Inside, the maître'd greeted me looking bilious and I declined to shake his hand. I explained that I was meeting Rosemary d'Artichaud for a meal and he grimaced.
"Your acquaintance is already here," he said. "Shall I take you to her table?"
I nodded, a little puzzled by his question which seemed to leave open the option of fleeing the restaurant and standing her up. He grimaced again, picked up a paper menu, and escorted me over.
The restaurant was half-full, and the people sat at the other tables were all thin, pale and looked faintly miserable. No-one was laughing, and the conversations were quiet, people leaning in to talk to one another. Several of them looked very intense, and one man stared at me in a very hostile fashion as we walked past his table. The maître'd left me at my table with visible haste, and I was regarded by a thin, pale woman with shoulder-length dark hair, dark circles under her eyes and black lipstick. I smiled. She didn't.
"I'm very pleased to meet you," I said, offering my hand. She ignored it, her mouth pursing into a thin line.
"Meet," she said in clipped tones. "A very typical masculine way to describe things, with the clear emphasis on an alternative spelling with heavy socio-sexual overtones."
"Right," I said. "You invited me to this dinner and suggested I might like to review this restaurant. Did I misunderstand?"
"Aggressive," she said. "Again, an attempt to establish alpha-male status upon arrival. Frankly, I'm surprised you haven't got your cock out and starting pissing on the furniture."
"Before dinner?" I said, making one last attempt at levity. The look on her face was enough, and I turned round to leave.
"Sit!" she said. "And keep your put-upon attitude to yourself. I'd like to show you that it's possible to write a review without resorting to your typical chauvinist clichés and hyper-macho posturing. You can write reviews like the ones I put up on my blog."
And this was, in essence, why I was here. My editor had received an email from Rosemary d'Artichaud excoriating us for an unnecessarily aggressive style of restaurant reporting that seem more interested in describing my inability to have normal human relations and less about the food or making recommendations, or even telling people about places they might like to eat.
'Your last review left me almost unwilling to eat!' she'd bleated, completely missing, in my opinion, the point that the restaurant had left me unwilling to eat as well.
"You should meet this woman," said my editor, and I realised that I should write down Rosemary's response to my using the word meet so I could repeat it back to my editor. "See what she's got to say, see if we can perhaps use her. She could write complementary reviews to yours, we could offer a professional vs punter style thingy."
I objected until she assured me that my word count would remain the same, and then conceded only mildly ungraciously.
I sat down, a little warily. All the cutlery appeared to still be on the table, and her handbag was very slightly out of reach. It appeared to have been made from macrame and was rather tatty.
"Please, order what you like from the menu," she said. She had no menu in front of her, so I offered to share mine. She turned me down with a simple look of disgust. "I eat here regularly," she said. "They know what I like."
They also, it seemed, knew what I didn't like. A quick scan of the menu failed to turn up anything with meat in it, and a more careful perusal showed me that the menu was almost completely vegan, with only two items including dairy. This, I thought, explained the lack of happiness in the room.
"Perhaps I'll let you order for me," I said, forcing a smile. "You could tell me what's particularly good."
"Let me order for you? Let me? How very generous and condescending, your Lordship! My, I feel so privileged, and overcome with awe for your beneficence! I wonder if I could ever be as wonderful and male as you!"
"Sex change operations are remarkably cheap these days," I said, knowing full well that this would probably get me ranted at for five minutes, but unable to resist. The rant lasted fifteen minutes, during which time she waved an anaemic waiter away thrice. Finally she finished and let the waiter approach.
She ordered several dishes, mostly legumes and nuts, but with one dish of stuffed peppers that sounded like it might be filling. When the waiter looked at me I nodded and requested the same.
"So," she said. "I'll be writing for your paper, in competition with your column then. I think this should be really quite easy. I get over three-thousand unique visits to my blog each day. Including weekends."
"It's not quite that simple," I said. "There are a number of things my editor, who's a woman by the way, would like you to change first."
Rosemary opened her mouth, but then paused as the fact my editor was a woman sank in.
"Firstly, she feels that your current style is a little militant and would need to be softened slightly to appeal to a wider audience."
"No," said Rosemary firmly. "My style is part of my appeal."
"Mmhmm," I said. "Yet the paper has a target demographic, and in the blog-post where you suggested that the children of meat-eaters should be part of the food-chain themselves, we found that our demographic do not think of themselves as either cannibals or willing to see children hurt. In a later post, where you suggested that veal-producers should be tortured to death, you not only mixed up methods of veal-production with methods of foie-gras production, but you went into quite graphic detail of what suffering you wanted to see. Our demographic felt that approving of this would make them feel like Hitler, which was a negative sentiment."
"These people should be made to understand how they rape the environment!" she screamed. Our waiter, delivering plates of clearly undercooked lentils, ignored her, apparently used to these outbursts.
"And your blog is undoubtedly the right outlet for that," I said. "My editor, who is a woman, would like you to be less incendiary and more aware of the economic needs of publication."
"Eat your lentils," she said, spooning a number into her mouth and crunching energetically. "These at least have been honestly obtained and cooked without harming anyone."
I managed a spoonful, and then put my spoon down.
"Seasoned with the very earth they sprang from," I said. "And pulled too soon. Would you compare them to aborted foetuses, do you think? Because that's probably inappropriate for the paper."
"These are delicious!" she snarled, spitting lentils at me and across the room. "They're al dente"
"They're badly undercooked and should have been washed first," I said. "You will need to know these kinds of things to be able to write reviews for the paper. Opinion may be ninety percent of our columns, but the remaining ten percent does require actual knowledge."
She threw the plate of lentils at me at that point, and I only just dodged it. I stood up.
"I'm leaving," I said. "I'll tell my editor about this meal and leave the decision up to her. But if I were you, I'd learn something about food."
As I left, the maître'd shook my hand and whispered something I didn't quite catch, but sounded like "Thank-you. She's such a bitch."
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