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

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.

Rawberry Horecake

Desserts are tricky things.  Too often I find them relegated to the end of the menu, somewhere to dump them out of sight and out of mind because the chef would far rather be doing something interesting with the starters or exotic with the mains.  The dessert comes as an afterthought, and might as well be tipped out of a tin, microwaved until it smokes and then submerged in industrial custard.  That said, I do remember one restaurant where the chef was far more interested in doing the wait-staff than the food.  That was a long, hungry evening listening to ecstatic screams that only served to let me know that the chef was actually good at things he turned his mind to.  But mostly, I avoid the desserts or order them only because the Blonde is on a diet and wants to look longingly at the food before refusing to eat any of it and sulking about it in the cab on the way home.

“There’s a dessert restaurant you’ve not reviewed yet,” said my editor, waving a copy of some free newspaper at me.  “They’ve reviewed it in here, and I’m fed up with them scooping us!”

“They only appear to be scooping us because you use their restaurant pages to decide what to send me to review next,” I riposted.  “You’ve completely ignored my review of Porkgasm and it’s been three weeks now.  You’ve also ignored my review of Arabetty, and there are no other restaurants in London serving Raven on the menu.”

“Who wants to eat raven?  People like desserts.  You like desserts.  Go and review this place.”

“I don’t like desserts,” I said with feeling.  So much so that I had to spit in the wastebin to get the memory of the taste of industrial custard out of my mouth.

“Don’t spit in the bins, people copy you and then the cleaners complain that everything’s soggy.”

“Why do the cleaners care?” I asked, puzzled suddenly.  “What are they doing with the rubbish that they care if it’s soggy or not?”

“I don’t know,” she said waving the free paper at me.  “Desserts!”

“I don’t like them,” I said.  “I think I told you that already.”

“Why not?  Who doesn’t like something sweet to finish a meal with?  Like, Bombe Chocolat with gianduja sauce and Nutella noisettes, for example.”

I thought about that for a moment.   “That would make even an Oompa Loompa sick,” I said.  “And anyway, most desserts come served with industrial custard.”  I spat again.

“Don’t spit,” said my editor reflexively.  “What’s industrial custard?  Is it like custard powder?”

“No,” I said.  “No, custard powder as least would be reconstituted custard, and for all his other faults, Mr. Bird managed to put together pretty much the right ingredients for custard.  Industrial custard is vat grown from genetically modified bacteria that basically just float on top of the custard eating slime, sunbathing, and pumping out custard.  It’s as cheap as you can get, you just buy a vat and top it up with the right kind of nutrient slime every week.  Then you turn a spigot at the bottom and out runs your custard ready for reheating and pouring over your microwaved desserts.”

“That sounds horrible,” said my editor.  A sub-editor walked past her and spat in her bin.

“No spitting!  See what you’ve done now!”  She glared at me.

“Fine, I’ll go review your restaurant,” I said.  Leaving the office seemed like a good idea all of a sudden.

*

The restaurant called itself Just Desserts and I tried very hard to smile at the sign, but unlike the middle-aged matrons waddling in in front of me I couldn’t find such an obvious pun funny.  I waited while the maître’d seated them at a round table, politely deflecting their comments about his marital status, their attempts to show him photographs of their offspring, and the occasional sly hand attempting to pinch his bottom; then he approached me.

“Table for one?” he asked, his voice sepulchrally deep.  I half-smiled and nodded.  I pointed to a two-seater table in the middle back of the room.  “That one would be nice,” I said.

“That’s our Valentine’s table,” said the maître’d.  “How about I seat you outside?”  It was single-digit temperature even sat out of the wind, so I demurred.  “Very well,” he sighed.  “Try and look romantic while you’re sat there please.  If anyone asks, your date went to the toilet half-an-hour ago and you’re still waiting.”

I refrained from comment, just in case he still thought he could make good on seating me outside and sat down to look at the menu and the dining room.  The dining room appeared to have been done a new designer who hadn’t yet learned how to tone their urges down a bit.  The seats were opulent and deeply cushioned, and I sank at least three inches into my chair.  The table was solid mahogany, mostly concealed by the pristine white linen tablecloth, and the napkins were so heavily starched I could have shaved with the creases.  The room had a high ceiling, in the corners of which plaster cherubs were floating and molesting grapes.  There were only a few other customers, the largest table being that of the matrons who were now being noisy and getting drunk on Eiswein.  I looked at the menu.

Rawberry Horecake read the first item, so I stopped and read it again.  I read it a third time, and then raised a hand.  A waiter appeared as though I’d announced my intention to leave without paying.

“What’s this?” I said, pointing.

“Rawberry Horecake,” said the waiter.  “Should I read the rest of the menu to you too, Sir?”

“Thank-you, I can read,” I said.  “I just can’t guess what that’s a typo for.”

