Stuffed rice

 “Stuffed rice,” said the waiter, setting the plate in front of me.

“Pardon?” I said, staring at him, and then the plate, in disbelief.

It had started three days earlier when my editor, bless her rancid, fatty little soul, left.  She claimed she’d been headhunted by a news network looking to replace a recently-departed prime-time host, and while she was certainly fascist enough in her views for that to be possible, none of us actually believed it.  Still, we dutifully passed a card round (I took the liberty of writing fake messages from three made-up names to confuse her if she bothered to read it) and had a small collection for a leaving gift.  When that added up to mostly pocket lint, we wrapped up a stapler from the stationery cupboard and reluctantly agreed to spend an evening drinking with her instead.  Knowing full well that no-one would be able to agree on a location because no-one wanted her knowing where they liked to hang out, I proposed a bar/restaurant that had recently opened and that I would have to review anyway.  This wasn’t negatively received, so we ended up, nine of us sitting at a table for six, in Malhereusement.  The atmosphere was French, the menu appeared Swedish and the cooking seemed to be East European, all of which intrigued me enough to make a reservation to review it a few days later.  The drinks came fast enough that we managed to largely overlook the enforced company we were keeping, and most of managed a fairly civil send-off for her.

Someone, not me, did key her car afterwards, but that’s small potatoes; senior management have had much more expensive send-offs, and I’m not talking about the bill presented to accounts the next morning.

So, with the hang-over mostly subsided and an empty editor’s office awaiting a new incumbent, I made my way back to Malhereusement and attempted to peruse the menu.  My first problem was that the menu was indeed written in Swedish which I’ve never learned to speak.  The Blonde claims to speak some Norwegian but given the outrage caused in Barcelona when she attempted to speak Spanish I’ve never dared accompany her near a Scandinavian destination.  I waved a waiter, who waved back but didn’t move.  I waved a little more impatiently and he waved a little harder and eventually, after I yelled “Come here!” at him, I got some more service.

“I can’t read this,” I said, holding the menu out.

“Would you like me to read it to you?” he asked, sounding both polite and impertinent at the same time.  

“In English?” I said.  My editor, bless her holey, fungus-infested cotton socks, had a sense of humour like that of a pregnant cat trapped in a wheelie-bin and I’d had too many conversations like this with her.

“The menu is in, ah… Swedish,” said the waiter.  I forced a smile; the kind where your lips press so hard over your teeth that you can feel the skin stretching to ripping point.

“Then that would not be helpful,” I said.

“We have a Braille menu,” he said, turning as if to go and get it.

“I’m not blind,” I said tartly.  “I want a menu written in a language I speak.  English, for preference, but I can manage German, Swahili and Ancient Mesopotamian at a pinch.”  In fairness I haven’t touched Mesopotamian since university but I doubted that they’d have written the menu in a language that obscure.

I was wrong.  The waiter, dare I say gleefully, presented me with the menu written in Ancient Mesopotamian.  I blew the dust off it, and opened it and marvelled at the words before me.

I pointed at several items after it became clear that the waiter neither spoke nor wrote the language he’d handed me a menu in, and he wrote down their positions on the page — I watched him.  At no point was there a hint of an apology, or a suggestion that he might have carried this joke a little too far.  He took the menu away and a few minutes later presented me with a platter of flatbreads and some dips and I was pleasantly surprised to find them both edible and enjoyable.

And then he came with the starter, set it down in front of me, and said, “Stuffed rice.”

“Pardon?” I said, staring first at him and then at the plate.

It was true.  Someone, and I hope they were exceedingly well paid, had apparently hollowed out each individual grain of rice and then painstakingly stuffed them with a farce of onion, pepper and tomato.  I guessed that they’d been cooked in a mixture of wine and stock, and the rice was perfectly tender and slightly fluffy.  It was a complete inversion of the normal stuffed vegetable dish, very well executed, and left me wondering what kind of world I was sitting in.

“Someone keyed my car!” said a nasal voice, and my ex-editor sat down, uninvited at the table with me.  “Oh, are those stuffed maggots?”å

Christmas on a budget

 My editor had announced that we had a budget for Christmas as she flounced into the office wearing a green dress with ruffles that -- I hope -- was supposed to make her look like a Christmas tree.  The brown leggings certainly contributed to the effect by making her seem like she had a knobbly, bulbous trunk, but overall it all seemed a bit try-hard and while I found it more to be pitied than laughed-at, there were certainly smirks around the office after she left.

"You mean for the Christmas party?" I said.  Being the food-and-drink correspondent I was probably the only person who was actively hating the Christmas party.  Not only was I obliged to attend, but I would be working as the paper required me to review the party and would publish the article.  I'd tried, one year, reviewing it accurately and had been bullied into coming into the office on Boxing Day to rewrite it until I "got it right" so I was resigned to my fate.

"No, for the whole of Christmas," she chirruped like a budgie that's got into its owner's meth supply.

"That dress better not be part of it!" came a sharp-toned comment from somewhere deep in the office.  I stared at my desk and pretended that I'd not seen who said it while my editor glared menacingly around the room.

"We can increase the budget if we let someone go," she said.  "Though that would be a shame, just before Christmas.  And this dress, for those of you taking such an interest, is for the charity auction this afternoon."

"We'll be sorry to see you go," I said sincerely.  She was still hunting for her earlier critic and missed my implication.

"In fact," she said, her scowl relaxing as she gave up on hunting insultors, "we are going to have a theme week" -- everyone groaned in unison -- "of Christmas on a Budget this year.  We're going to run a series of articles on regifting, handmaking gifts from things you might otherwise throw out, cutting down on gift lists without offending people, and Christmas dinner on a budget!"  She ended triumphantly and smiled at me.  I frowned back.

"You want me to write recipes?" I asked.  I'd tried once; the Blonde had agreed to take notes and by the time we'd finished trying to make scones we had three empty bottles of London-sourced gin and a recipe that began (and ended) "Take a bottle of gin."  We might have eaten a block of butter, too.

"No," she said.  "But there are several greasy-spoons that are offering a budget Christmas lunch that you should review.  I've emailed you the details."

I hesitated.  This was much more my remit than writing recipes, but I've pretty much reviewed exactly one not-high-end restaurant in my life, and it didn't go well.  Comparing it with L'Escargot and The Fat Duck was, in hind-sight, not a good choice, but even so my observation that the food I'd been served was normally what I'd expect the protein I usually received to have been fed on was both accurate and unflattering.

"Theme week," sang my editor, and flounced into her office.

I opened my email, ignoring the swell of conversation about how flammable my editor's dress looked, and viewed the list she'd sent me with interest.  Even though it seemed faintly wrong, the idea of turning a full English Breakfast into a substitute Christmas lunch had a certain je ne sais quoi about it and the first 'menu' that suggested that bubble-and-squeak was a perfect replacement for brussels sprouts fried in bacon fat wasn't that outlandish.  I wrote the address down and noted that it closed before I'd normally start getting dressed for dinner.  Maybe it woudl have to be lunch after all.

There was no way I could think of that I'd get the Blonde to accompany me on this though.

Lapin mariné

 It sometimes seems that certain streets are destined to house restaurants.  You can walk along one for five years, noting the shabby pub on the corner and the bizarre, tiny, neo-fascist shops that never seem to have any customers yet never go out of business and have names like Only Britain, Nicely British, or Home Rule.  I went in one of them once, mostly to see if any of the items in there weren’t made in China and was astonished to find that almost everything was expensively provenanced from the British Isles.  As I left, empty-handed and with my tail a little between my legs, a woman wearing a t-shirt bearing a print of Andy Warhol threw a cup of Pho at me and called a Mussolini-licking little bitch.  I was so surprised that I stood there, cabbage sliding down my face, while she ran off and I found myself wondering how long she’d had to wait for that opportunity.

But then a restaurant will open on that street and, suddenly, in what seems like a space of weeks there are six of them and four more announced and a sour-dough pizza place already being constructed.  Almost as though the street was always destined for this and it just took a while for it to realise it.  To come out as a restaurant street, as it might be.

