Whatever the reason, my $5.99 New York strip steak dinner appeared in short order. Sure, I did have to ask the waitress to break my $10 bill, so I could have a steady supply of singles. CCR has a rather aggressive dancer schedule. No stripper shakes it longer than the length of a single jukebox song. That means they get up there, quickly strip down to pasties and a G-string, perform a number of limber exercises designed to expose the naughty parts of their anatomy, and get the hell off the stage.

And then they come right to your table, where protocol says  you give them at least a buck for wiggling their butt cheeks in rhythm. I felt obligated to pass out dollars even as I was stuffing my face with beef. I felt like Dad at the dinner table passing out money to his daughters.

OK, the food: The plate arrived looking like a snapshot from my own private eating hell as a child. I grew up in Omaha, beef capital of America, and yet my family couldn't cook a steak to save their souls. I remember chewing and chewing and chewing at some overcooked, underseasoned piece of meat — until I would give up and just spit the nasty wad out in my napkin. Or just hold it in my cheek, like a chipmunk, until I could spit it out in the toilet.

CCR's gray slab of beef brought back all those memories. It didn't help that the New York strip was about as thick as a book of poetry. Its sides didn't inspire much hope either: a stack of extra-wide steak fries that looked barely cooked and a bowl of sliced green beans, previously frozen or canned if I were a betting man.

The meat's thinness, in fact, reminded me more of skirt steak than strip, even though it clearly was the latter. There also wasn't a char mark within a mile of that steak, which means the protein likely never came in contact with a grill. I was not looking forward to my first bite.

Now, I don't want to oversell this, but let me say this about the first bite: It was far better than anything I could have imagined, particularly at that price, particularly  with its underwhelming appearance. The steak was well-seasoned, the salt and pepper bringing out the meager flavor of that thin cut. The seasoning, in fact, was the make-or-break element of the meat. Those bites not sprinkled with enough S&P were lifeless.

I have absolutely nothing kind to say about the sides, other than the fact they were less embarrassing to stare at than the women on stage.

Crystal City Restaurant

The place looks rather harmless from the street. It features a brick-and-tile facade that gives little indication, save for the silhouette of two mammothly endowed women, of the nude acrobatics going on inside. Unlike at Camelot Show Bar, where I ate lunch today, you have to seat yourself, which is sort of a pyschological test to measure your perv and shame levels.

I decided that if I'm going to do this thing right, I'm going to sit right up front, by God. I claimed a four-top booth near the stage and plopped myself down. I promptly ignored the dancer about eight feet away and checked my e-mail accounts, typed out an e-mail to a source, checked facebook,  looked for comments on my previous postings, logged on to Twitter, and generally acted like I was at the office for about 10 minutes.

I clearly need work on my strip-club etiquette.

The waitress here wasn't required to perform her job wearing lacy underwear. She wore a short skirt and a casual top, looking no different than, say, someone working the tables at an Eastern Shore crab shack or a sports bar in Bethesda. She handed me a menu and left me alone to review its many choices. 

I opted for the most dangerous entree: the New York strip steak dinner special, available on Wednesdays. The six-ounce strip (ugh!) comes (double ugh!) with your choice of potato, and a vegetable side. All this for the low, low price of $5.99.

I felt like I was in Las Vegas, back before all the celebrity chefs arrived and the only gustatory attractions were the all-you-can-eat buffets for $5.99 a head. The lines for those buffets could be longer than the queue to ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland. 

My memories of those buffets are not too kind — slices of roast beef that had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, a broad and lifeless array of vegetables, and a chocolate cream pie for dessert. The shit was designed, I figured, to get you back to the gaming tables pronto.

I wasn't sure what the $5.99 New York strip steak dinner was designed to do, given the attraction of Crystal City, one presumes, has nothing to do with what's on the plate. But nonetheless, the management has one stipulation for its ultra-cheapo steak special:

Dine-in only.