“It’s not a typo, Sir,” said the waiter.  “That’s the name of the dish.”

“Then what on earth is it?” I asked.

“Have you heard of Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm?” asked the waiter, and I nodded, only to regret it when he finished talking ten minutes later.

“I’ll take one to go, thank-you,” I said.  I’d leave the dessert on my editor’s desk and hopefully discourage her from any more mad notions of sending to review these places.  Suddenly the industrial custard didn’t seem so bad after all.  I licked my lips.

Analphabetic Soup

My editor, an otherwise lovely woman with impeccable taste, had insisted that I pay a visit to this restaurant.
"It's new!" she said, as though that meant anything.  "There will be celebrities there!"  She fluttered her hands in front of her face as though fanning herself.  "I've even heard that... Gordon might be there!"  She sat back in her chair, the expression on her face suggesting that I was supposed to know who Gordon was and why it was significant that he was there.  Wherever there actually was.
"Look, I don't normally do this," I said, feeling unaccountably like I was turning down a date.  Possibly with Gordon, as there's no way I'd date my editor, and I suspect her ogre of a husband has similar feelings on the matter.  "I pick my restaurants based on research, not on looking in the paper for whatever's new this week.  I don't generally go anywhere where there are sublebrities clamouring for attention, as they tend to get served the better food and the rest of us can go hang, because if Kate or Britney is eating the soup then everyone wants to.  Even when Kate's throwing it up in the toilets five minutes later.  Oh, and I don't know who Gordon is."
"He's a chef," said my editor, putting so much emphasis on the job title that italics and bold wouldn't do it justice.  Imagine her leaning over you, looking down the length of her nose at you, disapproving with every syllable.  "How can you not know a chef?"
"Easy," I said.  "I eat the food, from the restaurant.  Very often it's not been cooked by the chef du jour at all, but one of his brigade.  And while Norman Normal might be a very nice kid, two years out of cooking school, on his third stage and turning out beautiful pierogies, no-one cares because he's not got a name that people pronounce in special ways that my keyboard can't transliterate.  But he's the one producing the food, and that's what matters when you're the one eating the food."
"You're going," said my editor, her face doing that blank thing it does when she doesn't want to listen anymore.  "I'd come with you, but I've got another engagement that evening.  But you're going, and you're eating, and I want you to meet Gordon and make sure his name gets in the article.  And get a picture of him too!"
"Topless?" I asked, and she shot me a filthy look.
"Yes!"

*

I arrived at seven fifteen for a seven thirty table and there was a queue at the door.  I took this in, a little surprised, as the restaurant itself seemed rather smaller than I'd been expecting: almost like someone's front room, completely with tiny, hedged garden outside the window.  I strode confidently to the front of the queue, ignoring the cries of distress and the whimpering of small, starving children.

"I have a reservation," I said to the maître'd, noticing that his suti looked creased and the lapels appeared stained.  "For seven thirty."

"Your name, please?" he asked, and I told him.  He stared at the page of the appointments book for a moment, and then dipped his head, a jerky little nod.  "You do," he said.  "That makes a change.  I see it's a table for one.  Would you like to choose a dinner guest from the queue outside?"

"No," I replied.  "Desperation does nothing for my appetite.  What are they all there for?"

"They want to meet Gordon," he said, with just a hint of anger in his voice.  "What else?"

"The food?" I said, slightly surprised that there should even be a question.

"Hah, hardly," he said.  "I'm sure you'll form your own opinion though."

"I have a meeting with Gordon too," I said, as he showed me to a wobbly table with a threadbare tablecloth.  I looked at it, he looked at me, and slowly I realised that I would have to sit down as he had no plans to seat me elsewhere.

"Oh, you're that guy," he said, sounding tired.  "Gordon will come and meet you between courses."

"Topless?" I asked, but the maître'd had already turned away to answer the question of a belligerent, chunky woman with a feather boa.

The menu was insipid, with nothing that looked particularly interesting, or even appetising.  Since the starters all seemed to variations on prawns save for the soup, I ordered it.  When it arrived, I stared at it, and the waiter walked hastily away while I consulted the menu again.  There it was, in small print: analphabetic soup.  Swirling in a salty, hot broth that tasted industrial were strands of pasta that, at a push, might have been Chinese pictograms before they were overcooked.  I pushed them around, wondering if I was making sentences or just piling them randomly and offensively together.

As I laid my spoon down, deciding that not eating the soup was better than eating it, Gordon appeared. Somewhat to my astonishment he wasn't just topless, he was also naked save for a chef's toque, that he was incongrously wearing on his head.  Well, incongruous given his state of undress.

Without hesitation I took advantage of the screaming groupies throwing themselves at him to duck out of the restaurant and hide in the nearest bar that carried single malts.  My editor could pick her pictures out of the blogs in the morning.