Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (free biff chip and kipper ebooks txt) 📗

the owner, a fellow named Margolin. Naturally, I don’t quite understand, so I ask for an explanation.

“It’s for his first name,” the waitress says. “It’s Joe.” Service at most Early Bird establishments is friendly but not intellectual.

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My mother declares that Mr. G’s has the best Early Bird seafood in south Florida. She has the Canadian sea scallops casa, which I guess means casserole, since that’s what it is. It comes with pasta, salad, coffee, and dessert, and it costs $10.95.

“Quite a bargain,” I say.

“Eleven dollars isn’t so cheap,” Ida replies.

Our next stop is Raindancer, in Fort Lauderdale, her top-rated Early Bird establishment. I’m astonished by the portions, so huge I understand why retirees wear elasticized pants. The Early Bird includes entree, soup, salad bar, coffee, and “a choice of selected desserts” (that’s a euphemism for “we’re saving our best desserts for better-paying customers”). My mother is excited about the salad bar because it offers unlimited anchovies, the forbidden fruit of her low-salt diet. I warn her that her doctor is going to read about all the anchovy fillets on her plate. She says, “I don’t ask my doctor what to eat.” By now, I’m feeling like a sport, having taken my parents out for three dinners. Perhaps you think otherwise, that I’m some sort of cheap-skate son who won’t spend more than eleven bucks on his mother. Let me tell you how generous I am. Because she is celebrating a birthday during this visit, I invite her to dinner at the Forge, a Miami Beach restaurant with more objets d’art than a Las Vegas shopping arcade. To me, the decor is excessive, but to my mother, who has always wanted to eat there, it is beautiful.

We go for the Early Bird, of course, although the Forge doesn’t call it an Early Bird. It’s Twilight Dining Service, three courses for $19.95.

Ida, tempted by the steak Rosanne, asks the captain for an explanation of the dish. He begins, “It’s a ten-ounce steak, pounded—” She interrupts.

“I don’t eat anything pounded.”

I ask for the free-range Wisconsin duck.

“Terrible,” my mother says. “The last time I couldn’t eat it. I should have sent it back. It was tough and stringy and—” I stop her.

“I thought you said you’d never been here,” I say.

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“Oh,” she says, “it wasn’t here.”

I have the duck. I give her a taste. “Now that’s what I call duck,” she says. She has the Forge special sirloin. Perfection. Dinner is accompanied by a bottle of slightly sweet Mosel wine, magnificently suited to the palate of a Jewish mother.

Service is exquisite, helped along by my father, who assists the busboy in piling up our plates. Coffee costs extra, which is known to cause food riots among Early Birders, but my mother so loves the Forge that she shrugs when I mention the extra $1.95 involved. “I got money,” she says, implying that if a son won’t buy a mother a cup of coffee, what good is he?

“You know,” she says, transferring her affections, “I like the wine steward.”

She decides to tip him. On the way out she slips him three bucks, quite proper for a twenty-one-dollar bottle of wine. The wine steward tells me it is the first time in his thirteen years at the Forge that a woman

“of that age” ever tipped him.

“What age is that?” I innocently ask.

“Oh, sixty-five or seventy,” he says.

I catch up with Ida and Norman outside. When I tell her the wine steward’s estimate of her age, I expect her to simper with happiness.

Instead, she looks at me the way she did so many years ago, when I came home with a C on my report card.

“I gave him a tip,” she says. “What do you think he’s going to do, say I’m eighty?”

GQ, november 1991

T H E L O N G A L O H A

When I look back to my college days, what I remember most is my first dinner date and the Pub-Tiki’s Sesame Chicken Aku-Aku. Let me tell you about this dish. Boneless white meat in a cream sauce as velvety as a warm tropical rain. Egg noodles as soft as twilight shadows. Sesame seeds, the most exotic seasoning I had ever tasted, sprinkled across the top. It was the very definition of alluring.

The woman was lovely, too. She was a raven-haired wordsmith who worked with me on the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper, and she always wore a formfitting, tightly belted black vinyl raincoat. I had no idea what I was doing out with a girl like her, a knockout even under deadline pressure, but for that matter, I had no idea what I was eating, either. All I knew about Polynesian food was that it deserved to be described in the words of the great philosophers. Now, thirty years later, I can no longer recall those words. For that matter, I seldom recalled them on exam days, either.

My status with this child-woman was somewhere between sycophant and manservant. Sometimes I ironed her hair before she went out with the older men she was used to dating, many of them twenty years old or more. I knew I had no chance with her, but I thought perhaps I could improve my station were I to escort her to the Pub-Tiki, the most sophisticated Polynesian restaurant in Philadelphia.

The main dining room featured eight-foot-tall wooden sculptures and a lava-rock fountain. The Outrigger Room had a genuine outrigger 1 0 6

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canoe hanging from the ceiling—outriggers have always been de rigueur in Polynesian restaurants. The Map Room dazzled with a hand-painted mural of Polynesia.

I could imagine how the date would go: when our modestly but fetchingly attired pseudo-Polynesian waitress came to take our order, I would take charge. For