[This is the winning entry in a
contest sponsored by San Francisco Focus.
The contest involved writing
a restaurant review in the style of a famous author.]
Images of the Dinner or
How Many Way Are There to Grill a Mango?
[a la Nicholson Baker]
On Sept. 2, 1996, I sat back on the sheet-covered couch1 (we had just moved house and the new furniture hadn't arrived yet) and tried to write a restaurant review on Stars in San Francisco, a restaurant I had visited over a year and a half ago, and not since. I had to consult my 1994 calendar2 and affirm that interval. When I mentioned to my husband that I was writing about the time we'd gone to Stars he looked at me blankly saying, "You remember eating at Stars? Did we ever go to Stars?"
Since it had been rather a long time since I'd been to the place, and since the babysitter factor was looking bleakish (as to the question of going there again anytime soon), and since the deadline for the review was three days hence, I decided to, in the spirit of postmodernism, which one could say, takes into account that the thing in itself becomes subsumed in multi-layers and ambivalences and conveyances of moment-filled slices of a memory of having done any given thing, reconstruct the evening in question in my mind, and record the turnings of my flawed but possibly revealing mnemonic tableaux.
After all, I rationalized to myself, if a reader goes to a restaurant because of a good review, she or he will, ultimately, be left not with clear, intact memories of the night in question, but a residue of fragments, various and vague, possibly photograph-like (blurry or underlit photographs at that) images of the dinner, which would be far less likely to correlate to a concisely and consciously (one could say, self-consciously) constructed review, which cited some of the establishment's hors d'oeuvres and entrees, along with the writer's thoughtful reactions to each, wines one could imbibe and rebibe if desired, and comments that one wine was a bit clumpy and another foggy but tasting of blackberries.
But never mind all that! Now I see I have already passed the 300 or so word count that was a guideline for the review and I haven't yet begun my, I have now decided, unresearched, except for the quick look at my aforementioned calendar, review-in-retrospect of Stars in San Francisco.
Considering the vagaries of time, it is enough, I wrote in a note to myself at this point in my musings, to mention that Stars was a loud place; for some reason current owners of fashionable restaurants seem to feel that the more the echoey, exciting-seeming noise, the more scintillating the dining experience, and to that end, the designers of Stars took it a step further by lining the multi- (but I'm finding I'm using that prefix too much in this review;--is there another one that would do as well? Without resorting to a thesaurus, the only possibilities that come to mind are "plural-" and "variegate-" and, my favorite "florilege-" but it's easier here just to say "split-level") leveled rooms with not just floor-to-ceiling, tinted windows, but also large mirrors and glass-covered posters, which brings to mind a whole series of speculations on the acoustics of ice, into which I will steadfastly not enter.
The other impressions that stay with me, after these long months, are a) the dish I ordered which was either chicken or fish, but it doesn't matter now, because it was delicious, and included the surprise of grilled mangoes,3 and, b) when my dinner partner, actually, my husband, left the table to use the restroom, our waiter, after a thoughtful few moments on both our parts, came to the table and on the pretext of folding my husband's temporarily ex-napkin, tactfully asked me what show we were going to after dinner; (I had mentioned when I'd made the reservations that we needed to be finished by 7 o'clock to be able to get to a show) I answered that we were going to Traviata, to which he replied we had plenty of time to get there, but that it would be a late night for us. On reflection it seems to me that the service at Stars went far beyond anything expected, and that after a glass of the wine I ordered,4 the noisy clattering and chatting of my fellow diners became rather pleasurable, an effect I could intensify if I put my fingers on the outer flaps of my ears and closed and opened them quickly, making the whole room seem like a futuristic train station past which Einsteinian trains commuted at the speed of light, or, to be realistic, very near the speed of light.
Since this review is now many times over the recommended length, I must try to stop myself from continuing to write it, and I find the only way I can do this is to put my mind to my next review, which will be on the Cafe New Orleans, a trendy-looking restaurant that just opened in Menlo Park (near our new move-innance) which I haven't yet visited. In the spirit of postmodernism, and even of deconstructionism, I think I'll write the next review before I go to the restaurant, and then later, see if I was right.
1. Before me, as I sat, my son was watching Mr. Rogers on TV. The risk of mentioning this is that when a young child enters the scene, especially if the child's mother is in said scene, the focus goes from whatever was at hand to the child. Being aware of this happening already, I'll try to refrain from mentioning him anymore in this review.
2. Retrieving the calendar was no small feat--because of the previously mentioned move, I had to make a trek to the overflowing garage, ceiling-high with boxes and furniture that, in the case of the latter, would not fit into the new house, or, the former, the contents of which we would eventually insinuate into the house over a period of weeks, maybe month, we hoped not more. My husband and I had made up names for the garage--we alternately called it "the midden" and "the darkness where men weep and gnash their teeth". When the garage is clearer and cars can once again be parked in it we'll probably go on calling it "the midden" and "the darkness where men weep and gnash their teeth" even though the hapless garage won't deserve these epithets anymore.
3. Something I will never forget, partly because several months later I tried making a dish with grilled mangoes in it and it ended up tasting oddly like a combination of dog-smell and pineapple-dumpling soup, which made Stars' dish seem even more astounding to me, since, how many ways are there to grill a mango?
4. Which I chose with my weird-but-reliable method: I studied the wine list and, after eliminating the cheapest and most expensive wines, looked for a synchronistic correlative between one of the wine names and an event in my life. I haven't got the space to go into the dynamics of that night's choice; perhaps in an essay at some later date.