Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: restaurants

  • pizzagram

    Woman at the next table films her third slow sweep of the entire restaurant. I am stuffing long reins of mozzarella in my mouth. I wipe my face and go over.

    ‘Hi. So sorry to intrude. I just really don’t like being background scenery in your panoramic videos, I just want to eat my messy pizza without ending up on your Instagram. Could you please not do that?’ I have broken the fourth wall. She looks stunned. The couple at the next table roll their eyes and purse their mouths.

    Everyone else in the room including half the waiters is staring down into their phones, apart from one man seated at a large table who has met my gaze and grinned sadly, as though we are the only two left awake. Suspending conversation in favour of objects is objectionable. Objecting to being rendered an object is human. It seems to me as we turn this corner we are normalising all the wrong things.

  • a Berlin evening, so cold, so sweet

    After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.

    The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.

    Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.

  • this land is our land

    Was quite excited to work out last night by decoding the allergies notice in a Korean BBQ restaurant (‘alergia’) which began ‘en caso de…’ – ‘in case of…’ – that ‘casa’, house, must mean your case. It’s your shell. And mi casa es su casa. My case is your case, we all breathe the same air, death and the roiling adventure of this life will inflict us all.

    On the way home we passed again the man whose giant telescope, set up in the square outside the Teatro Real, has shown me on previous visits Jupiter, and her moons, and – unbelievably – Saturn, looking like a chalk sketch much stouter and smaller than I had always pictured Saturn. He busks with it. Drags it down there, I can only suppose, on the back of a small truck and sets it up pointed at whichever body in the heavens is tonight most significant, then he stands artlessly waiting, perhaps not polishing the lens but minutely adjusting the sights after each visit, inviting all and sundry to take a look through his machinery at the distant miracles now shedding some light on us – too little light, and too late. We didn’t stop to look through the lens again but my companion pointed out the joy on the man’s face, the way when someone steps up onto his wooden footstool to apply their eye to the eyepiece stooping to reach it he himself bends in, unconsciously it seems, and eagerly, as though he is sharing their experience and imagining their wonder. The first time I saw Jupiter in a long line of moons I was almost crying. Now every time the man and I wave to one another, satisfaction on our faces, a strange friendship. Mi luna es su luna, inevitably.

  • king of little Thailand

    Unable to stomach any more Spanish food I went out and found a tiny Thai place. It was up a narrow staircase from the paved street where people wander in the evening in great numbers; the combination of Thai intricacy with Spanish kitsch in the decor was eye-watering. The girl tried to seat me at a little table under a limeskin-green wall but I asked her: can’t I please sit and look out? “This table is reserved,” she said, indicating the last little window seat. The owner came out and asked her what was going on. He was a dapper Thai gentleman who reminded me of the portrait of the King above the bar. He came over and swept the chair back invitingly, ushering me in and then jamming the table back further into the alcove, saying ruefully, “For Thai people,” as I worked my legs in under it. “Or,” I said, “Spanish people.” “Yes…” opening a large menu in front of me. I sat eating my dinner all alone and gazing down into the street where people towed their children, and several tall black men down either side of the pedestrian zone were running an illegal market, holding their stalls (spread on canvas) by four guy ropes, one at each corner, and all of them looking around constantly, alert. There seems to also be a trade in contraband recycled cardboard; I saw one man towing a giant carton by a rope like a small boy playing battleships come speeding down the alleyway and hastily harvest the best, cleanest folded boxes from the large pile all the local shops had planted out under the streetlamp; without waste of time he towed his bounty away. Not five minutes later another man pulled up diagonally across the walkway in a dirty white unmarked van and jumping out threw his back door open; looking about him nervously he stashed several large cartons of folded boxes into the back of his truck and then drove away, still looking anxiously all around. The restaurant owner came back to ask would I like a “cocktail” “of the house”, “it is a kind of Baileys,” he said, in English, “so you digest.” Thank you, I said, I would. And when he came back with the bill (I think it’s “la quinta, por favore,”) I used the formulation taught me by eavesdropping on Germans in cafes in Berlin: “Just give me fifteen back, please.” As he turned to go I touched his arm as lightly as I could. He could have made four times the money on my table had he given it to a group. “You are a very cultured person,” I said, “thank you for your hospitality. I appreciate it.” “Oh,” he said, “oh!” and touched his open hand over his heart. I grabbed my bag and ran away shyly and at the top of the staircase he caught my eye as a large group of Germans came in and his hand went again unconsciously over his heart.

  • citizen’s arrest

    I walked into one of those joyless lunchtime buffets so ill-suited to Chinese cuisine. The name of the place was China-Haus, China-Garten, something like that. They had long ranks of bains marie, tepid with cornflour. Another woman came in behind me, rather young with a lot of glossy hair spilling over her parka, and stood there pulling off her gloves. “Do you have coffee?” she asked the waitress. “Not… not really.” “Oh good. I’ll have a latte machiatto. Do you have aloe vera juice?” I started to laugh. The waitress looked over her shoulder at the kitchen, uneasily. “We basically just have normal coffee.” “Oh,” said the coffee loving yoga monster, dismally. She was so bewildered that I sort of fell in love with her humanity.

  • you are like a fresh cranberry

    God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.

    We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.

    They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.

    Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.