My destination last Thursday night was for just such a street, though happily not the one where I was assaulted with a Vietnamese soup, and a restaurant called Le Lapin mariné which my schoolboy French suggested meant the pickled rabbit.  Whether this was a rabbit immersed in vinegar or a very drunk rabbit was more than I could remember, though neither suggested that a care for animal welfare would be written on the menu.  The Blonde declined to join me as Thursday is her yoga evening and she and two of her friends have a bet over how long it will be before the yoga teacher breaks down and cries, so I was on my own.

The restaurant looks warm and inviting from the outside, and inside you rapidly learn that looks can be deceiving.  I was seated in a draught and when I complained I was moved to a table closer to the kitchen where there were two draughts and the tablecloth was stained.  I considered complaining again but after looking around I realised that there were yet worse places to be seated and held my tongue.

The walls are painted one of those off-white shades of which there are too many to count or learn the names of, so let’s call it Magnoli-esque and be done with it.  Written in black marker are a collection of names: Nora, Robert, Genevieve, Sam (at least three times), Gillian and more.  I asked the waiter, as he was handing me the menu, the drinks menu and a list of daily specials about them and he fixed me with a steely glare.

“Are you complaining that you’re not up there?” he asked in the tones of someone who gets those kinds of complaints a lot.  “Because if you are—“

“Not at all,” I said.  “I was wondering what they’re there for.”

“They’re all the people the owner has slept with,” said the waiter.  He raised an eyebrow as though expecting me to start complaining.

“I hope he devotes as much effort to the food,” I said and turned to the menu.

The front page was a full-page, full colour picture of a preserved rabbit in a Kilner jar that made me wonder what I was in for.  Much to my relief the remainder of the menu, though brief, was much more standard fare.  There was a choice of three starters (‘Henry’, ‘Chloë’, and ‘Patricia’), a page with six main courses, also indicated solely by name, and finally a Desserts page with once again three names on it.  The drinks menu, at least, listed wines with their traditional names and descriptions so when the waiter returned I ordered a bottle of a recent Chablis, ignored his pointed glance at the empty place opposite me, and asked about the menu.

“Ah,” he said, his eyes raising to the ceiling as though to invoke some higher power.  “The Chef decided to take inspiration from the owner.”

“That’s nice,” I said, trying to be patient.  “But what does it mean?  And what is ‘Henry’, should I choose to order it?  The pickled rabbit?”

“Rat,” said the waiter.

“What?”

“So, the Chef thought that if the owner could put the names of all the people he’s slept with on the wall, the Chef could name all the dishes after the people he was trying to sleep with when he first had them,” said the waiter quickly, as though expecting to be interrupted.  “So ‘Henry’ is who he was trying to get with when he first had pickled rat, ‘Patricia’ was there when he tried pasta alla amatriciana, and so on.”

He stopped, looking like he was expecting an outburst and I waved a hand indicating he should continue.  That evidently confused him and he remained silent.

“Really?” I said eventually.  “What’s the point of the menu if I have to ask you what each dish is in turn?  How can I choose from a list of names?”

“Well,” said the waiter, “you might have slept with a Chloë too, and then you could pick her name and get the memory—“

“Of what the Chef was eating when he tried to sleep with her? Chloë’s a common enough name that I’d hope we weren’t both trying to sleep with the same one,” I said.  “And I’ve never tried to sleep with a Henry.  Or wanted to order pickled rat.”

“My name’s Henry,” said the waiter.  He smiled for the first time.

In the end I just drank the bottle of wine and tried not to listen to the waiter as he explained the circumstances behind the naming of each dish.  The wine was excellent, but everything else… left just a little to be desired.  Much like the lists of names that adorn the walls and menus of this odd little place.

Flattened

"There's been an accident," said the Blonde poking her head around the door.  I was contemplating dressing so I was in my Burberry dressing gown (a Christmas gift from our slightly bewildered next-door neighbour) and my argyll socks.  "And you might be wearing it."
"Ha very ha," I said, having heard that "Lol" had fallen out of fashion to the extent that only 2% of the population now used it.  I suspected that most of that 2% worked in our advertising department, based on a sample of emails that had inexplicably escaped my spam filter.  I also wondered how language mavens came up with such figures, for surely they couldn't be out on the streets with their notebooks and tablets, shoving dictaphones under people's noses and demanding that they explain how they express themselves.  Though I confess to thinking that it might be quite endearing to have a walrus-moustachioed duffer glaring at me through through his monocle and asking questions like "And do you normally decline that adjective when conversing with your chums?".  And then to realising that I was just bringing back slightly repressed memories of my Latin lessons and Mr. Throbdust.
"Yes, well," said the Blonde.  She had that look in her eye that suggested that if I didn't get a move on she'd be picking my clothes out for me, so I picked a shirt at random from the wardrobe. It was frilly down the front so I put it back and picked up the polo shirt next to it.  "A steamroller seems to have gotten away from its driver and rolled over a bicycle and someone's bag of cricket kit."
"Was anyone hurt?"
"I hope so," said the Blonde. She doesn't like London's feral cyclists.
I put on some dark trousers and considered the shoe rack.  I have exactly two pairs of shoes: work shoes and wedding shoes.  I put the work shoes on.
"Where are we going for tea then?" she asked.  "I might need to change."
"Der ebene Tafel," I said, trying to get the right harshness and clippedness into the sounds.  "The name's German apparently, but the food is modern European."
"...does that mean cabbage?"  The Blonde can put enough suspicion into a single question to make interrogation experts look like pussies.
"Only if you're lucky," I said with a half-smile.

*

Der ebene Tafel has a nice bar upstairs of the restaurant where we bought a moderately priced glass of prosecco and an outrageously priced glass of craft beer and sat on stools that looked like they'd been salvaged from a council-run leisure centre cafeteria and looked at other couples sitting around drinking and waiting to be seated.  The restaurant itself had looked moderately busy, which was impressive given that they'd been open three months already and I'd expected the buzz around them to have died down a little.  The walls were hung with art from Geraldinium Holmes's latest exhibition which I utterly failed to recognise but had the Blonde making little gasps of admiration and pointing things out to me.  Eventually I asked her why everyone in the pictures looked as though they were starving.

"Oh, that was the theme of the exhibition," said the Blonde.  "She called it Maigre, obviously, and the pictures are all inspired by hunger-strikers.  She allegedly starved one live model for thirteen days to get the right shadows on the ribs."

"She sounds delightful," I said, looking away from the pictures.

"She's wanted in eight countries for suspected human right abuses," said the Blonde.  "It's significantly increased her market worth."

Thankfully the waiter came and seated us downstairs in the restaurant before I could have more details pointed out in the pictures.

The restaurant décor was disappointing: the shag-pile carpet might have been intended to shock but it just looked like a hygiene nightmare; the tables were octagonal and looked like Claes Olaf rip-offs, and the the cutlery, though interesting shaped, seemed impratical (while the industrial aesthetic makes a change, a fork with only one tine is really just a very thin-bladed knife, and the knife with parallel blades seemed useless unless you were trying to snort coke off your plate).  The Blonde picked up the spoon, which possessed two convex sides and rapped it on the table.  It broke, and our waiter replaced it with ill grace.  Then he presented us with menus.

I ordered the multi-hued beetroot salad for starters and the Blonde opted for sauced clams.  When the plates arrived, I found myself frowning.

"I could put this in an envelope and post it to myself," I said.  The beetroots were sliced paper thin, as was everything else on the plate, including the leaves and herbs.  The whole thing was flatter than the soles of my shoes.  I looked at the Blonde's plate and it too was disturbingly flat.  I understood the point of the fork now; the only way to get the flesh out of the shells of the clams was to slide a very thin blade in there and scrape.  Each shell was barely 2mm thick and probably 15cm long.

"It's very... hard work," she said, with a sigh.

The mains were similar: my steak covered my entire plate twice over but was as thin as the beetroot slices.  I couldn't tell you how it was cooked, and I'm only sure it was because it was the wrong colour for tartare.  There was a sensation of beef, but barely that.  The Blonde ordered the spatchcocked chicken and that came out nearly eight times the size of mine.  It was neatly folded on the plate like an accordian and could probably have been worn by Lady Gaga to a Premier in Leicester Square.

"How flat are the desserts?" I asked the waiter as he passed by.

