I had a bad feeling about the restaurant as soon as we arrived. Actually, as soon as I learned we were going there. But family were in town and they wanted to eat at a place with a view of the ocean, and a menu that would appeal to both adults and children.
The entrance was so crowded it took a few minutes to get to the hostess. We were led upstairs to a closed-in veranda overlooking the ocean. We ordered drinks and then food, which included blackened mahi mahi and chicken tenders. We caught up on news. A half hour passed. Forty-five minutes. An hour.
“I’m going to go to the men’s room,” I announced. “Usually when you go to the men’s room the food arrives.”
I returned from the men’s room to a hungry table. Hania went to the ladies room, and returned, with no food in sight. I headed back downstairs to the hostess to tell her of our marathon wait. She said she’d send the manager up.
Returning to our table, I found the manager, and our food being served.
It was not very good.
Sunday’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks has me remembering a seafood restaurant I went to several years ago in Seattle. The menu offered three soups: New England clam chowder, Manhattan clam chowder, and New Jersey clam chowder.
“What is New Jersey clam chowder?” I asked the waitress. “I grew up in New Jersey and never heard of it.”
“It’s half New England clam chowder,” she told me, “and half Manhattan.”
I went with the Manhattan.
A few months ago, a couple we’ve known for a long time invited us and a few friends to dinner at the Biltmore to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It was a lovely evening except for the fact that I failed to order the “thousand-layer lasagna” which a number of people raved about. We made plans with the couple to return sometime, perhaps around the holidays.
So Saturday night, Hania and I drove to Coral Gables. We arrived early and stopped at the Portuguese Bakehouse for four pasteis de nata, Motek for some hummus to go, Bulla for five takeout gazpachos, and finally Graziano’s for some last-minute Christmas presents.
I found a prime parking spot in the hotel lot, and we met our friends in the lobby.
“You know you have to pay for parking now?” Mark said. “It’s $4 an hour.”
I rushed out to my car, which, thankfully, had no ticket, and, after some searching, found a sign on the opposite side with the zone number.
“When did they start charging for parking?” I asked an employee as I returned to the hotel.
“Monday,” he said. “The city owns the lot, and they decided to start charging.”
Making my way to the restaurant, I found everybody sitting by the fountain in the courtyard. It was a gorgeous South Florida evening; looking up, one saw the sky framed by arched terraces and feathered by palm fronds.
The waiter arrived and announced that they were out of lasagna. This was greeted with a loud moan, and the news that we had driven from Fort Lauderdale. I noticed on the menu that the name had changed from “thousand-layer lasagna” to “Biltmore lasagna.” I ordered the spaghetti with clams.
“Do the clams come in shells?” I asked the waiter.
“No,” he said, which was also disappointing.
The spaghetti and unhoused clams arrived in tomato sauce. My third disappointment of the evening. Taking my first bite, I had my fourth disappointment. Hania and Cecile were equally unenamored of their risotto.
The soft trickle of the fountain was soon drowned out by the pounding music of a party in the ballroom. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
But not even that could spoil the pleasure of sitting with friends in an elegant courtyard the week before Christmas. And the gazpacho and hummus made for a delicious Sunday lunch.
Saturday we drove to the just-opened Old World Polish Deli in Fort Lauderdale to buy kabanosy (small sticks of garlicky sausage) and stuffed cabbage. On the way, we passed the new Kimchi Mart where I buy my kimchi. Both stores are small gifts of the immigration that our burger-loving leader is trying to stop.
Yesterday I remembered my first Thanksgiving away from home – in France. I was spending the year learning French, at a language institute in Aix-en-Provence, and eating my meals in the dreary university cafeteria. The meal that Thursday, as I recall, was liver and lentils. As usual, I filled up on baguette and cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) and, on the long walk back to my dorm, treated myself to a Toblerone bar, biting off each triangle, one by one, and then letting the chocolate dissolve between my tongue and the roof of my mouth, without any further contact with my teeth. That was the year I discovered the perfect diet plan: Walk a very long distance to a very bad meal and then walk back.
Growing up in New Jersey, I would sometimes take a bus into Manhattan, step out of Port Authority, and just wander for the day. It took me years to get into a museum because the streets were my museum – endlessly fascinating and educational. It was in New York that I developed my love of walking city streets.
Nobody counted steps back then but last Wednesday in Manhattan I did 14,000. Many of them were in pursuit of a place for lunch. Or, to be more accurate, the place for lunch. I have an ideal restaurant in my head – for all meals when traveling – and I always suspect that it’s right around the corner. This is workable in small towns, where options are limited; in New York, where places to eat almost outnumber pigeons, the search can be endless. And immensely annoying to companions. Hania wasn’t with me; hence the marathon.
It started at Rockefeller Center, where I asked a man if there was a good deli nearby. My heart was on a New York sandwich – corned beef, pastrami – in a bustling, well-lit place filled with New Yorkers.
He pointed me in the direction of a place called Toasties, which didn’t sound promising and wasn’t. It was full of office workers standing by a counter waiting to pick up their orders. I wanted sit down, so I walked out and headed down Madison Avenue, where I found more of the same. One deli was actually named Grab & Go.
I turned west into the theater district, making sure to stay east of Broadway and the tourist swarms. Here there were more takeaways, many of them Asian and interesting, but my hotel – in the vicinity – was fine for sleeping but not for eating. Occasionally I’d pass a nice restaurant – Greek, Italian – that was romantic and empty. Here I would have stopped had Hania been with me.
It was now after 1 pm and I was flagging. I remembered the Irish place next to my hotel, which I had heard the receptionist recommend to the couple who’d checked in before me.
It was dark but busy, and I was sat at a table close enough to its neighbors that I could eavesdrop. My waitress spoke with an Irish accent. My Reuben sandwich was perfect, just the right size, not overstuffed, and came with thick, crispy, delicious French fries. I was having lunch in New York, unquestionably, and it tasted even better because of the hike I’d taken to get to it.