When I was fourteen, I desperately wanted to attend my future high-school’s homecoming celebration. Obviously, in retrospect, that seems pretty puerile, but the promise of fully-developed high school girls grinding to Juvenile’s Back Dat Azz Up understandably prevented me from seeing any of the plan’s potential downsides. Making a long story short, I finagled my desired invite by volunteering to escort my brother’s girlfriend’s terrible-looking bff. To be fair, that insult is overly harsh, as puberty had transformed me into the pinnacle of awkwardness, she was likely in my league.

I had little to do with the planning of the night’s endeavors and didn’t learn that we were eating at the Melting Pot until the limo pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot. Countless “we have to cook our own food?!” jokes later, we finished an entirely mediocre meal. When we climbed back into the limo that I realized, at some point during the meal, a transformation had occurred to the females in our group. A car that had once been filled with frigid, circumspect bitches now featured ample booty-dancing and a downright indecent amount of necking. Still, I wrote it off to idiot, teenage females getting amped up for the dance. It wasn’t until my date felt the outline of my dick through my Dillard’s-brand slacks that I realized something that would serve me well for years to come, fondue has a causal relationship with getting laid.

In the decade since, I’ve probably given the Melting Pot (or the lesser Simply Fondue) more than $5,000. A few months back, after the Melting Pot refused to take back an obviously baked wine, I decided that it might be easier to capitalize on the “Fondue Effect” if I was able to serve it at home. I went to Amazon and ordered this:

In an impressive act of due diligence, I tested the fondue pot before using it on a date. I went to the grocery store and purchased more than $100 worth of Sterno fuel, gourmet shredded cheddar, filet mignon, easy to melt chocolate, and every ancillary ingredient suggested by the recipe book that came with the pot. Once home, with the ingredients spread before me and the Sterno raging under the pot, I poured four ounces of Shiner Blonde into the fondue pot. With five minutes, the beer was beginning to bubble, so I dumped in an ass-ton (scientific measurement) of cheese, which quickly melted. Cheese melted, I tore into the a loaf of French bread and began consuming. The flavors were notably better than the cheddar at the Melting Pot. Once the last of the melted cheese (and half-a-loaf of bread) was gone, there remained a film of cooked-on cheese in the pot. The realization that I was going to have to clean the pot between each serving hit me particularly hard. Nevertheless, I went to the sink and did my best to remove the cheddar remnants.

Impressed with my own dedication, I filled my almost clean pot with the meat-cooking-wine-mixture prescribed for by the recipe book. I put the pot back on the fondue set and waited for the mixture to boil…and waited…and waited. It took 15 minutes to get my first bubble, 18 minutes to get what I can comfortably call a “boil.” Once in the boiling mixture, the meat cooked fine and tasted on par with the Melting Pot. Still, it had taken over 40 minutes to go from my last bite of cheese to my first bite of steak. I finished the course, extinguished the flame, and left the mess to watch a TiVo’d episode of House. Two days later, the maid found the set in the same state I left it, with a note that read: “Trash.” I’m confident she took it home and the set became her formal queso bowl.

Disappointed, but still looking for a legitimate in-home fondue option, I returned to Amazon and ordered this:

An electric fondue pot, I figured, would save a shit-ton (slightly larger than an ass-ton) of effort. And it does. I invited a date under the honest pretense of testing my new fondue set and we were able to do the full three course meal in under an hour. The extra hands certainly helped, especially when pot cleaning, but a ton of the time was saved in the melting/boiling department – it took less than two minutes to bring the meat cooking wine mixture to a boil.

I’ve since discovered that the “Fondue Effect” is derived primarily from the melted chocolate course and, accordingly, now use the fondue set only for dessert. This allows me to eat a delicious, non-boiled dinner at a reputable restaurant and mitigates the initial hostility when I ask my date to come up to my loft. Toss in some candlelight and wine and you have a 70% chance of getting laid (my actual success rate).