"Don't order the Napoleon," he said with a ghost of a smile.

"This has been interesting," said the Blonde.  "Perhaps we could go somewhere where there's actual food next?"

I nodded my agreement, realising that I'd managed to confuse my napkin with my beef, but that the napkin seemed to have had more texture to it.

Mate's rates

“Can you go and review that new place that’s opened up in the Slaughterhouse district?”  My editor’s words were slightly indistinct as she was eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut while she spoke, spitting little flakes of pink icing into the air like malodorous snow.

“No,” I said, sitting back slightly.  My suit was fresh from the dry cleaner’s, and I had no intention of having it decorated with other’s people’s partially digested food.

“Let me rephrase that,” she said, swallowing first thankfully.  She looked around her desk for her coffee mug, and swigged from it in a way that would have made Caligula proud.  “Go and review the new place in the Slaughterhouse District.”

“No,” I said again, resting a foot across my knee and leaning back in the chair, which creaked like an old park bench after heavy rain.

“Why not?”  The way she rolled her eyes told me that I was in for a hard time; clearly there was some ulterior motive for this order.

“Because it’s owned by Tim,” I said.  “And part-owned by Vincent actually.  And Vincent is the Blonde’s father, and Tim is the guy I got in to cater my last three birthday parties.  I can’t go and review their restaurant because I’ll have no credibility.  Obviously I’ll be writing whatever they’ve told to me, so a good review is just me blowing smoke up their pert, well-formed bottoms, and a bad review is reverse psychology to invite people to go and see the place to find out why I’d slate it like that.  Can’t do it.  Just can’t.  See?”

“Oh good Lord,” said my editor.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  Firstly, you’re a critic who writes more about his personal life than he does the food.  So we’ll all enjoy reading you dish the dirt on Tim Vincent and we’ll barely notice when you squeeze in the top three items from the menu and claim that they were divinely inspired and tasted like old cabbage dipped in a turnip broth.”

I frowned and put my foot back on the floor.  “You actually read my last review?” I asked.  “Because that sounds like a quote to me.”

“I read all your work,” she said.  “I sometimes wish I didn’t have to, but I do.  And I occasionally correct your wayward commas, but not too much as the readership like to complain about them.  You generate more letters for the weekly Grammar column than any other writer on the staff.  Technically you’re doing half of that job as well, but I’d as soon not remind of you of that because pay rise time is a year away.”

“Fine,” I said, my cheeks burning red.  “I’ll go and talk to Tim and Vincent and see if I can get a reservation.”

“Why’s it in the Slaughterhouse District anyway?” asked my editor, picking up the last pink doughnut.  I cringed.

“They wanted somewhere that would gentrify slowly,” I said.  “I suggested Grime Road as well, but they like the availability of cheap meat.  They can get it practically still mooing or oinking or clucking from the neighbouring businesses.  It might not be Wagyu beef, but it’s definitely the freshest you’re going to get in this town.”

“…isn’t Grime Road next to the municipal dump?”

“The tip, yes.  I thought you couldn’t get much more low-end than that, though it turned out that there were almost no rubbish-disposal costs when you can just get the porters to throw the waste straight over the chain-link fence.”

She sank her teeth into the doughnut like a shark fastening onto a swimmer’s leg in a B-movie.  A cheap B-movie, though the pink icing did look rather gory as it smeared across her lips and teeth.  “How slowly will the Slaughterhouse District gentrify then?” she asked, sounding genuinely interested.

“Very,” I replied.  “Slaughter’s a good business at the moment.  If market trends continue it’ll be at least thirty years before they start closing down and letting people move in.”

“That’s a very long term prospect then,” said my editor.

“Oh yes,” I said with a smile.

Laboutrou II

Laboutrou is a foot-fetish bar, though I confess I didn’t know this straight-away and had to look it up on the internet.  They serve food and inadequately-clad women with elegant feet and have a bar that looks well-stocked from the pictures, though the feet and ankles, often supported in stilettos, rather obscure the picture and made it hard for me to figure out what I thought the food might be like.  Plain, I suspected.  Simple stuff, probably cooked ok.  Nothing special, but then it would still be much better than the place from last night, and it would give me a review to turn in.  My editor might frown a little, but I could point out (gently, of course) that this just supported diversity and recognised that we draw our readership from all walks of life.  Which is largely bull; people will read it because they’re curious that we’ve got the gall to tell them that such a place exists, and the cojones to go there and find out what it’s like.  And as “Jim the Sales guy” knows, some of them will be curious, or desperate, enough to go there themselves “for the food” and then he’s got customers for life.  Or at least until they move on to something a little more hard-core.

I turned up wearing my suit and realised that I was little overdressed.  The bar had seats at the bar and at well spaced tables, and a catwalk of sorts ran through the whole room.  There were two girls out on the catwalk with long, elegant legs and limited clothing, and the tables closest to the catwalk were all already taken.  The only two that were empty had Reserved signs prominently displayed.  Most of the people in there were men, clad in denim jeans and flannel shirts or heavy-cotton t-shirts and paid no attention to anyone coming in.  There was a stag party, judging from the costumers (two cows, a sheep, an inflatable sheep with sunglasses, a fox, and a Santa Claus because there’s always one guy who doesn’t understand that there’s a theme or can’t be bothered to hire the right kind of costume), and there were a couple of women here and there.  That surprised me a little, and then I realised that I had no right to be surprised.  The bar advertised its food, with the foot as optional, so there was no reason for women to feel like this was a male-only space.

The maître’d took one look at me and ushered me over to my seat the bar without asking my name.  I raised an eyebrow and he nodded – I was seriously overdressed.  I slipped my tie off and into my pocket, but the room didn’t seem like anywhere I wanted to risk an expensive jacket ending up on the floor.

“What’ll it be, then, dude?” asked a bartender, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.  He looked me up and down.  “Brandy sends her regards, she’s ill tonight.  Got toe flu.”

I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t control the smirk.  The bartender caught it.

“Yeah,” he sighed.  “Everyone laughs dude, go ahead.  It’s a real thing though, when you’re parading your feet around like they do all night five nights a week.  Occupational hazard.  You can ask your doctor.”

I managed to get the smirk under control and turn it into what I hoped was a friendly grin.  “Right,” I said.  “It’s fine, sorry.  In my line of work you get all kinds of odd digestive ailments from time to time that people don’t believe are real either.”

“I don’t want to hear about that dude, that’s disgusting!  You eating or not?”

Toe flu fine for dinner conversation but Montezuma’s Revenge wasn’t?  Well actually, he might have a point there.  I picked up the menu and scanned it: bar food seemed about the right description.

“Chicken strippers, onion rings,…” I rattled off seven items and then turned to the drinks list.  To my surprise all the beers listed were local or described as craft.  After several moments of indecision I realised that I’d already ordered enough food for two, so I ordered three different beers as well.  The bartender looked a little stunned.

“All for you, right?  ‘Cos you can’t feed the girls.”

I blinked as the image of little signs dotted around the catwalk reading “Do not feed the models” swam before my vision, and then it was gone again.  “All for me,” I agreed.  “Part of the job.”

And here, dear reader, is the crux of the matter.  The food that arrived was so good that I was oblivious to the girls wandering around the room for the rest of the two hours that I was there.  There could have been two hobbits chasing Gollum for all I knew or cared, but that food was incredible.  The chicken strippers were little juicy goujons of delight coated in a delicate batter that was expertly seasoned and spiced and delivered on the promise that the Colonel made for a distinctly different piece of chicken.  The onion rings weren’t slimy, they were crisp on the outside and meltingly soft on the inside; there was a creaminess to them that I eventually got the chef to reveal was a soubise that the onions were dipped in before they were battered and fried.  The beers took a bit of working out, but eventually I figured which to pair with which foods and my mouth was rapturous about it.  The whole evening was so far removed from the one two days ago that it was hard to believe that I could find two such different establishments in the same city.

When I got home, the Blonde was sitting in the living room with the television off and her lips pur

Laboutrou I

The phone rang while I was staring at a blank piece of paper so I answered it immediately.  It had barely had a chance to start its electronic imitation of a ringing bell for the second time before I was barking “Hello?” into it, anxious to be drawn away from the writer’s block that was plaguing me.

