Conventional eating, part IV: "lunch on your own."

In the highly likely event that the people who purchased this week in wonderland for you are seeking to save a pile of money by evicting you from the hotel for all the major meals other than "continental breakfast," you will need to find food that does not suck in the tourist wastelands surrounding your particular tower of PowerPoint. To do this, you need to find the people in the hotel who eat food that does not suck and ask them to tell you where that food is.

Steps to Lunch:

Ignore the concierge.

Remember the kindly old bellhop in the elevator who asked you were you coming for the convention and you squealed and threw money at him/her? Throw more money and ask where's good and cheap and nearby to eat.

If you can't get past "Checkers" and "Olive Garden" with the bellhop, try the chambermaid, the bartender, the guy schlepping towels and beverages poolside. Keep trying 'til you get something good. Mostly it's a matter of waiting out the wall-of-schlock concierge talk they've all been trained to deliver because the distant dwellers on Park Avenue who own this place believe you are the lumpen and Olive Garden breadsticks is what the lumpen eat. Try telling the people in the hotel where you eat when you're at home, which, if you have any sense, is where the Mexican migrant workers in your area eat because that stuff is currently the best cheap food available in the U.S.A., unless there's something even better and cheaper I don't know about in which case please bust off and comment because I need to know immediately.

Basically? Where are the recent immigrants eating? That is what you need to know, and since the hotel is staffed by recent immigrants, that is what you are uniquely positioned to discover. Your luxury hotel looks like simulacraland, but in fact underneath its plasticky skin it is a real place with real people in it. It is little Haiti or little Havana or Chinatown under a veneer of American corporate spackle. Bust through and partake.