I am sitting with work colleagues at a Turkish restaurant. It’s a team evening out. I endorsed the choice of venue although it’s my first time here. It’s not a well-known eatery but is there anything better than discovering a hidden gem?
There were no warning signs. The place is clean and modern. The online reviews were positive. The pictures of the food online were professionally shot, and had the required effect of reeling me in.
Things start well enough. We order the set menu for all. The starter bread is warm, the humus smooth. Then, gradually, my smile starts to contort into a grimace.
We should have one appetizer plate each, but we’re a few short. No matter, we’re sharing and there’s plenty to go round. Still, they should discount the bill for that. I know it’s a small amount, but it’s the principle dammit, I think to myself, as a few twinges of a mean Rumpelstiltskin begin to surface in me.
Then, my main course arrives. Nothing remarkable about that, except that there has been no sign of the soup starter that should have preceded it. I politely enquire of the waitress. She seems a little bemused, like it’s some detail I’ve picked up on: she wears an expression as if to say it’s optional whether they serve the soup I ordered, and they decided that, well, they couldn’t be bothered to right now. Still, the main course is removed. The soup arrives after some wait, and it isn’t worth the wait. I now worry that my main course is sitting on a shelf in the kitchen, poised to be microwaved and returned to me.
The soup is whisked away, quarter-eaten. When the main course does return it seems to have undergone some kind of personality transplant. It seems more, how can I put it? Angry. I forget to check for signs of saliva from a hostile chef and proceed to tuck in. It’s a mixed grill served, with some pretensions of hipness, on a wooden chopping board. There is some variety in the meats: they are lukewarm to room temperature. There is one consistency though: they are all equally dry. I’m getting a reasonable upper arm workout sawing into it. But I’m hungry so I can’t bear to send it away a second time and I manage to finish a good chunk of the offering.
A colleague receives her main course – apparently it’s a lamb shank. A hushed silence descends on half the table as they watch a completely unappetizing-looking plate placed in front of her. “You poor soul, God help you” is the collective, unspoken thought. The silent, funereal audience gazes on and hopes, beyond hope, that it tastes at least thirty times better than it looks (because then it would be just about edible). She sits for several minutes not eating. I enquire, and she replies she doesn’t have any cutlery. I usher a waiter over to resolve this obstacle, oblivious to the episode of culinary distress I am now facilitating.
She cuts into the lamb with the fascinated and slightly aghast curiosity a first-year medical student might display when faced with their first cadaver. The shank is a potent dark orange colour, reminding me of one of those roast ducks strung up in a canteen window in downtown Kowloon. In what appears to be some kind of practical joke, the lamb rests on a large pool of mashed, smoked eggplant the taste of which which my colleague describes as “interesting” (a most remarkable demonstration of the concept of polite understatement). What she means is that it tastes like an eggplant was being roasted on a barbecue, exploded, dripped to the bottom of the barbecue pit and was scraped off with the dormant ash about a month later, blended, and served to her. She is less neutral about the lamb, which she describes as “chewy”, by which I can only gauge she means it is the most soul-crushing disappointment she has suffered for a very considerable period of time.
The rest of the party members succeed or lose to varying, pot-luck degrees with their food choices but no-one hits a jackpot. The service remains haphazard and forgetful. We depart the venue. Another colleague and I spend the journey home engaged in furious agreement about the poor service and food. Our conversation is one long “I know, right?!” back and forth. I say that I might even set up an account on Tripadvisor just to post a negative review.
I arrive home, and open up the laptop, still shaking my head in disappointment at the injustice of it all. No discount for the missing appetizers?!
I start to think of the witty, sarcastic review I should post online. Something like “the restaurant was founded in 1953 and so, it seems, was my main course” and “the wait staff gave us a lot of attention, returning several times to request a reminder of what our orders were”.
I am beginning to impress myself with my plan of consumer revenge, when I take a quick look at the news online. A story has been developing throughout the day about a horrendous fire in Kensington, London that has completely gutted a high-rise residential apartment block. Many have died and more are missing. Harrowing stories are emerging about the desperate final moments of the victims and of whole families being wiped out. And those who escaped? Homeless and traumatized.
My heart sinks. I notice something sitting next to my laptop. It’s a wooden chopping board, piled high with perspective.
I feel a bit silly. I quietly close my laptop and head off to bed.