In all fairness though, it wasn’t entirely my fault that the muse had abandoned me and was lounging around on some other writer’s couch, her cigarette dangling loosely from the corner of her slightly slack, over-lipsticked mouth, her dress falling indiscreetly off one shoulder and her mussed hair covering half her face in a way that would have made the head-chef at Borridges bite through his wooden spoon and declare a fifty-percent off special for the next hour.  The restaurant that I’d been sent to the previous evening was as dull as the soup they served and as tired as the meat in the main course.  I’d struggled to stay awake through dessert, and the food sat heavily both in my stomach and on my mind.  I had to write about this?  Pigs would have rejected it as swill, but even if I were brutally honest and said so, it would only increase business to that miserable hole from people curious to see if things could really be as bad as I’d described.  The only fitting review for it was utter silence, the damnation praise whispered in far corners where only the wind can hear it.  But handing in a blank piece of paper (again) would irritate my editor to the point where my pay-cheque might find itself similarly blank and depressingly unsigned.

“Oh,” said a voice at the other end.  It was tinny and echoey, it sounded like its owner was somewhere cavernous, possibly fornicated.  My thoughts were swept away in an instant to a grand dining room, four stories high where trapeze artists – all french, dressed in form-fitting leotards and possessing moustaches that would take people nostalgically back to the nineteen-twenties despite their having not been born till the nineteen eighties – swung back and forth above the diners as a prandial display of excess that would have delighted the noble heads of Europe.  “Oh, hi!  It’s me!”

I contemplated, for a moment, the idea that maître’d’s might be so accustomed now to my presence in their dining rooms that they expected to be recognised simply by voice and background noise, and reluctantly concluded that that probably wasn’t the case.

“Me who?  Is this about a reservation?” I asked.  Perhaps I had another dinner (on expenses) waiting for me that I could write about instead of the Limbo I’d endured yesterday.

“Oh you silly!  Reservations are for Indians!  It’s Brandy!”

I suppose it’s sexist and old-fashioned but it wasn’t the name that finally brought the face to my mind, but the repeated, breathless exclamations.  Well, that and the realisation that she was serious about the Indians.  It was the Blonde.  Only it wasn’t, it was the Blonde before the Blonde.  The ex-Blonde, though that makes it sound like she changed her hair-colour, or the pre-Blonde, but again we have the hair-colour-change problem but in the other order.  “The Blonde I was dating before the current Blonde” is better, though not perfect, and rather a mouthful.  Calling her the “other Blonde” could only land me in more trouble than I’m probably in for referring to girlfriends as “the Blonde” in the first place, and the apparent tacit admission that I date women based on their hair colour alone (I don’t).  However, the Blonder might well do, as the current Blonde at least knows better than to assume that Reservations mean Indians.

“Hi Blondie,” I said, my mind still trying to reconcile what I should be calling her.

“Brandy, silly!  Hi, look, you still eat food, right?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering where this conversation could possibly be going.  “I’m not dead yet.”

“Oh hee, hee, hee!  You’re still so funny!  Look!” (I resisted the urge to turn my head and look out of the window) “I’m working at Laboutrou now and Jim!  He’s the sales guy!  He’s funny too!  Jim found out that I know you!  Hee, hee, hee!  He asked if you would come and review us!  Isn’t that funny?!”

“Sure,” I said.  “What time’s dinner?”

Smokiness

The Blonde had gone on holiday with her two best friends which she’d apparently known from birth.  She will spend hours a day on the phone to them, usually after she’s just come back from lunch with them, or shopping with, or Yoga-lates with them, leading me to wonder if there’s anything that ever happens in any of their lives that the other two don’t immediately know about.  It’s as though they’re attempting to defy the Copenhagen interpretation all by themselves by ensuring that perfect information is transmitted to distinct locations simultaneously and instantaneously.  But anyway, it had been Thursday afternoon, and I had been browsing on Amazon to see if there was anything humorous I could buy with my work’s credit card and have shipped to my editor’s desk, when the Blonde hobbled in clutching her hip.  I looked up, and adopted an expression of concern.

“Are you alright, darling?  Was the shopping too much?” I asked.  I’ve learned how to add a rich timbre of sincerity to my voice through too many occasions of being accused of being sarcastic when saying such things.

“It was Yoga-lates, actually,” she said.  I know only that it’s some kind of combination of Yoga and Pilates and that it was endorsed, for a while, by that political party who wanted to save the world by Yogic flying.  “I collided with Jenna and we then both hit other things.  It hurts, I don’t mind telling you that.”

Jenna, as I understood it, was the teacher of the class, though the Blonde often had acidic things to say about her which made me wonder why she attended the class at all.  I harboured the suspicion that the Blonde only went because her best friends went, and one of them was determined to go because they had a crush on Jenna.  I wondered if this collision would have caused ripples in the waters of friendship.

“We’re going to Monaco tomorrow,” said the Blonde.  I shook my head.

“That’s rather short notice,” I said.  “I’ve agreed to do the obits column this weekend, I’m not sure I can just mail it in from Monaco.”

“Not you,” said the Blonde witheringly, and I obligingly withered.  “The girls and me, we’re going.  Strictly a girly weekend of massages, spa treatments and general relaxation so I can get something done about this hip.”

I nodded, and decided it was best to keep quiet.  I waved her off to her taxi the following morning, and then found an excuse to work from home that afternoon, so that I wouldn’t be around to blame when an elephant’s foot umbrella stand, autographed by the members of Fleetwood Mac, landed on my editor’s desk in the most flamboyant gift wrap I could request.

Saturday morning, left alone and looking at wonderfully blue skies and sunshine through the window, I decided to break out the barbecue and smoke something.  There was a bag of charcoal left over from last summer, and it looked as though I’d remembered to clean the barbecue out before storing it this time, so all that I need was something for the smokiness, and something to absorb it.  I did consider briefly trying to smoke the vodka but it seemed like it would better to drink it instead (later; at this time of the morning I’m strictly coffee and cigarettes until the bacon rolls have arrived).  There was a bag of snails in the fridge, but I thought that they’d just taste of smoke (I have yet to find anything snails naturally taste of other than rubber), so that left the Blonde’s birthday cake.

Her birthday was two weeks ago, but due to a mix up between bakers the cake had only arrived Wednesday of this week.  She’d looked at it, ooh-ed a little over the exquisite icing, and then reminded me she was on a strict diet until she was happy with the way she looked in her bathing costume.  The cake had been sitting in the fridge ever since, so I figured it would be acceptable to smoke it and see how vanilla cream cake worked with a smokey infusion.

Find something to generate the smoke was tougher; there were no bags of applewood-chips or hickory-chips left over, and when I checked the garden the trees all looked to be tougher than me.  There were nettles, but nettle-smoke didn’t sound that tasty.  Checking the kitchen I thought I was going to have to try smoking with seven-grain flour for a while, and then I found a box of single-estate tea that the Blonde’s mother had given up at Christmas as part of a hamper.  Perfect!

The barbecue was a cinch to set up for smoking, so the tea-leaves went into a little foil tray that sat directly on the coals, and the cake sat on the grill. I closed the lid, and waited.

About twenty minutes later I heard an odd sloughing sound and eyed the barbecue with suspicion.  When, a few minutes later still, smoke started leaking out from it I opened it up to check on the cake.

The icing had melted and slid off the cake onto the coals and over the tea-leaves, where it then caramelised and started burning, hence the black, acrid smoke that was now billowing out (the fresh air providing new oxygen to the coals).  I scooped the cake off the grill and slammed the lid back down.  I let the barbecue cool down and then take it to the tip and replace it: there’s no way I was trying to clean burnt caramel off the wretched thing.  The cake, sooty and smelling of tar, went back in the fridge.  The Blonde wasn’t back until Monday; I had time to find someone to recover it with icing, and since she wasn’t going to eat it anyway, she’d never know.

