I Am My Favorite Restaurant

Auto-Fiction by Audrey Ferber

Good evening. My name is Audrey. I’ll be your server tonight. And cook. And dishwasher.

            Wine? Something white, fruity. Don’t worry about headache, calories, getting maudlin. Isn’t it nice that I know you so well. 

For your main course I suggest the roasted branzino. Yes, of course you’d prefer ribs. When exactly do you plan to start dieting? On your deathbed? Always looking for the easy way, the fatal disease, a stomach cancer, to do the work for you. Where is the discipline?

No, the fish is served with steamed broccoli. No sauce. Baked potato and salad – light dressing. Yes, you may eat as much lettuce, as many cucumbers as you like, as much as it takes to fill the aching maw but all that roughage requires dressing, pints and pints of it and one tablespoon of olive oil contains one hundred and twenty calories making it a calorie dense food. One tablespoon of oil, even mixed with vinegar and Dijon mustard, doesn’t go very far. The dressing can be extended with water but that fights the mouth feel of oily satiety which goes against your very nature.

Thank you. I’ll step into the kitchen now and start preparing your meal.

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Hmmm. Your husband, he’s playing poker at a friend’s house, has left his Costco haul on the counter. Thirty-two cans of diet root beer, tubs of chocolate covered almonds, pistachio nuts and individually wrapped biscotti. Let me just move those so we can get started.

The fish, when released from its pristine white paper wrapping, gives off an ammoniac, uric scent. Happily the smell dissipates quickly. Is fish supposed to be odorless? Smell like a flower? Smell like fish? Unless you fish, hunt, farm, raise everything yourself, food sources are a roll of the dice. A recent factory farming documentary showed chicken abuse so horrendous it should have sworn us all off poultry forever. But fried chicken, those crackling little fat packets under the skin, the plaques of cayenne tinted batter that crumble in your mouth. You’d shove your best friend, your husband, into traffic for a thigh. I know you would.

The branzino’s provenance, a fish farm in Greece, is too far from California to be optimal. And farmed fish in general, the pollution from waste, the environmental disruption, don’t get me started...

Spray a little olive oil into the bottom of a baking dish. The chemical propellants in aerosol sprays can’t be good but it comes down to calories and coverage. Whether sprays really cover more of the pan while presenting fewer calories is a question of perception. It would probably be healthier to spread a bit of organic virgin olive oil from a dark glass bottle with a pastry brush. Not your black brush because flame retardants in black plastic pose health risks.

            It is possible to forgo the oil completely and use water at the bottom of the pan. Then roasting becomes more like poaching. No crackly skin? No toasty garlic? No sensual pleasure? Your husband thinks that’s what sex is for.

Rinse the broccoli. Cut off much of the stem. Wasteful! If you had a penny for every broccoli stem you’d discarded over the years, you’d have hundreds, thousands of dollars. If you’d eaten them all, you’d be fiber rich.

Find the steamer. Fill the pot less than halfway with water. Load the veg and leave it on the stove.

Scrub the potato. Or wash. Who really scrubs? Middle rack? Upper? You can’t be bothered with those kinds of details. Your mother used to pierce potatoes before she baked them. To release steam? Pressure? You had an exploding potato recently. What a mess. Such a cliché to discover that your mother wasn’t wrong about everything.

Season the fish with lime, garlic powder and coarse salt. You’ve gotten too lazy for fresh herbs. Blame your husband. He doesn’t like dill. His first wife was Swedish and she used it on everything, he claims. He doesn’t like cilantro. He doesn’t like curry. He takes great pleasure in naming all the herbs he doesn’t like. He says he doesn’t like any herb he can taste. A MAJOR DISAPPOINTMENT! You I thought you’d putter around the kitchen together. Grow herbs on the deck. 

Put the potato in the oven. Pile spring lettuce in a shallow bowl, with a Persian cucumber and one quarter of an avocado. The avocado is brownish around the edges and there’s a major blemish right center. By the time you clean it up, there’s not much left. Use the whole thing. You don’t like to waste food. You’re either cheap or ravenous. Ravenous from the old French ravinos to describe people who were “aggressively greedy or violent.” Avocado is a good fat. You like to think of yourself as good fat too.

Put the fish in the oven. The potato should have gone in earlier. Cooking is all about timing. Take the potato out of the oven and put it in the microwave. As many times as you’ve googled “microwaves,” you still don’t completely understand what they are.

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In the dining room, pour Audrey more wine. Crackers and runny cheese or those oily Spanish almonds would be nice with the wine but resist. Only baby carrots and low-fat popcorn are permitted. But remember: in excessive quantities low-fat popcorn can become a high calorie snack too. And baby carrots are not really babies.

