(Once in a while, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Where'd you go? Po Dog.

What'd you eat? I had a Seattle dog ($5.75) and french fries ($3.50).

How was the food? It was good. Like you'd better expect from a $6 hot dog, the quality was top-notch. It was a beefy hot dog slathered in cream cheese and scallions on a grilled bun (the grilled bun was an extra-nice touch), and it was just about a perfect (if pricey) hot dog experience. The fries were kind of generic, though. Salty and hot and just the right kind of greasy, but not as great as the dog. Next time, I'll try the house-made chips (also $3.50). Jason Simpson on Twitter informs me that the peanut-butter dog is really good, too. But some sort of a lunch special would be much appreciated. While the dog and fries were more than filling, 10 bucks is a bit much.

What does your date say about itself? "How do you fall in love when you're afraid of the whole world? Yellow & Green is a story of love, sex, intimacy, food, family, friendship, betrayal, redemption and agoraphobia." The author is local and she was very nice on Twitter, so I thought I'd give the book a whirl.

Is there a representative quote? "My apartment is an older one bedroom, first door up a flight of stairs behind a front door that was supposed to be locked, but almost never was. The buzzer worked about as well as my social life, so lazy people on the second and third floors would use duct tape on the latch to keep it from locking."

Will you two end up in bed together? Well, I'm probably going to finish the book because agoraphobia is really interesting to me. And the first few pages are packed with interesting details of life with agoraphobia—Chen waits for five hours at a bus stop until a bus comes that's so underpopulated that she is guaranteed not to sit next to anybody, and she scours the internet for restaurants that are going out of business so that she can eat away from crowds of people. But I don't understand why Chen chose the co-writer she did. The writing here is atrocious. "Urinarily" is used as an adverb, for one, and ill-conceived sentences clunk into each other. I got about 20 pages into the book in spite of the writing. Combine that with a serious lack of editorial control—why is the entire book double-spaced? How did errors like "Belletown" get through any kind of a copy-editing process?—and you have a real mess.