Pickled owl heads

My elder brother has had an obsession with all things bonsai since he was six and my father brought a dwarf-rabbit home for him to play with.  I, being a little younger and more impetuous, was obliged to observe the rabbit only from a distance, and could only pet it under adult supervision, while my brother was allowed to hold it and giggle with shock as it tried to nibble on his nose, and then his ears.  His screams as my parents tried to remove the rabbit from his ears brought the neighbours round, and though I have no memories of this myself, my mother assures me (bad-temperedly) that I told them all we were feeding my brother to the pets because he'd been naughty.
How this inspired him to become interested in bonsai is a matter between him and his three therapists, but certainly while he was sticking to plants we had some beautiful miniature shrubs and trees arranged around the house, and he would spend hours with his tiny tools, snipping roots and buds and training tiny green branches to grow in odds shapes or along strange support beams.  My mother considered trying to get them exhibited as art when he was older and better able to handle the exposure to the adult world, and my father tried not to use them as impromptu door-stops or things to throw at the neighbours' cats.
The bonsai squirrel was a failure, but in hindsight made perfect sense: it would have belonged perfectly in his collection of trees and added to their intrinsic appeal.  When my parents found the baby squirrel lodged firmly in the pickle jar and my brother grinding up acorns in order to be able to feed it through a straw, they took everything but the trees and the simplest tools away from him and told him to concentrate on his schoolwork.  My brother threw a tantrum, then the trees away and, as far as I know, is still sulking today, living somewhere in the Cotswalds.
So when the waiter put a plate of soil in front of me with a bonsai tree on a side plate and a little beaker filled with what he claimed were bonsai owl heads, I immediately asked him who the chef was and if he'd ever been to the Cotswalds.
"She's called Letitia Peach," said the waiter sounding oddly cross. "And she's from Italy, Naples in fact and has never toured the country."
"So how do I eat this then?" I asked, only mildly reassured.
"A knife and fork is what the civilised people use," he sneered.  "But if they prove too hard to master, you might try your fingers, or possibly just licking the plate."
"Could I get another glass of water then, please?" I said, picking up my water glass and dropping it on the floor, where it smashed with a happy sound.  "Oops!  Butterfingers!"
The soil tasted faintly chocolately, and I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not, but I was relieved that it was the Blonde's bridge-club evening and she wasn't there.  She would have had some choice words to say about being expected to eat a garden.  Literally.
The pickled owl heads were a revelation though, and I found myself ordering six jars to take away.  They had just the right amount of tangy crunch, and were deliciously juicy in a meaty way almost mushroom like in its intensity.  I'd been expecting the vinegar wrench of pickled onions, but I had to hunt for an acid undertone, and I rather liked it.
The second course was announced as mock-dolphin and it turned out I was expected to eat what looked like old plasticine.  The taste was marginally interesting, but the disgusting texture and unpleasant name for the dish overrode that good point, and I finally sent the dish back with the waiter.
Dessert was something immemorable with a strawberry inappropriately placed, and I barely noticed it.  When the bill came with my six bottles of pickled owl heads I was entirely ecstatic.
Go for the bonsai, but leave before the chef gets 'creative.'

Breakfast

The Blonde was in the bathroom doing something complicated with tongs, pins and the occasional screech, and I was surveying the kitchen with dismay.  There were two crates of champagne stacked in front of the oven, there was a Christmas pudding sitting in a puddle of some liquid on the side-counter, and there was a rather brown looking banana in the fruit-bowl.  The fridge fared little better: we had butter, mustard and some wilted spring onions, but otherwise even all the cheese was gone.  I checked the lower cupboards in case there was any pasta left, but all I found were two tins of kidney beans in chili sauce and a duster that turned out to be a dead mouse on further inspection.
"Darling?" I called, trying not to sound phoney.
"Busy!" she yelled back, followed by a sharp "Ouch!" and a stream of cursing.
I checked the bread-bin again, just in case the bread had come back from holiday while I was hunting through the cupboards, but it was still empty.
"What do you want for breakfast?" I called.
"I'm not eating breakfast," she yelled back.  "New Year's Resolution, remember?  No food that doesn't taste good dunked in Champagne."
Ah, well that explained the crates of champagne and empty cupboards then.
"I'm going to get myself some breakfast then!" I called.
Something thunked twice and then shattered, and I fled the cursing before I could be accused of being responsible.
I very nearly got the car out and went to McDonald's, but as I was checking my pockets for my keys I remembered that one of my New Year's Resolutions was to walk more and to add more than just evening restaurants to my column.  I left the keys where they were, walked the end of the street and caught a bus the seven stops to a café I passed a lot at lunchtime when it was always busy.  Perhaps they'd serve breakfast.
"Did you read about us in the London Sandwich Review?" asked the waitress.  Her teeth were crooked and yellow, as was her wig.  She reminded me of Nora Batty, although she was clearly a few days younger, so much so that I had to fight the urge to look down and check her stockings.
"No," I said, peeling the menu from my fingers.  It seemed fairly rudimentary: so long as I was happy with fried food, or possibly a boiled egg, I could get something to eat.
"Good," she said.  "Horrible publication.  Now love, what can I get you?"
"Darjeeling?" I said, wondering if this was optimistic.
"Bless you."
There was a moment of silence while I readjusted my mental perspective, and then I tried again.
"Er, tea, please, white, no sugar, ducks." I said.  She scribbled on her pad and smiled at me, making me feel slightly nauseous. "Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, beans, black pudding, fried slice, fried tomato and a waffle," please I said.  More scribbling, and that expectant smile again.  "That'll be all, thanks, ducks," I said.
"Not a problem, twattercock," she said pleasantly, disappearing back to the kitchen and making me wonder if I'd just been insulted.  I decided that perhaps 'ducks' had been going a bit too far.
I'd barely started looking out of the window at the council's eternal roadworks before a chipped white mug filled with orange liquid thumped down on the table in front of me.  I assumed it was my tea, though it was too hot to actually taste and blowing on it just seemed to create clouds of steam.  I looked out of the window again, sure that there were fewer workmen there all of a sudden, and then the waitress reappeared.
"Sorry, loveyduck," she said.  "I completely forgot to ask: how do you like your eggs?"
"What choices do I have?" I said, holding back a joke.
"Boiled, fried, poached, scrambled, Benedict, over-easy, on a raft and a Lavallette" she said.  "Or a combination."
I shrank from the idea of boiling a fried egg, but was intrigued by the last option, which I thought had ceased to offered a hundred years ago and basically poaches the eggs in double cream and then serves up the lot.  It's delicious.
"A Lavallette," I said.
"Lovely jubbley," she said, disappearing again and making me certain that she was taking the piss.
Five minutes later, and I had breakfast in front of me.  The cream from the eggs Lavallette was invading the beans and submerging the tomato, though the fried mushrooms and black pudding had created a serviceable levee behind which the bacon was hiding.  The fried slice was somewhere beneath the tomato, and the waffle was... well.  It came on its own, on a side plate, and appeared to have been boiled.  I eyed it suspiciously, not least because it appeared to be eyeing me back.
"I gave you a bit of sausage," said the waitress, from somewhere behind the counter.  "I thought you'd probably just forgotten to ask for it."
Indeed, there it was, underneath the aggressive waffle.
"Thank-you," I said weakly, wondering how I was to review this.

