it that I would end up apologizing in my first language.  She however, apparently tripped, looked at me and in that split second decided to apologize in English.

It makes me jealous how quickly second languages come to other people.

All in all it was like stepping into a restaurant in the States.  The walls were decorated in the same way, the music was from the pop charts, and the food was starchy and fried.  The only difference was that nearly everyone else was speaking Bulgarian and like most restaurants our food came out at different times.  I don't think this restaurant will become a mainstay of mine but it was great fun and a little bit surreal last night.