chrystal clear

I went for a meal with my good friend Hanna. We sat down together in plush womblike Le Bar Rouge; where the music is french, the waitresses wear bodycon red silk minis, there are gold tassles on the red suede tables and the food is divine.

It was only to be a quick fix, really, come chat and a bite to eat; then I had to hurry back to the office for an unexpected all nighter. So along with our food we had not a single glass of red, nor white. Instead we drank cool cool water from cut crystal tumblers.

I went for the trois plats, three small dishes each divine in itself. A carpaccio with shredded parmesan, gravelly black pepper and juicy morsels of green olives. An calamari with wafer thin batter and a marjoram intensive mayonaise. An a blade of tuna, rawer than a hand in freezing water, thrown over a fennel and artichoke salad. Hanna had the chili-fest of a burger and I stole a few of her crisp fries.

While we enjoyed our meal and our conversation – focusing mainly on giggles, her sudden departure from her old job, and my ethical qualms about a church wedding - a couple were seated next to us in the feathery intimacy of the red print walls.

The lady wore structured white, the man carefully dishevelled grey. Her nails were like talons, only marginally thinner than her emasciated arms. He studied the menu, she demanded champagne. Then they commenced to order. They were to eat, if memory serves me right, oysters and the shellfish plateu, goose liver and the truffels, the three kinds of cheese and the créme brulée. For her. He had the hambuger.

Hanna and I both noticed, and communicated to each other in the silent language of the raised eyebrow and crooked smile,  that they didn’t seem very up beat. In fact, they were distinctly short of conversation. Not a beep, in fact, passed between them.

This didn’t bother me half as much though, as the silence that continued when their food arrived and they commenced to eat. I eyed them sidelong, poised for the jealousy inducing oohs and ahs with which I assumed they would greet each new salty swallow. But it was not to be. They poked at their food wearing matching his/hers frowns, leaving most plates to be carried out again: ruins of an ancient civilization, torn to shreds by the passing rampaging wild folks.

Well, it struck me, as I watched the oysters shrivel in their pearly graves and the foie gras lie untouched next to its fig, that it really isn’t only a matter of learning. The food thing, that is. She of the snippy mouth clearly knew her pricelist. Possibly also her spicing. But the spirit that needs go with eating - not to mention – the simply physical fact of needing to introduce the foodstuffs into your mouth, she hadn’t grasped. 

Paying ridiculous amounts of money for show offy food is a less common crime, though, than viewing food as simply instrumential. Someone famous said a cynic is he who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I’d like to paraphrase it by adding: a poor eater is he who knows the nutritional value of everything and the flavour of nothing. Like take this girl in my office – really, take any one of them – they all share the same misconstruction.

Instead of walking to work and buttering a sandwich – they take the tube and eat some can’t believe it isn’t styrofoam substitute. Instead of having a salad of heartcoloured coldcut slivers and parsely-ed potatoes for lunch, they have nutrasweet and cornflakes. Instead of using the blunt knifes at work and cutting up plums, physalis and yellow pears for a late afternoon snack, they have their fourth cups of (again nutrasweeted) pissthin coffee. I bet they could give me the calorific content of any choosen ingredient, but they cannot tell what an onion should smell like when its fried right.

All of which is just sad and has kept me rambling away from the point of this post to the point where I have lost the point. I think it was to be something educational about not putting to many things on your plate, and also, appreciating the fun that happens in ones mouth upon sober eating.