Thanksgiving

My editor had apparently bumped into the Blonde in one of those hideously overpriced department stores that seem devoted to offering the unpleasantly-rich bizarrely impractical things to spend their money on.  The Blonde said she had been looking for a goldfish-defibrillator and had literallly bumped into my editor as she was trying to pull an over-sized Taschen volume of pre-invasion Tibetan art from an inconveniently located book-pillar.  I had stared at her, not knowing where to begin in the wrongness of her sentence, and she'd seized my silence as an invitation to start to explain.
"I know we don't have a goldfish," she said, in a tone of voice that I know means that she's going to pause and then say "Yet" meaningfully.  Unprepared, I leapt into the breech.
"We're not having any pet that could be thought of as food," I said.  "I can't take you to restaurants and expense it if you won't eat any of the interesting things on the menu because they remind you of a pet."
"But a fish!"
"But a fish nothing!  There's a restaurant opening next week that is going to have ornamental carp swimming in ponds next to while you eat.  If they serve, as is being rumoured, Koi a la King then that's just a big goldfish in a chunky sauce right there, and you'll be calling me heartless and cruel for eating it.  If we get a dog you won't want to go to Chinatown any more because you'll start thinking about all those rumours that they serve stray dog on the menu and won't want to take the chance.  If we get a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, there goes my bacon sandwich of a morning."
"I don't want a pig running around the flat!" said the Blonde, looking annoyed.
"Thank God," I said very, very quietly, but equally fervently.
"Look, the goldfish defibrillator is a gag-gift for Annalieke's birthday–"
"How much did it cost?"
"...That's not important, she's my oldest girlfriend!"
"As in she's the oldest girlfriend you have, or she's just the longest-serving?"
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
I could hear the stormclouds gathering as her tone of voice changed and decided to retreat a little in the interest of entente cordiale.  "You met my editor then?"
"Oh yes!  Isn't she just adorable!  You never told me how cute and witty she is."
"How could I have missed that?" I said, letting the irony sit heavy on my words, confidant that the Blonde wouldn't spot it.
"Yes, how could you?  Anyway, we were talking about Thanksgiving and she thinks it would be a great little world-interest piece for the paper.  So we're going to this American restaurant.  Tonight."  She brandished a notepad at me, on which I recognised my editor's barely literate scrawl instantly.
"American?"  I groaned at the very idea.  "Don't eat today then, you'll need all the space you can manage for the outsize portions."
"What's wrong with a plate of food that fills you up?"
"Nothing, if it's the only course."


*
We went to the restaurant in silence, which I assumed was somehow my fault.  When we arrived a man dressed in a suit that appeared to have been cut from the American flag seated us at a table for six and called it a table for two.  The menu was blessedly short, just a single page with a second page brought a few minutes later for drinks.  Looking up and down it, I noticed that they had a "Thanksgiving dinner" listed with no further information, so I ordered that.  The Blonde ordered a child's garden salad and a bottle of spring water.
"Why aren't you eating?" I said, just a little crossly.
"I'll eat yours with you," she said.  "The waiter thinks we're on a date anyway, and you were just complaining about the portion size."
Her logic was impeccable, and I suspected that my editor had been coaching her there too.  However, our first course arrived before I could dig the truth out of her.  The Blonde dug in eagerly, while I stared in bemusement at the bloodied mess in front of me.
"What is it?" I said finally, picking up a fork and spearing some dripping red berries.
"Cranberry salsa and goat's cheese," said the Blonde, her teeth already stained red.  "It's delicious!"
"These are tinned cranberries," I said after the first mouthful.  "And this cheese is warm."
"This is turkey dinner," said the Blonde.  "It's supposed to be like this."
However, the second course stymied even her.  The turkey was served diced and recomposed in aspic into long fingers sitting on top of equally long fingers of polenta.  A thin layer of garlic-speckled mashed potato sat on top of the aspic, and a single spring of coriander poked out from the middle of it.
"This doesn't look right," said the Blonde, her lips pouting marvellously.
"You think?"
The food tasted a little better than it looked, but it was still mostly bland, canned, and over-tanned (in places, when we pulled the turkey out of the aspic).
For dessert, finally, sweet potato and pumpkin risotto was served inside hollowed-out pumpkins.  I was about to comment that this was actually worth eating when I noticed that the Blonde was discreetly throwing up inside her gourd.  I raised an eyebrow and she shrugged.
"I think it's the aspic," she said.  "That's not part of Thanksgiving."
I summoned the waiter and prepared to argue over the bill.

The taste of summer

The Blonde had been adamant that I take her to this restaurant.  She'd slapped the newspaper down on the breakfast table, upsetting the toast rack and scattering buttered toast over both her cat and the floor.  The butter side landed down on both cat and floor, rendering both pieces of toast immediately inedible in my opinion.
"Why haven't we been here yet?" she'd said, bending down and peeling toast from the cat while I peered at completely the wrong part of the page.
"The National Tyre Centre?" I said.  "Possibly because neither of us own any kind of wheeled transport?"
"No," she said heavily, implying that I was being deliberately stupid, "the other article."  She deposited toast a la cat hair in the toast rack while I read a two paragraph review of a restaurant due to open that evening called La Fenec.
"Because it's not open yet," I said after checking my watch.  No restaurant would be open at 11:30, they'd only just be getting the staff in to prep for service.  "And because I'd not heard of it until now.  I still haven't heard of the chef."
"What do you mean?  And when are we going, since we've not already been?"
"I mean that this article, if two paragraphs can really be called such, doesn't name the chef.  And if I can get reservations then yes, I suppose we can go.  Why–y–y–y...?"  I trailed off into startled silence as the Blonde produced a mobile phone that appeared to still be in working order and started dialling a number into it.  A few minutes later she was shouting at somebody apparently working for La Fenec who was shouting enthusiastically back.  I laid the sports section over the toast rack to conceal the uneaten, inedible toast, and waited for the noise to die down.
"Reservations at nine," said the Blonde, hanging up on what sounded like sobbing.  "In your name of course.  Bring your notebook."
"It's a work thing?"
"Unless you want to pay for it yourself."
I shrugged, a gesture I'd learned during three years studying in France and one of the very few things I'd succeeded in bringing back with me.  The customs officials had been extremely thorough and officious on my return.




*
La Fenec, whoever the chef was, was busy when we arrived, though our table was already cleaned and waiting us. Across the way, at a table for four, another newspaper restaurant critic was happily drunk and eating the flower arrangement on his table. Beyond him I could hear the braying laugh of a currently popular singer who was rumoured to be getting set to abandon singing in favour of acting serious drama; I already had a bet on with the bookies that they'd be back to singing before the end of the year, and a second bet that their second album would either not be released or be released and plummet out of sight in the first week. I was pretty sure I was on to a winner.
We were seated, and menus presented to us; they were large, each page A2 size and the print big enough for the partially sighted to manage even in the fashionable gloom.  There were three mundane starters, two pedestrian main courses and a short dessert list that made me wish I'd eaten before we came out.  The Blonde stared at the menu eagerly, and then desperately, her eyes racing across the page as though expecting it to propose to her.  Then she grabbed the waiter, who was trying to leave us to decide how to bore ourselves with dinner.
"Is there a special today?" she demanded, and a look crossed the waiter's face.  He was clearly about to say no, and then he saw that I'd seen his reaction.  He leaned in.
"Please keep it very quiet," he said, "but there is a special.  It is rather limited however, so there may not be much left...."
"We'll take two," said the Blonde without even consulting me.  The waiter nodded and disappeared, leaving the menus behind.
"What do we do with these?" said the Blonde, waving hers vigorously and knocking her bread plate to the floor, where it broke in half with a sad little tinkle.
"Read through them," I said, "in case the special is off."
As it happened, the special was on, and fifteen minutes (and two further butter plates) later we were presented with our start: the taste of summer.  The plate appeared to be covered in newly-mown grass, whose scent was wonderful but whose taste was far from delicious.  There was a hint of soft red fruit in the smell, and a small log-cabin had been cleverly constructed from fingerling potatoes, spun sugar and horseradish; when I removed the roof I found food furniture inside as well.  The Blonde breathed in deeply over the plate, and closed her eyes.
"It brings back memories of summer," she said.  I tried it too, leaning in and inhaling, and suddenly, almost as if there were such a thing as magic, I found myself immersed in my strongest memory of summer.
I was on the porch, trying to climb up into the rocking chair only I wasn't quite big enough.  There were patches of blue in the sky, but the clouds had been building all morning and were quite grey in places.  I could hear the wind rustling the branches of the trees, and the crows were flapping around like aerial tramps and cawing mournfully when the wind dropped a little.  I made another attempt to scramble up into the chair, and then I heard shouting from inside the house.  Then my father came running out of the door, pursued by Granny, his mother-in-law.  He threw his arms up – I remember he was covered in flour from the chest to the knees – and shouted something about making pies.  Granny shouted something back, and then there was a loud bang and all the crows were in the air, cawing loudly.  When I looked again, my father was on the floor, blood spreading over the flour on his chest and hiding it.
My screams emptied the restaurant, helped by my nose-bleed all over my plate of grass.  The Blonde looked at me aghast.
"Tasted just like summer," I said quietly.  "We're not coming here again."

