belugaville:(Images: 1. Our food on the table. 2. Anna smiling and sitting in a booth. 3. Amanda and
belugaville:(Images: 1. Our food on the table. 2. Anna smiling and sitting in a booth. 3. Amanda and Anna. 4. An empty booth that is in a corner and has paintings above it.)After a year of loving on Boogaloos, we have decided to declare it the official restaurant of Belugaville. It’s on Valencia Street near the City College Mission Campus, and after trolling away at our Accessible Theater Arts class, we usually are worn out and have to head to Boogaloos to replenish our beluga energy.Boogaloos has a huge menu that I am pretty unfamiliar with because we always get a 2-egg scramble with guacamole, sour cream, spinach, and mushrooms; potatoes; and toast (OR COFFEE CAKE). This is always too much food for two belugas to eat, which is pretty impressive. Other things on the menu include French toast, Carribean food including plantains!!!, quesadillas, AND cocktails–all causing me to wish I was a cow with four stomachs, instead of a marine mammal with only one.I’ve heard there are other restaurants in the world, but Boogaloos is simply the best when it comes to belugas and other wildlife with disabilities. I recently noticed that they display and sell paintings by artists at the Arc Senior Center, which is really cool. But the fastest way to my heart is SEATING and Boogaloos delivers in spades.We both love booths and at Boogaloos I feel very comfortable transferring Anna into a booth and finding a place to stash her wheelchair. As you may have guessed from my Life as a Crab post, this is not always a given. If a restaurant is crowded with tables, transferring feels really stressful and impossible to do without being in everyone’s way. Also, at some restaurants it feels like they have already decided where Anna should sit and it’s hard to explain to them why their idea doesn’t work. Even if Anna is staying in her wheelchair, we have to sit in a particular configuration so I can feed her. When eating with friends who also use a wheelchair and/or need their PA to sit in a certain place, it becomes ever more challenging to create the Beluga & Beluga Friends Setup that we require for an enjoyable meal. (Especially if Anna and I are determined to sit in a booth.)But at Boogaloos, everyone is happy to let us sit however we want and there is lots of room. It’s true that we go at two o'clock, which isn’t the busiest time, but I still think they are strikingly helpful and non-bossy. (There’s only one boss in Belugaville, and I think we all know who that is.)Also, today we were sitting there and it occurred to me that they have every kind of seating. There are regular booths, tables with chairs, and half booths of all shapes and sizes. I imagine that many combinations of friends, with different mobility aids and seating preferences, could find a comfortable place to sit.(I do want to say that we haven’t gone to Boogaloos with a group of wheelchair users, so I don’t want to promise that it would be perfectly accessible when I don’t know for sure. Also, the door is closed sometimes and it doesn’t have a button, although I’d like to think they would be good at noticing when someone needs help getting in.)Even more fine qualities of Boogaloos include good music, played at a volume that some people might think is too loud but in my opinion is just loud enough for belugas to dance and sing while enjoying their scrambled eggs and gazing at their long-term boyfriend, the ceiling fan. -- source link