But I have an overly developed sense of shame. I can't look at naked women and drink. So I tell the waitress that I want water.

"Sure, one bottled water," she says and immediately walks away before I can correct her. Still, sparkling, or tap are apparently not options offered at Camelot. It's bottled or nothing.

The bikini waitress drops off the smallest bottle of Evian I've ever seen, along with a tiny wine glass filled with ice and two straws. I can't tell exactly from the scribbles on my final bill how much I paid for the water, but it appears to be somewhere in the $6 to $7 neighborhood.

It's going to be a long lunch.

I've ordered the jerk chicken "chef's special" with the idea that, if I'm really going to judge a dish coming out of the Camelot kitchen, it might as well be something that the head cook at least claims to have developed himself. As a lark, I ordered a side of onion rings, fairly certain that they would be Sysco's finest.

My lunch took forever to reach me. I had sit through one stripper after another after another while the kitchen pretended they were busier than Ray's Hell Burgers on a Saturday night. This tactic, of course, has its desired effect: You feel compelled to do something while you sit there watching naked women climbing brass poles for your enjoyment. You either give them a buck here and there or wait for the dude sporting the oversized Polo shirt and nasty grimace to shake that fucking cash out of you himself.

I almost breathe a sigh of relief when the bikini girl brings my lunch. She tries to place the plates on the table without her boobs falling out of her skimpy green bra. Her technique has all the grace of a construction worker with a jackhammer.

The chicken is surrounded with sides: mashed potatoes (one step up from the boxed variety), wilted greens (bitter, a little spicy, and passable), and a large chunk of a hard, pasty baguette. The thick breast meat (of course!) is surprisingly juicy. I was expecting a hard, dry brick of overcooked chicken, but this breast is moist, even at its thickest sections. It also packs spice and heat, more than I thought the kitchen would serve the typically middle-aged clientele that waddles into the Camelot. The meat wasn't grilled, like genuine jerk chicken should be, but baked instead. No matter, I was pleased to savor something without feeling guilty.

Oh, and those rings? Totally from Sysco, or some other food-service giant.

Well, I was wrong. The hardest part came when the dancer bounded off the stage and launched into that standard social protocol of all strip clubs: hitting up the patrons for cash while pretending to give a shit about them. The stripper approached my table. I had already placed my order.

"Hi, how are you?" she asked.

The interior of the club was dark, illuminated only by the sickly yellow glow of these backlit transparent panels, designed faintly in the style of a family coat of arms. Despite the poor light, I could tell this dancer was very tan. She was also young, although she was trying hard to act more mature than someone who shows her crotch for a living.

"You having a little lunch?" she inquired.

"Yes, just stopped by for a bite," I lied.

"What are you having?" she wanted to know.

I started to fidget, wondering if the meter was running in this young woman's mind and what the charge would be for me.

"I got the jerk chicken." This was true. After carefully and deliberately scanning the menu (while a completely naked woman danced on stage, mind you, and other women wearing sexy underwear paraded around the narrow room), I decided that the only true test of the kitchen would be to order one of their specials, not a burger or a sandwich. Hence, the jerk chicken.

The dancer looked at me blankly for a second, then said, "Oh, that must be a special."

"It is a special," I reassured her.

"The chef is good here," she countered. "You wouldn't think so at a place like this, but the chef is really good."

"What do you usually get?" I asked.

"I usually get the burger," she responded.

I looked at her in her bikini underwear, guessing that she couldn't be 100 pounds, tops.

"But you're so skinny," I protested. "You must not eat that many burgers."

"I have a very high metabolism," she said. She went on to describe how much she sweats and how people worried that she couldn't put on any weight, which then lead to various medical tests.

"They tested me for tapeworms,  too" she noted. 

The next image that flashed in my mind was enough to ruin my appetite — and any sort of side dish of arousal that might come from eating lunch around women without a stitch of clothes on.