English Breakfast

"There's been a rumour," said my editor, perching herself on the corner of my desk, "that the phone hacking scandal has spread a little."
"Like margarine?" I asked, pronouncing the hard g.  I loathe the substance, and I loathe the word, which when pronounced properly (it derives from margaric acid, you see, so the g has always been hard) sounds nothing like anyone would be willing to eat.
"Like margarine?" she parroted, her face study for an artist confronted with the loss of his arms: blank.
"Spreading like margarine, straight from the fridge.  I thought the phone hacking scandal was old news now, and we were all about people not being convicted for the murder of other people, possibly because they own a cat?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Whoa Nellie!  Are you telling me you don't keep up with the news at all?"
"We're the weekend supplement," she said, shaking her head in mystery.  "We're not concerned with the news at all, in fact, if you try to be too contemporary our copy-editors will wield their red pens.  At you, and possibly your prose."
Our copy-editors appear to consist of a somewhat feral tribe and have hereditary positions, sharpened teeth, and views on comma-placement that you violate at your peril, so I retreated a little and helped her get the conversation back on track.
"What's with the phone hacking then?  Who's been hacking whom this time?"
"Do you recall Rosemary?"
"I still have nightmares where she arrives at the office with a truck-load of lentils that have been sitting in a Georgian warehouse for ten weeks and attempts to make us all eat them all, shouting at us that they're health foods and that a little bit of ergot never did anyone any harm.  There's usually a european peasant dancing around with a pitchfork as well, in front of a bonfire."
"Do you have to be so literal?  Can't you just say 'yes' or 'no' once in a while?"
"No."  I smiled.
"She's alleging that we hacked into her phone."
"Why?"
"To further bolster her case that we set out to destroy her livelihood by representing her as a mad harridan with personal vendettas against much of the country."
"No, I meant why would we want to hack her phone.  But before you answer that, that sounds like a very accurate representation of her."
"Notwithstanding," said my editor with a smile like a twist of barbed wire.  "I need you to meet her and assure her that we're not interested in her phone."
"Oh no!  I met her once already, it's someone else's turn.  Send the intern, he's leaving next week anyway.  Or send Joe, his balls belong to his wife so he'll be safe!"
"I said you'd do it.  You're meeting her here, tomorrow morning at 6am."
"What kind of place opens at 6am?  Oh.  A greasy spoon.  I'm reviewing breakfast?"
"Yes.  And meeting Rosemary.  Our lawyers think she spends much of the night posting flamebait to various internet forums so she should be tired and easier to talk to."
"The plural of forum is fora," I said.
"Only in Latin," replied my editor calmly.  "English pluralises everything with an s if it feels like it."





*
The greasy spoon was called the English Breakfast and served me a strip of rubber that I tried to send back as not being bacon.  The proprietress, a buxom woman with strawberry blonde hair who I'm sure counted every baked bean that fell on my plate, told me it wasn't, it was a fried egg.  I pointed helplessly as the hockey puck and said that the black pudding appeared overcooked, and she told me it was a mushroom.
I was wondering if I could stomach eating it when Rosemary marched in, slamming the door open so that the plate glass windows at the front shook, and tried to pull the seat opposite me out.  It was, however, screwed to the floor in the Great British Tradition of greasy spoons.  When it didn't move Rosemary pulled harder, until she snapped the back of the chair off.  The proprietress was upon us immediately like some overweight avenging angel, determined to sit on the culprit until they admitted culpability with the last of their breath.

"It was like that when I got here!" is how Rosemary started, and moved on to blaming me, blaming British manufacturing standards, the shopfitters and imported Chinese plastics.  None of which swayed the proprietress in the slightest.  "I'll blog about it!" Rosemary finally shouted, looking triumphant.
"With broken fingers?" asked the proprietress, and Rosemary caved.




*
"You hacked my phone," she spat, sitting on a different chair and putting her credit card back away.
"No," I replied as calmly as I could.  I tried to spear a french fry on my fork, but it bounced off.
"Oh yes you did.  You're well aware that I'm the organiser of PAVINGSTONES, and you were trying to find out what our next offensive would be!  I hear the clicks on the line, I timed the delays when I try to connect my calls.  I know exactly what you're up to!"
"PAVINGSTONES?"
"People Against Vegetables INdustrially Grown Subject TO North European Standards."
"There's a problem with that?"  I shouldn't have asked, but my blood sugar was low thanks to the inedible breakfast in front of me. Rosemary ranted for fifteen minutes while I tried to find something on my plate that wasn't congealed, too hard to chew, or remind me of things I've found in the Blonde's makeup bag.  When she finally ran out of breath, I said,
"We're not hacking your phone.  We don't even know your number."
"Well who is then?" she demanded.
"We don't know that either," I said.  "Look, would you like some breakfast?"
"I'd rather drink the water from the mop-bucket than eat that rubbish!"
"That can be arranged," said the proprietress, who had chosen that moment to come back with the receipt for the payment for the broken seat.
I excused myself, leaving a generous tip behind, as Rosemary had her head forcibly pushed into the mop bucket and was exhorted to 'drink deep.'

News of the weak

"Darling," said my editor, leaning over my desk. Her blouse was open a little too far, and I could see that she was wearing a grey, stretched-looking bra that surely wasn't supportive enough. "We should do lunch."
I ran through the possibilities quickly: this couldn't be important or she'd have either buttoned her blouse up or worn a better bra, but equally she rarely invited me anywhere, let alone to lunch. I concluded that this was going to be about that female blogger, Rosemary, again.
"Sure," I said, forcing a smile. "Burger King?"
"Good grief, no! You're a food critic, we'll go to wherever you're reviewing next. This should be a business lunch."
I was a little alarmed now, as it was becoming clear that my editor was planning on watching how I conducted my analyses and reviews, and decided to head things off at the pass.
"This is about that blogger, Rosemary, isn't it?" I said. "Don't tell me that you're actually listening to her complaints?"
To her credit, my editor laughed. "We can't listen to all of her complaints," she said. "She filled up the voicemail service before she'd finished. We're getting them transcribed though, we think we can put them in the Christmas magazine as an example of the kinds of madness we have to deal with sometimes. She's also written us a forty-page letter, did you know? And posted a hundred-and-fifty thousand word essay on her blog."
"Good grief!"
"Yes, exactly. We're still considering hiring her though, if we can get her to sign off on a fairly heavy editing policy. Someone that crazy will generate a certain kind of audience, the obsessive kind who never stop buying the paper to read what she's written next."
"Good grief!"
"Quite. So, no, lunch isn't about that, or about your increasingly bizarre expenses claims, or even the fact that you don't seem to have found a restaurant anyone can actually eat at in the last two months. It's... an internal matter."

*
The waiter presented us with a menu that appeared to have been hand-written on card torn from a corn-flakes packet.
"I'll have... well, the starter," I said, as there was only one listed, "the beef, and for dessert... the dessert." I passed the card to my editor, who concurred with my choices, and the waiter disappeared before I could ask if they had a wine menu.
"A little primitive," I said, "but let's see what the food is like. So, what's this internal matter then?"
"There's a little bit of a scandal about to break," said my editor. "It seems that certain journalists, whose names aren't to be mentioned, might have been stealing people's mobile phones, listening to their messages, and then 'finding' those phones again and returning them."
"That doesn't sound too good, certainly," I said. A plate of foie gras and brioche with a hint of salad was deposited rudely in front of me, but the smell had me salivating like a Pavlovian hound.
"Well, it's not illegal, exactly, but given the current climate, it's not something we'd really like to have to explain."
"Stealing's not illegal?" I said, a little indistinctly. The food was heavenly.
"Well, that bit might be, I suppose, but that's very hard to prove. The rest isn't really very illegal."
"Have you been talking to our lawyer again?" That woman was as twisty as a corkscrew, and about as attractive even in a good light.
"It was necessary, she thought you were one of the journalists."
"!" There was no way I was spitting food this good out, no matter how shocked I was, so I chewed, swallowed, and only then glared at my editor.
"Well, you're abrasive, you make strange expense claims, she thought you were just rather ineptly covering your tracks."
"So... does she now know that I'm not?"
"Not exactly."
I glared at her, interrupted only by the waiter leaning over me to take my plate away.
"Well," she said. "This is kind of why we're still entertaining Rosemary."
I raised an eyebrow and refused to comment.
"We're going to get her onboard, and then use her as our scapegoat. She's unpleasant enough that people will love to see her getting her comeuppance. But we need you to agree to hiring her, since she'll be in your department. There might be a little overspill of blame, but we'll be behind you 100%."
"I'd prefer you to be 100% in front of me," I said. "This is blackmail."
My editor nodded, and tried to look ashamed.
"Fine," I said, making a quick decision. "But no more questions about my expenses."
"We'll double the limit before we question them," she said quickly.
"Treble."
I think she might have held out longer, but then the beef arrived and neither of us wanted to be that close to something that smelled that good and not be eating it, so we shook hands and the deal was sealed.
And I finally had a restaurant so good I could recommend it. Which I'm not doing, as I'd like to be able to keep going back there myself, so I'm keeping it a secret.

