A moving feast

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

—Ernest Hemingway, “A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel”

Sacre bleu! What a crazy nuit! Henri dined at Hemingway’s, the new restaurant on Cohasset, the other night, and, well, he must have had un petite too much vin rouge. He remembers calling a cab, stumbling up the walkway and into the house and not much more, except thinking that he should write his review while it was still fresh in his mind, which he now fears he must be losing. This was on his computer screen when he woke up in the morning:

The food writer sat at a table near the bar of the restaurant that was clean and well lighted and ordered a glass of Bordeaux from the tall waitress and looked at the walls of the restaurant. There were pictures of Ernest Hemingway and of fish and of large animals from Africa and framed quotations from the writings of Ernest Hemingway and windows that looked out onto a patio, where there were tables and chairs for eating food outside and drinking outside on days that are warm but not too warm and nights that are cool but not too cool. The food writer drank from the glass and the wine was strong and good and he set the glass on the table. The food writer looked at the appetizers on the menu. There were crab cakes and calamari and stuffed mushrooms and there were prawn and shrimp cocktails and there was a vegetable tray and he knew he would not order the vegetable tray.

The food writer ordered calamari with aioli and another glass of wine and because the taste of the wine was good he ordered a bottle of the wine and he drank the wine and because it was dinner time he looked at the dinner menu. There were prawns and salmon and steaks and there were pastas, fettuccini primavera and Alfredo and seafood linguini, and the food writer remembered the fall he had lived in Paris and the nights he ate pasta and drank wine in the cafés near the Champs Elysées and made plans to write good sentences about wine and food and Paris.

The tall waitress brought the calamari to the table and the food writer tasted the calamari and it was breaded and moist and good and he dipped the calamari in the aioli and washed it down with red wine and the calamari was better than when the food writer had tasted the calamari and not washed it down with red wine. The food writer ordered prime rib which came with soup or salad and two side dishes and the food writer chose the salad and steamed asparagus and the garlic mashed potatoes and poured more red wine from the bottle into the glass.

The tall waitress brought the salad to the table and the food writer washed the salad down with the red wine from the glass that the food writer had poured from the bottle. The tall waitress brought the prime rib to the table and the meat was big and succulent and tasted good washed down with the red wine and the potatoes tasted good and the asparagus tasted good washed down with the red wine.

The food writer was happy and made plans. The food writer would write good words about food and wine and the words would make sentences that would be true. The food writer was very drunk.