dining out

I’m saying a lot of goodbyes right now, especially at work... which is also my mother’s work... since I was seven... so it is also the restaurant where I have sat and folded napkins for fourteen years. Our head chef knew me as a very very blonde seven-year-old girl. My photograph hung on the kitchen wall. He likes to smack my mother’s ass and always has. It’s okay because she always gets him back. I gave him a big hug and told him I loved him and he looked at me sweetly and said that he loved me too and was proud of me. He’s a big dead head and likes to wear a shirt that says Althea which he always points out when I’m there. This is natural. His wife’s a witch and they live in Vermont. 

I hugged everyone very tight because I love everyone very much and they make me laugh and together we form something akin to family.

I remember on my mother’s birthday in 2011 I visited her at work. Then the waitstaff was completely different, but I remember some of their names: Stetian, Juliette, Erin. Stetian was sweet and quiet. Juliette was older but very beautiful and loud and used to give me very big wet kisses. Erin was also very beautiful but younger and tweezed her eyebrows very thin. She also made me scrapbooks on my birthdays. Anyway I visited my mother at work on her birthday in 2011, and this birthday was special because she was born on November 11. We went at 11 o’clock and all cheered when the clock struck 11:11. It felt very special, partly because even my dad cheered, and they usually avoided each other. What peace repeating numbers can inspire, I guess. I really and have always deeply loved the restaurant where my mother works. It once mystified me and then ensnared. I learned how to run food, host, and then wait tables there. Work hard, drink habitually, commiserate. I began to think theoretically about dining. I adopted firm beliefs, ie. the host should be in control of foh, completely in step with the kitchen, and strikingly beautiful and disarming in her apathy, because she stands in contrast with the waiters’ desperation which they, by their very nature, wreak. 

Menus should be paper and of good quality; qr codes are the worst thing to happen to dining quite possibly ever. And settings should be uniform. I am a sort of zealot, huh. But I love dining so much. When orchestrated well it is so luxuriously pleasurous (not a word but should be). And it costs so much money, so it should be done well. A lovely, leisurely, and properly lubricated meal with an intimate group: Delicious. On my last day, I heard a table order a beautifully coursed meal: 6 oysters, bone marrow, and our lunch special: a soft shell crab, all to share, plus a few glasses of Chablis. I also enjoyed the company of a beautiful, older couple, who were from Connecticut but did not wreak of it, and who owned a house in a nearby village where they made their bucolic escape. They were so charming and ordered so well that I couldn’t help but want to be 50 and hot and married and visiting from Connecticut. And I never thought I’d say that.