Dinner with Rosemary

From the outside, the restaurant didn't look as dilapidated as the web-site photos had led me to fear. To be fair, I'd deliberately only looked at the photos presented on the Rosemary's Kitchen blog in order to give the blog its fair shake of the dice and I'd carefully not checked the restaurant's actual website, or gone looking for any other reviews. I studied the facade carefully, and checked the print-out I'd brought with me, and decided that whoever had taken the pictures was not a good photographer, and hadn't had a good camera.
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."

Fray Bento

The Blonde had been re-reading T S Eliot's The Wasteland all week, and I'd been teasing her about it, asking her how many times she needed to read the same verse before she understood it. She'd taken it well for the first thirteen seconds, and then thrown the book at me. I dodged, it shattered a vase of flowers, and I took the opportunity to get out of the house and go vase shopping while she carried on reading the poem and occasionally consulting the dictionary.
When I returned with a new vase she had a deck of Tarot cards out and was frowning thoughtfully at them.
"I think they're broken," she said, pointing at the Tower. "This one keeps coming out upside down."
"The Tower?" I said, putting the vase on the table and picking up the flowers from where they'd fallen. "A symbol of strength and fortitude, assailed by outside forces."
"Huh?"
"The lightning striking the tower is representative of the outside forces," I said. "When upside down, or inverted as Madame Sosotris would surely say, it indicates weakness and yielding, an ineffectual striking out at obstinate circumstance and the futile flailing of fists against outrageous fate."
The deck of cards narrowly missed me, hitting the vase and knocking it off the table, where it too promptly shattered.
"Shall we go and have lunch?" I suggested.
*
Fray Bento was an Argentine Sushi restaurant that my editor had been pestering me to visit for a few days now, and which I'd been procrastinating over. I was peripherally aware that Argentina was a South American country and probably had splashy coastal bits where fish might be found still fresh, but it was most strongly associated with beef in my mind. And the name of the restaurant was clearly intending to focus that assocation. When we walked in and saw the leather-covered banquettes and the mechanical rodeo horse I very nearly turned round and walked out again, certain that we'd stumbled into a steak-house by mistake.
If only.
The waiter seated us using the three words of English that he knew ("Heel!", "Sit!", "Beg!") and presented us with fish-shaped menus that were greasy to the touch. The Blonde, eager to show that she's not just a figure of physical perfection, thanked him in Spanish. He looked confused.
The menu featured some very classical sushi dishes, but looking closer I realised that I couldn't actually find any fish in them. The nigiri rolls were vegetarian, the sashimi turned out to carpaccio, and the Zaru Soba was served with Bovril rather than dashi. I waved at a different waiter and he turned his back on us, so I got the Blonde to flutter her eyelashes at another one. He hastened over.
"English?" I said, a little hesitant.
"Norwegian," he said in perfect English. "I suspect, however, that you were hoping to ask me if I were capable of speaking English."
"I was certainly hoping to patronise you more than you seem able to patronise me," I responded. "This menu, where's the fish? This is a sushi restaurant, and yet everything on here seems suspiciously beefy."
He nodded, much to my dismay. "Argentine sushi," he said slowly, carefully enunciating each word as though for a child, "Is a euphemism for beef. In the case of our chefs, corned beef. I'm told they corn it themselves."
The Blonde stood up and left without a word. She had a bad experience with corned beef when she was a child.
"I see," I said, aware that I still had a review to write. "Well, I guess that's better than buying in tinned corned beef."
The waiter's inclination of his head told me all I needed to know.
"Bring me whatever you'd personally recommend," I said, stressing the word personally.
He brought me the bill.

Think of the children

The Blonde wanted to go out and celebrate. I had just put on some Argyll socks that her mother had sent me for Christmas and put my feet up. I looked up, trying not to rustle the newspaper angrily and asked her what we were celebrating.
"Did you forget my birthday?" she cried, her eyes opening wide and a recently-manicured hand flying to her mouth.
"No," I said. "It's in two months time, just before we go to... somewhere."
"Oh." I could tell she was put out that the ruse had failed because she ask where I was going to take her for her birthday.
"Well, it's our five-year anniversary."
"Not for another four months," I said, raising the newspaper again and relaxing. "It's the day after Bonfire Night."
"You seem to know these dates awfully well," she said, the tone of doubt in her voice warning me to slacken my grip on the paper. She whisked it out of hands, and peered at my lap, looking for the calendar, smart-phone or PDA she suspected I was using, and found nothing but my paint-splashed jogging pants. "You can't go out wearing them!"
"I wasn't going to go out at all," I said. "I was going to read my newspaper and wear these socks your mother sent me."
"But we're celebrating!"
"What are we celebrating?"
"My... my period!"
I considered telling her that I knew her schedule as well because I'd synchronised the mortgage payments with it, but I could see that she was determined that we were going to go out and celebrate something. So I smiled and said,
"Is that such good news, dear?" and left her worrying about me wanting children while I got changed.

*
We arrived at I Bambini Grigi slightly later than I like to visit restaurants at, and stopped at the front door. I frowned, and the eight-year-old child in the ill-fitting tuxedo with a thin, wasted face frowned back.
"We have a reservation," I said, though in fact I was acquiring more the more I looked at him. "For nine."
"There's only two of you!" he said and giggled as though this was the funniest joke ever. I smiled as politely as rictus will allow, but the Blonde tittered a little too, and nudged me to tell me I should be laughing. I allowed a mirthless "Ha. Ha." to escape my lips.
"This way, Sir and... Ma-dame," he said sounding forty years older than he looked all of sudden.
We were seated, and a waitress brought the menu. Behind her lipstick and ill-applied make-up she could only have been six, and she was in a wheelchair. I tried not to stare, and the Blonde asked her if she'd mind if she gave her some make-up tips. As the girls got it on, I checked the menu, and noticed immediately that all the dishes on there were either invalid food or involved very young animals: week-old lamb, veal blanc, duck foetus. I flagged down another waiter, this one being probably twelve and looking like a heroin addict and asked him to send me the manager.

*
"And what seems to be the problem?" said the manager unctuously. His name-badge said he was Oliver, and he at least seemed to be an adult, if only just.
"Your staff," I said. "Have you ever heard of child-labour laws? Oh, and the menu too. This food is disgusting, and that's before I try eating it!"
"We're not breaching child-labour laws," said Oliver smiling. "None of these children are actually employed. All of them have expressed a wish to the Make-a-plea foundation to work in a restaurant before they die. They're all terminally ill."
"Right," I said. "Right. All terminally ill. That doesn't include the chefs, does it?"
"But of course! Children wish to cook as well, they watch Nigella and Jamie and Gordon--"
"I hope these kids don't watch Gordon! I have enough swearing at home, without going out for some more."
"They cook. Which, to some extent, explains the menu, they cook what they're used to."
"Duck foetus?"
"We had a shipment, we can't afford to waste food."
"Look," I said, "this is ridiculous. You might have got round the child-labour laws, but there are food hygiene laws too!"
"We're completely kosher," said Oliver quickly.
"Leprosy," I said. "Where do you put the lepers? And the kids with infectious diseases?"
"The salads and the cloakroom," said Oliver. "Hang on, what's the difference between a leper and a caper?"

*
We left without eating, and without paying, since Oliver wasn't paying any of his staff. On the way home, as the Blonde was choosing between Burger King and KFC, I made a few notes. After all, if I write it up, it becomes a work expense.