Logic suggests a smaller amount of a tastier foodstuff, a smear of triple cream brie on a rich cracker, might be more satisfying. But if the goal is volume eating, to fill the hole, bulk, even boring bulk is preferable.

The fish starts to cook. Releases its aromas. Aromatic even without a stuffing of fresh herbs.

Let me set your table. A linen napkin. The plate arranged with the Blue Willow pattern is facing the right way. Who wants to eat with an upside down moat staring you in the eye?

Your husband is indifferent to the niceties of table decor. He sets the Blue Willow any old way, disregards the moat, the willows, the tiny shepherd.

Move his crap, his box of tissues, his cannister of pens, his pad, his magazines, his small blue Swiss Army knife emblazoned with a star of David, a box of toothpicks, a small ball of rubber bands, somewhere out of sight. You’d lived an entire life before you met him without the need for tissues on the dining room table.

“It's not a desk,” you remind him semi-regularly. “This isn’t your office.”

“It’s my table,” he replies.

A comment not worth deciphering for the anger it might cause.

What is compatibility? Do a husband and wife have to like the same food to be well-suited? You like his suits.

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You made lunch for him at your flat not long after you’d met. Arranged rare flank steak on lush lamb’s tongue lettuce, a variety with the mouth feel of velvety grass. Right before he arrived, you seared red peppers in balsamic vinegar, garlic and Sicilian olive oil, hot and fast, until their skins blistered. Served the best baguette in town spread with New Zealand butter and a few crystals of coarse salt.

“Do you always eat like this?” he asked.

“Mostly.” You wouldn’t have bothered with the salt for yourself. 

The first time you baked at his house he only had imitation vanilla.

“You shouldn’t buy 'imitation,’” you couldn’t stop yourself from saying.

“I’m not a gourmet,” he replied defensively.

It was too early in the relationship for criticism, for you to know more about something than he did.

You both considered yourselves sophisticated. Or maybe the imitation vanilla, extract incompatibility, was reason enough to have broken up with him then and there. But you were thirty four and the clock was ticking and you liked the way he smelled. And his loose curly hair and his books and his brain. You’d grown up with a mother who was always wearing something she didn’t want creased or stained, but when you inclined towards him, or even if you only thought about moving closer, he seemed to intuit it and wrapped you in the warmest hug. You loved that.

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Please sit down. Let me serve you.

The first taste of fish skin is pure pleasure. Salty garlic crackle.

A little lime would be nice.

Let me get that for you.

The second glass of wine is pleasantly blurring.

Who is this charming server? This attractive woman of middle years?

Sixty-five is middle only if you live to a hundred and thirty. Don’t kid yourself.

The potato disappoints. Chalky with powdery mid notes. A big block of bland carbs. And the broccoli is boring too.

I’ll just grab you some sesame oil, a little tamari.

That’s better.

You always need to spice things up. Your refrigerator door groans with condiments: chutneys, mustards, chili sauces Asian and Mexican, Thai curry paste, horseradish, harissa, preserved lemons, Calabrian peppers, tamarind sauce, Korean Gochujang, wrinkled tubes of anchovy, tomato and wasabi paste. Capers, olives, Siracha ketchup.

What is your beef with simplicity? Find beauty in purity, the primary taste. Stop masking. Get used to things as they are, to what you have.

Dessert?

Your mouth sings with lime, salt, garlic. Don’t disrupt the harmony.

Let’s leave the dishes on the table and retire to the living room.

Sit on the couch. Ignore the magazine on your lap. Another sip of wine. Savor the delicious time alone. Savory. He loves chicken pot pies, the cheapest brand. His palate is under-developed, his taste preferences based almost entirely on nostalgia for a childhood that might not have been so great to begin with. You should have vetted his food preferences more carefully before you married, taken a scrape of his tastebuds for analysis.

On your first date he took you to a restaurant with mediocre food but a great view. Out the window, the Pacific Ocean opened before you. Crashing whitecaps, rising spumes of glittery water; an entire world on offer. One lone boulder stood tall and serene, a cozy opening rounded in its center, beckoning like home.   

Sit forward on the couch, listen for his key in the lock, hungry for his return. 

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Audrey Ferber’s stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, LILITH Magazine, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, New World Writing, The Writer’s Chronicle, First Person Singular and elsewhere, and have been performed live on The New Short Fiction Series. She teaches at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. She is at work on a memoir about care-giving and marriage. 

Images:

Fish on a platter by Henry Perks

Two fish on a platter by montatip lilitsanong