Tag Archives: restaurants

224. Coffee Drink of the Day IV

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The coffee drink of the day is called the Prophet. To help launch the new Prophet drink, which has caramel in it, as best as we can tell, with milk and espresso, whipped cream, and a few other essential ingredients, a man—apparently “the prophet,” sent in from corporate, dressed in a polo shirt emblazoned with the logo from the coffee shop—gets up on a crate at the front of the long line and says, “My, God, what is she doing?” He’s pointing at a young woman reading a book at one of the round tables.

“Where is her power cord, her trackpad? Don’t you just want to swish her away? A book? Really? What next, her collection of compact discs? Huh? Am I right?”

A couple of those standing near the pastry case look up from their smart phones and say, “What is he talking about?”

“He’s talking about the truth,” some of the early converts around us are already saying. ”Obviously this drink is very forward-looking.”

“Look at her!” the prophet continues. “Just look at her!”

We look at her. She seems to be really into her book. She doesn’t even know that we’re talking about her. She’s a young woman, plain-looking, a ginger, with the tip of her nose burned red.

“Don’t you see?” the prophet says. “A book first and then what? A Walkman AM/FM cassette player? A cabinet radio the size of a piano?”

“Or one of those old school phones,” one of the customers yells out. “The kind where you have to spin the numbers!” The people cheer.

“Yes!” the prophet says. “A rotary phone, and then what?”

“Her grandma’s cinnamon rolls,” I yell out only half-jokingly, but they like that. They think I’m being serious. They cheer for me, too. And then I get to the front of the line and order a Prophet.

“Thank you, brother,” the prophet says, shaking my hand between both of his. “You won’t regret it.”

“What size do you want?” the barista says.

“Large. Make it a large Prophet. Without whip,” I say, and the barista says, “Do you want whip with that?” Again I say, “Without whip,” and she says, “Okay, so you don’t want whip with that. Is that correct?”

171. Unspoken Word

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I will shout it out, this word, the good word, over the traffic on Maricopa Highway. I will call it guacamole. I will say taco and marry that with salad—hearing me, dawg? Word. If we start now, we just might make it there before close. I will point out the skin of a black bean wrapped on your tooth, and you will nod, smiling, your headphones bumping, high as high can be, cuz you know the word, the word that ain’t need to be spoken. You hearing me? Word. It’s the unspoken word. Word. It’s the truth and the truth be setting us free:

Christ died to save Mexican food.

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Christ died to save the burrito and the enchilada, with chips and salsa. Christ died to save the pork carnitas and the fish tacos with special sauce. Christ died for cilantro and fried rice and pico de whatever and sour cream. Christ died three times to save cheese. You hearing me? Word. Christ died to save the Corona with lime, and Christ died to save the salt-rimmed original margarita on ice. (Actually, that’s not true. Christ rose for those.) But there ain’t much that Christ didn’t die for, and wouldn’t die for still. I’m not hearing you. Word. That’s right, cuz his love is big like that, is big but concerned for the small. Just one pinto bean hits that floor, and the angels weep.

113. They Opened a Restaurant in My Attic

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They opened a restaurant in my attic. This happened a few years earlier. I discovered this only when going online to check out reviews for another late night venue and came across a restaurant called The Attic, with the address to my home. My overall Yelp rating is through the roof.

One reviewer wrote: “Aside from a few typical Mother’s Day mixups and empty champagne flutes, the brunch was out of this world.”

And another: “Stumbled across The Attic when visiting [town X] and had a delightful experience at the one tiny window seat, looking down onto the garden. Despite the presence of the bachelorette party next to us, the meal was fantastic. I had a generous arugula salad with beets and pancetta, and my husband the seared tuna. The sour cherry crisp for dessert was a perfect balance of sweet and tart.”

One reviewer, a certain Jonathan P., misspelled it “Attack.” I quote the first line of his Yelp review here: “The Attack was has great food and good survice.”

More so than the spelling mistakes, the semantic chaos of his sentence construction concerned me. I hoped this was only the case of a drunken Yelper, for I couldn’t have just any old crazies dining in my attic. I stored my precious heirlooms up there, after all.

But this Jonathan P. aside, most reviewers raved about the sour cherry crisp as a perfect way to end what they claimed was a romantic, intimate and ambient spot for dining when visiting town X. That pleased me. If I was going to have a restaurant in my attic, I would naturally hope that it would be the best one around. One person went so far as to say, and I quote, “The Attic is my favorite restaurant ever: seriously.”

This was all fine, but during the first heavy rains in late fall of the past year, the roof began to leak, dripping onto a poor patron’s forehead while midway through his cherry crisp. This was The Attic’s first 3-star rating. After this, the overall tenor of the reviews began even if only slightly to shift. I read about complaints of the surrounding grounds, and of the garden, most particularly, going to seed.

One Yelper complained of the faint smell of pot smoke coming up from the second floor throughout dinnertime, followed by loud, thumping music. But the atmosphere, in general, she wrote and agreed, was still sweet, and the food and the sour cherry crisp, as always, incredible. Even so, this certain Sara M. wrote that she was only reluctantly giving The Attic 4 stars.

Sara M. was the first reviewer, additionally, to suspect that these stirrings from below were from a ghost. Rumors got out. I learned how the patrons began to come to The Attic for the sour cherry crisp and for the possible encounter with this otherworldly being. They claimed especially on weekend nights to hear him pacing downstairs throughout dinner, until close. Sometimes they could catch the phantom whiff of pot smoke as Sara M. had, and in lulls between songs of The Attic’s house band, a jazz trio, some even claimed to hear the occasional haunting hackles of laughter.

