THE ALLEY VIEW GRILL is on an alley. This isn’t Matthew’s first visit; he has already been there for lunch, to look the place over. That’s his usual procedure: visit for lunch to get a general idea of the place and decide whether it’s worth reviewing. If it is, he makes a mental list of things to look for at dinner. No notes. His reviews are always based on one lunch visit and one dinner visit — unless a place doesn’t serve lunch, in which case he reviews one dinner visit — and that’s that. He is only reimbursed for a lunch visit and a dinner visit, one meal at lunch, two at dinner, one cocktail at lunch, two at dinner. He’s familiar with the argument against reviewing in this way: suppose the chef is having an off night? B. W. Beath and Matthew’s editor agree on this: it doesn’t matter, or it shouldn’t matter. Here’s BW articulating his stand on this issue, in response to a heated letter from a reader:
Dining is like going to the theater. Cooking for the public is like acting. The show must go on. If the chef’s mother dies, we should not taste tears in the béarnaise.
BW endorses this attitude without reservations. Matthew isn’t so sure.
The Alley View is crowded when Matthew and Belinda arrive — jammed, in fact. This is often a bad sign, since it may mean a deliberate appeal to mass taste or current fashion, or as BW once wrote, “far worse, it may mean an unthinking appeal to mass taste or current fashion.” They are greeted by a man who would make a good wrestler. He’s bulging out of an expensive double-breasted suit, a silk-and-wool blend. From dark roots, blond hair cascades in ringlets to his shoulders. He’s holding a huge pair of chrome-plated pliers with blue rubber grips. He gives Matthew and Belinda a big smile, displaying dozens of paper-white teeth. Matthew takes an immediate dislike to him. “Here for an extraction?” the wrestler asks.
That can’t be what he asks. He must be asking whether Matthew has a reservation. “Barber,” Matthew says.
“Uh-uh,” says the wrestler, shaking his head. Another big smile. “Guess again.”
Maybe we should leave, thinks Matthew. This might be leading to some kind of serious trouble. He has learned that one never knows when one is going to run into a psychotic and rub him the wrong way with an innocent remark. An apparently simple-minded, baffled smile seems the safest response, certainly safer than words. You just can’t tell about words. The remark you make may turn out to have been the psychotic’s mother’s last words or some other hair-trigger tripper.
Matthew smiles a simpleminded, baffled smile.
“Dentist!” the wrestler says, raising the pliers in front of Matthew’s face.
“Oh, is that what you said? ‘Extraction.’ I thought that was what you said, but it didn’t seem likely, so I thought you must have asked if I had a reservation. Extraction. Sure. No, I mean. No thanks. I do have a reservation, though. Barber. The name is Barber.” He feels like an idiot.
“Barber. Mister Barber. We’ll have a table for you in just a few minutes. Would you like to have a drink while you wait?”
They would, so they go to the bar. The crowd is lively, almost entirely composed of people younger than they. Matthew tries out, mentally, a string of adjectives that BW could use to describe them in the review. He comes up with attractive, well dressed, talkative, ebullient, vapid. The last isn’t a fair assessment. These people are upsetting him because they’re young, attractive, well dressed, talkative, ebullient. Most of them seem to know one another; Matthew feels that he’s an outsider, that he and Belinda have been given the once-over, fairly discreetly he has to admit, identified as outsiders, dismissed as uninteresting, and are being tolerated, though they aren’t really welcome, as if they were trying to elbow their way in, taking up space that would be better occupied by someone more attractive, better-dressed, more talkative and ebullient.
Matthew elbows his way to the bar. Over the bar a neon sign spells “Champagne” in green script, a prompt for neophyte drinkers. Work on that idea, Matthew tells himself. BW can use that. He orders a couple of Bombay martinis. The bartender takes the glasses and the Bombay from a freezer under the bar and pours the gin directly into the glasses. At no time does Matthew see vermouth. He doesn’t mind this, really — he likes a frozen Bombay now and then — but this glass of gelid gin is not a martini; it’s a joke at the expense of the martini, a sarcastic remark about the martini. Matthew takes it personally.
In Topical Guide 415, Mark Dorset considers Marketing: Persuasion; and Drinking: Cocktails: The Martini from this episode.
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🎧 415: The Alley View Grill ...