So I was happy when our Roman Orgy appetizer plate appeared, and I had an excuse to think about something else. But, good God, what a miserable trade-off in imagery it was. One fried shrimp. One stuffed jalapeño. One chicken tender cut into three bites that you'd feed to a toddler. An unidentifiable lump of meat in one corner. And "seasonal fruit" scattered across leaves of lettuce that was actually mealy watermelon and nearly colorless honeydew. Watermelon is not in season. Neither is honeydew.

"This tastes like sawdust," Glenn said of the watermelon before spitting it out.

"I can't even tell what this is," I responded, poking at the mysterious meat lump. He picked up a strip of it.

"I think it's a battered jalapeño," he said, squinting at it. It's so dark inside the dining room at the Men's Club that it's impossible to read the wine list, let alone see your food, without pulling out your cell phone. The scantily clad but always sweetly helpful waitresses usually oblige with their own.

The meat turned out to be beef fajita strips, cold and nearly congealed. Glenn and I split the shrimp in half, and I ate the stuffed jalapeño. They were the only edible items on the plate. "This doesn't feel like an orgy," he cracked. "Certainly not a Roman one." And it certainly wasn't worth $17.

In an age when you can see more at home with an Internet connection thanks to City of Houston laws mandating how much of a stripper's areolae need to be covered, are strip clubs and their mostly overpriced offerings becoming obsolete?

That seemed to be the case on a quiet Tuesday night at The Men's Club, where beautiful girls halfheartedly "danced" more or less fully clothed on a runway for a few bored-looking men who were more interested in tie-loosening and Jack-sipping than anything else. They sat in cushioned wingback chairs amidst dim lighting and Toulouse-Lautrec prints on the walls, a cigar case squatting near the entrance and men in suits walking the floor to check on their customers. Sex seemed to be the last thing that was selling here. Is this the modern version of a gentleman's club?

If so, shouldn't it have better food?

I was shocked to find out that the Men's Club employs an actual chef, Dwight Stewart, who — by at least one account — is a pretty regular guy. Chef Jason Kerr, an occasional contributor at the Houston Press, interviewed Stewart last week independent of my review. It was a fairly standard interview, as our online Chef Chat series go. Stewart told Kerr he doesn't date the dancers, he actually works the line and he stays pretty low-key, rarely leaving the kitchen.

This, combined with a cursory glance at what looked like a pretty decent menu online, led me to the Men's Club in the first place. Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly impressed with Stewart's work.

On that initial Tuesday night, I was perhaps already in an uncharitable mood after paying $8.50 for a Jack and Coke that was mostly Coke, then another $8.50 for a shot of Jack that I bet went like this: Take a shot glass, put an ice cube in it, pour a little Jack Daniel's on the top, let it all melt, serve. Across the table, Glenn merely chuckled at me, a cold bottle of Budweiser in his hand. "You're doing it wrong, Shilcutt. They can't water down beer."

There are apparently many rules like this that I'm unfamiliar with, that Tuesday being my first visit ever to any strip club, anywhere, despite a nearly irrefutable rule that any Baylor grad had to catch a show at Sonny's BYOB by its legendary (and most likely fictitious) one-legged stripper. I almost wore it as a point of pride that I'd made it 30 years without setting foot in a strip club. But the hotel lobby-vibe at the Men's Club was only vaguely tinged with sleaze, certainly no more so than any regular club of the non-breast-baring variety.

By the time our entrées arrived, we had become uninterested in the girls onstage. There is no pole at the Men's Club, no mirrors, just a runway that leads halfway into the dining room on which the nearly identical-looking girls gyrate endlessly. At one point, I'd caustically remarked that one of them had "mom hair," to which Glenn replied, "Those are actual people up there, Katharine." He was being sarcastic, but it shamed me into silence for the rest of the meal. We talked about other things instead, or rather yelled into each other's face over the ear-numbing sounds of Flyleaf and Lit and other bands I'd thought faded into obscurity with the 1990s.