These reviews eventually attracted a pretty famous, modern ghost-buster type who had published a couple of books on parapsychology, including a pretty well-received book on spectrology, or the study of ghosts. I couldn’t tell from his review of The Attic if he believed this spirit to be of the good or evil variety, but I know that he, too, loved the sour cherry crisp. He went on for two or three unnecessary lines about the texture of the crisp and its buttery sweet tartness. What he finally suggested—and what most interested me in his review—was that this ghost was once a man who had likely died, as the saying goes, of a broken heart.

This review above all others, as one might imagine, really helped sustain the business of The Attic. Constant lovers and perennial loners alike were attracted to the haunted premise of the place. There were some disagreements as to whether this man, or this shell of a former man—stuck in the intermediate realm, unable to find a way to move on—was really suffering from a broken heart. What they could all agree upon, on the other hand, as suggested in their reviews, was that wherever he was ultimately going, they only hoped that it would be as heavenly a venue as The Attic, and that they would be serving the sour cherry crisp on the menu there, too.

82. This is a Special Occasion

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This is a special occasion. I’ve changed out of my usual Friday evening after work to Sunday afternoon flannel shirt. I’ve shaved, slapped on aftershave, washed the car.

She’s taken off the university sweatshirt with the pizza sauce above her left breast where a name tag might go if hers was that kind of job. It wasn’t. She was a fulltime mom. Our kids didn’t care what her name was. Her name was pizza sauce above left breast. Her name was feed me. Her name was bandage up my boo-boo, wipe my face, look at me, look at me, look at me.

We haven’t talked for the twenty-minute ride to the restaurant. She is likely worrying that she forgot to remind the babysitter that our daughter is lactose intolerant and that our son is allergic to bees. She wrote it down. I underlined it. She texted it. I’ve since reminded her that she texted it, but she is worried still that our son might get stung by a bee, indoors, on a Sunday night in early December.

She should be more worried about the black ice that I’m now maneuvering the car ever so delicately across. Nevertheless. This is a special occasion, and it is fine. All of it fine. It is fine, even, while I’m later glancing at the wine list, that she is telling me again what our daughter said to her just that day. It had something to do with butterflies and cookie trays.

I wish I could tell her to be quiet for just a moment and look at the menu so that she could order the first time the waiter came around because I was feeling light-headed from lack of food and couldn’t think straight.

But it’s not that kind of night. I’ve chosen a fancy four-star affair with white tablecloths. Let her tell the stories again. They’re cute stories, cute kids, and I like being a father, I really do. I like being a father and she loves being a mother and what else, besides, would we have to talk about?

From somewhere behind me, then, and across the room, stage left, a guy lets loose with a hackle of a laugh that I’m only vaguely aware of at first, my stomach gurgling with the thought of fried calamari. But even as my wife continues to tell me about whatever she’s now telling me about, and rather than dying off as one might have expected, the guy’s hackle begins pushing into several sharp-driving spurts of coyote-like yips, until all of those at their candlelit tables around us reply with chuckles and snorts of their own. The hostess, bent over the hostess stand by the front door, is chortling to the point of tears.

But when I turn back to my wife, she is giving me her closed face. It’s the door of that particular face, I know from experience, that no happy knocking on my part with the usual litanies of mm-hmms or uh-huhs will open up. She asked a question, apparently, and is waiting for my reply.

“Yes?” I say.

“Yes?” she says.

I try a different route. “No?”

“I can’t believe it,” she says, and tosses her napkin onto the table. “Did you not hear anything I just said?”

60. The Evolution of Religion

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Richard Wilkinson reminds us that about a thousand or so years ago, a Christian basilica was built in the first court to the Egyptian temple of Amun in modern-day Thebes, a basilica that was later replaced by an Islamic mosque.

What he doesn’t say is how the mosque was later converted into a bicycle rental and repair shop by day (and an after hours gay bar) when a lesbian couple, practicing Buddhists, moved to Thebes from Phoenix, Arizona, bought the old mosque and aptly named their new venture Dikes & Trikes.

What they cannot yet know is how, in a few years, Ginette, the more butch of the couple, will have an affair with the wife of a high-ranking government official and will be forced, under cover, to leave the country with a camel caravan heading towards what the ancients called the Red Land of the Sinai Peninsula.

She will never be heard from again.

Songs will be made up about her, legends told, ghosts occasionally seen.

The meaning of the name Ginette is “God is gracious.” In her case, we can only hope so.

Jenny, the other half of the couple, devastated, will return to Cleveland, Ohio, her hometown, where she will teach deaf children how to play the guitar.

After Dikes & Trikes, Starbucks will move in without much resistance, sharing the space with a sandwich shop—not Subway, not Quiznos, not Jersey Mike’s, but a Middle Eastern knockoff.

The falafel pita sandwiches will be its most popular menu item, followed closely by its soft-batch cinnamon sugar cookies, more commonly known as snickerdoodles.

Finally, years removed, a traveling shaman  from some unrecognizable jungle religion with a six-thousand-year-old history will step up to the counter at the sub shop wearing nothing but a leather loincloth and order pastrami on wheat with mustard, lettuce and cucumbers, extra oil and vinegar—no onions, no tomatoes, no olives.

He will decline the meal deal with an almost imperceptible shake of his head and step next door to order a mocha Frappuccino, afterwards sipping it meditatively in the sunlight of the courtyard while making strange notations with his flint knife into his walking stick.