Buzzfeed video, bacon at three price points.

"This is bacon Carpaccio." 

Flashback. 

My younger brother and his one-time Navy diver friend, a tall muscular all-American Promise Keeper type fellow, and our real estate agent and I were having dinner at Avenue Grill, a settled upscale white tablecloth restaurant on 17th Avenue just outside of downtown. The real estate agent is female and she got up to go to the bathroom, my brother and his friend leaned in toward me and whispered, worry covering both their faces, they looked confused. "The agent offered to pay."

I said, "Great!" Because this is going to be expensive. 

They both burst out laughing. 

"What's so funny?" 

"We didn't know what to do but you answered instantly before we could ask you what you thought. You being untroubled by a woman paying for all of dinners is funny." 

"She just made a mint off us and we did all of the work. We deserve it." 

They go, "Yeah. You have a point." 

There. Settled. They were put at ease about that but the men were still uncharacteristically tense. What was wrong with these two guys tonight? Why weren't they lighthearted as usual? Come on. Let's have fun. Something about the whole setup was bugging them. I think they might have felt out of place. They are both electricians. They both work construction. Neither of them drink, and this is a fine dinner and wine type of place and where cocktails flow like a river.

One of them was reading the menu and asked aloud, "What is Carpaccio?" 

The agent told him it's slices of raw steak. 

The table fell to silence as they continued reading the menu.

Strained silence again. 

I mentioned, "Carpaccio is named after the artist Vittore Carpaccio because he was known for his oil paintings with a lot of red and white pigments that resembles the raw meat." 

Still total silence at the table. Come on!

I put on a high-pitched ventriloquist voice and said without moving my lips, "That's very interesting, Chip. Do you have any other food and art-related anecdotes to share with us at this time?" 

They all three stopped reading and looked at me. I assumed a confused expression and looked back and forth, then looked behind my chair to the left then to the right as if I didn't know who said that, and all three of them burst out laughing. Loudly. And raucously. It wasn't that funny. But they took a very long time to recover. They kept chuckling for several minutes. Their reaction was contrasted with their tension, their tension released. I think their oversized reaction was  because they saw in that, you can behave like an dope in a fancy place and in front of a professional woman and not be diminished. Your masculinity isn't aways being challenged. They were treating this like teenagers uncomfortable on a date and not the conclusion, the reward, for a very great deal of hard work.