Underground Eating (2007)

My wife, Tess, and I have eaten in a lot of restaurants and had a good many peculiar experiences doing so. The two strangest encounters, the ones which stand foremost in our minds, happened in the same city on the same day.

Having just arrived in Brisbane after a long flight Tess and I were ravenous. A couple of doors from our hotel on Wickham Road we found a restaurant and bar. In darkness we negotiated a flight of stairs, an atmosphere of bohemian otherworldliness clinging to us like damp, drawing us down and down towards a dimly-lit doorway. I anticipated life-sized portraits of the wide-shouldered Ken Kesey staring wistfully out the window, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady hunched together over some vague plan, in the corner the diminutive perennially white-suited Tom Wolfe leaning into his notebook. Their real-life imitations bowed over the bar, nodding towards their whiskies, observing each other through eyes filled with experience, silently ruminating about the hours to come when they would sidle off into the night to lonely rooms filled with books, a desk and a typewriter, or to a late-night bar to loll in the wash of a saxophone and piano, or to climb behind the wheel of a beat-up Ford with the intention of heading towards the hinterland or up the coast.

Instead we found a small room with white-washed walls and sparse furnishings, the lighting too bright, the tables too angular. A wall-sized mirror on one side gave the illusion of space. Uncomplicated and utilitarian, functional in the truest sense of the term, it felt like a university refectory. In some sense we felt cheated, a promise made had been broken. We considered leaving, but we were in a city we knew nothing about and, more importantly, were within walking distance of our hotel. The manager – wide-shouldered, dark closely-curled hair, angelically cheeked – fussed about and spoke kindly to us. His voice was subtle and, as though he understood we were in two minds, reassuring. He seemed sincerely grateful that we’d bothered to come in off the street. The extent of his appreciation made it hard for us to leave.

A stereo perched at the end of the bar played Van Morrison. It suited the manager’s appearance, whose harried Irish eyes really were smiling. I wondered if his name was O’Shea or O’Malley. It was Van Morrison in his early days, post-Gloria, pre-weight gain. The recordings rough but soulful, the band only just managing to hang together, the voice wringing out every drop of emotion. It felt at odds with the spare nature of the restaurant. Both O’Malley and Van Morrison would have been more suited to dark beams and green décor.

As soon as we were seated a young Japanese waiter appeared. He loomed over us, notepad ready, pencil poised. In stilted English he asked whether we were ready to order.

Tess, who’d once worked as a waitress, fixed him to the spot with her formidable gaze. I knew that look. It surged unchecked and terrifying from an icy contempt for ineptitude. It could melt and wither the most steely-hearted among us.

‘We don’t have any menus,’ she said coldly, her words precise and bitten-off.

The waiter was genuinely mortified. His eyes widened. His face drew in on itself.

‘Soh-rree,’ he said, pressing his heels together and bowing slightly. ‘Soh-rree.’

He hurried away, a comical shuffling, limbs apparently uncoordinated, hands dancing dementedly as he went. I half-expected him to run through one door then emerge stricken a moment later and disappear through another. He returned with two menus, saying again, ‘Soh-rree . . . Soh-rree . . . Soh-rree.’ But he lingered while we read the list of dishes.

Perhaps with the idea of alleviating the restaurant’s stark temperament, the meals were reasonably priced. This put me in a happy mood. Judging by the meals being delivered to other tables, O’Malley was generous in his servings. The meals themselves looked immensely satisfying. Usually it’s the other way round – average food served for an exorbitant price. It’s no wonder people choose McDonalds and KFC over more traditional restaurants.

We ordered the dip platter as an entrée, and steak and kidney pies for our main course. My wife requested a garden salad with her main. Just to make sure he had it down right, the waiter read back our order. He recited it in painful English, torturing the syllables, furrowing his brow in concentration, nodding his head sharply over each difficult consonant. We could have had our entrée delivered and finished in the time it took him to reach the end of the list – which wasn’t a very long one.

When our dip platter arrived, so did Tess’s garden salad. Her mouth hardened. She told the waiter he’d got the timing of our order wrong. Her tone was brusque, her phrasing concise, there was no mistaking her meaning. Some people have the ability to convey a great deal through very few words. It is a gift. Tess is consummate in this realm. The waiter looked stricken. Close to panic, his eyes retreated in on themselves.

‘Soh-rree.’ Bow, bow. ‘Soh-rree.’ Bow, bow, bow.

After he’d scuttled away Tess said she was considering having a piece of him. I leaned across the table, argued in the waiter’s favour. Most likely he was a student studying across the river at Macquarie University. Temping as a waiter was how he made ends meet. Probably it was his first night. Besides, I thought he was extremely funny. You couldn’t imagine a more bungling waiter. He was the Oriental version of Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

The meal cost $67 – excluding dessert but including a bottle of very nice wine at $28 per bottle. When I went to pay the bill O’Malley, smiling and speaking in his velvet voice, asked if I’d enjoyed my meal. I said it was very nice. An old man pressed against the bar stared into my face for a long second and then started laughing. I have no idea why. He clung to his beer with his knobbled hand, waggling his head and smirking, emitting tiny cackles which sounded like rocks tumbling down a hill. He was still laughing when I went outside to join Tess who’d gone out to smoke a cigarette.

Next morning we were back for breakfast. O’Malley was still there. There was no sign of our Japanese waiter from the night before. Van Morrison was still playing on the stereo. Though I have to say I never heard the same song twice. Maybe, I told my wife, O’Malley owns the entire Van Morrison collection.

That night, looking for somewhere to eat dinner, Tess and I wandered into a restaurant in Central Station. The door was propped open but there was no-one inside except a man with a cloth buffing brass fixtures in which we could see his reflection and another shining glasses behind a wide spacious bar at the end of the room. It was dark and atmospheric, with stained wooden floors, pictures on the walls, the fixtures brunette and emerald and gold. Comfortably old-fashioned, it was the sort of place you wanted to sit in and eat a meal, then arbitrarily discuss random subjects over a few glasses of chardonnay. Mr Buffing completely ignored us, he didn’t even bother to look up as we approached, so we made our way to the back of the room to Mr Glass and watched as he continued polishing his glasses. Behind him, above a door through which you could see the kitchen not quite in action, a menu detailed the plentiful meals on offer.

‘Excuse me,’ I said.

Mr Glass looked up from his work and without his expression changing he stepped backwards into the kitchen and drew a black curtain across the doorway. It was like a scene from a Hammer film, Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee sliding backwards, their boney hand gripping the edge of the curtain and drawing it closed, obscuring the mysterious goings-on in the next room. What was so important that we weren’t allowed to see it? I pictured dismembered bodies, severed limbs floating in an oily broth, hunch-backed kitchen hands wielding meat cleavers and hacking through fibulas. Taken aback, we waited for a few long moments, but it was clear he wouldn’t be coming back. Far from Peter Cushing, it was obvious to me that our Hammer artiste was an ill-bred knob.

As we left Mr Buffing once more managed not to look at us. He did so with an impressive sense of purpose. He seemed to be thinking, Master says I must not look at anyone.