It was hot where I live, on a hill overlooking a dry riverbed, not far from the sea. Indeed, Thursday and Friday were both in the 40s.
My daughter was celebrating her birthday that Thursday (she’s also in her forties) and I joined her and others as a Party of Six (follow me please) to the table in the corner, by the windows, in a smart restaurant in the next town from mine.
Our family knows their family, and thus we were treated to cocktails and jamón as the waiter left us some menus, bread and changed our plates and glasses. Smart places always do, for some unfathomable reason.
The owner reappeared and chose the meal for us – an eminently sound idea as I never like to read menus and tend to order the same as the person seated to my left (unless he or she is a vegetarian). I think the best restaurants are those who have no menu at all – maybe a blackboard with today’s ‘catch’ – but the simpler the better. One is there for the conversation, not to get lost in a thick book of food. By now, and anyway, our unopened menus had discretely disappeared.
And it came to pass that, being both a smart restaurant, and with special favour from the kitchen, we were served endless plates of delicious thises and thatses. The plates being passed around to the left and quickly emptied.
The main course began with a similar routine, or maybe that was the continuation of the first course Part the Second. More munching and forks clashing. It was too delicious to talk (and too noisy to hear). Mmm, good! Anyway, it was then followed (fresh plates, clean knives and forks) with a hot piece of iron over a small oil-heater and a large plate of raw beef for us to cook to our liking.
I was reading somewhere that when there’s a choice on your plate, you eat more. At home, not being much of a cook, I heat up one thing or another from the fridge or a can from the shelf, add some mayonnaise and call myself satisfied. But when there are lots of little exquisitely laden plates, multi-cultured tapas, then one can become quite a pig.
After that along comes the desert, or afters, or pudding. It’s been a while. Here, the same thing: a gigantic platter with at least ten different postres and, like Pokemon, you’ve gotta catch them all. The cake and the (apparently) forty-strong staff all smiling as my daughter blew out the candle.
My granddaughter’s boyfriend was the driver, sitting there poor chap with his glass of water. The rest of us, to a greater or lesser extent, drank beers, wine, gin and tonics and a shot or two of tequila.
Friday morning, I had no hangover but noticed I had put on over half a kilo.