Read The Dinner for Free Online Page B

Whether the little leaves we pushed through the bars of the cage each morning were corn salad, I can’t remember, but they looked a lot like it. The hamster or guinea pig nibbled at the leaves and then spent the rest of the day sitting in one corner of its cage. One morning it was dead, just like the little turtle, the two white mice and the stick insects that had preceded it. What we were supposed to learn from this high mortality rate was never dealt with in the class.
    The reason why I now had a plate of warm goat’s cheese with corn salad in front of me was simpler than it seemed. I had been the last to order. We hadn’t really talked beforehand about what we were going to have – or maybe we had, and I’d missed it. Whatever the case, I had settled on the vitello tonnato, but Babette, to my horror, ordered exactly the same thing.
    No problem: at that point, I could always switch to my second choice: the crayfish. But the next to last person to order, right after Claire, was Serge. And when Serge ordered the crayfish, I was stuck. I had no desire to order the same appetizer as someone else, but to have the same appetizer as my brother was out of the question. Theoretically speaking I could have switched back to the vitello tonnato, but that was purely theoretical. It didn’t feel right: not only would it look as though I wasn’t original enough to choose an appetizer of my own, but it might, in Serge’s eyes, raise the suspicion that I was trying to close ranks with his wife. Which was true, of course, but I couldn’t be so obvious.
    I had already closed the menu and laid it beside my plate. Now I opened it again. Reading like lightning, I skimmed down through the list of appetizers, adopting a thoughtful expression, as though I was only looking for the dish I’d already chosen in order to point it out on the menu, but by then of course it was much too late.
    ‘And for you, sir?’ the manager asked.
    ‘The melted goat’s cheese with corn salad,’ I said.
    It came out a little too readily, a little too sure-of-myself to sound credible. Serge and Babette didn’t notice a thing, but across the table I saw the look of bewilderment on Claire’s face.
    Would she try to protect me from myself? Would she say, ‘But you don’t like goat’s cheese?’ I wasn’t sure; at that moment too many pair of eyes were on me for me to shake my head at her, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
    ‘I hear the goat cheese is from an urban farm,’ I said. ‘From goats that live out in the open.’
    At last, after he had granted thorough attention to Babette’s vitello tonnato, the vitello tonnato that, in the best of all worlds, could have been my vitello tonnato, the manager left and we were able to resume our conversation. ‘Resume’ was not exactly the right word, though; as it turned out, none of us had the slightest idea what we’d been talking about before the appetizers arrived. That was one of the disadvantages of these so-called top restaurants: all the interruptions, like the exaggeratedly detailed review of every pine nut on your plate, the endless uncorking of wine bottles and the unsolicited topping up of glasses, made you lose track.
    As far as that continual topping-up goes, let me say this: I have travelled a bit, I have been to restaurants in many countries, but nowhere – and when I say nowhere I literally mean nowhere – do they top up your wine without you asking for it. They would consider that rude. Only in Holland do they come up to your table all the time; not only do they top up your glass, but they also cast a wistful eye at the bottle when it seems to be getting empty. ‘Isn’t it about time to order another one?’ is what those looks are meant to say.
    I know someone, an old friend, who spent a few years working in Dutch ‘top restaurants’. Their tactic, he told me once, is to actually force as much wine as possible down your throat, wine they sell for seven times what the importer