420: Belinda’s studying ...
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 1 continues
BELINDA’S STUDYING her menu. Matthew’s giving the appearance of studying his, but actually he’s studying the room. Since every dish on the menu is, according to Boston Biweekly dogma, supposed to be an equally good representative of the quality of the food, what he orders is never terribly important to the review. It’s more important that he be aware of the context. Right now he would like his immediate context to include a waiter. He wants to order another martini. There are waiters in sight, but none is looking in Matthew’s direction, and none seems to regard Matthew and Belinda as his responsibility. Here is BW on waiters who do not deign to wait, from his review of Miranda’s Verandah:
They belong to the school of waiters and waitresses who take as their motto, “Circumstances may have forced me to take a job as a waiter, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lower myself to the point of actually serving anybody.” Waiters of this school chat among themselves most of the time, and then, when they are good and ready, amble over to your table and drop by to see what you might want, manifesting in their manner the suggestion that they might exert their influence to have some lackey bring it, if you are found acceptable. Often they arrive at our table still chuckling over the witticisms of their fellows, and sometimes they share these bons mots with favored patrons, with whom they join in happy rounds of table hopping. To be accepted as worthy by a waiter of this ilk is to be considered one of the few patrons as bright and chic as the waitpeople and busfolk. Where this attitude prevails, it is much stronger on weekends, when outré suburbanites swarm.
Those suburbanites do swarm on weekends, congregating in murmurous throngs at restaurants BW has reviewed, regardless of whether he praises the places or damns them. They will go to a place that BW has liked because they expect to enjoy it but will go just as eagerly to a place BW has ridiculed, because they expect to enjoy feeling superior to it. They seize the opportunity to assume BW’s attitude toward it, to wear his sophistication, thus to savor, if only for the space of a meal, a life lived with the savoir-vivre of Boston Biweekly and B. W. Beath. The casual observer, seeing that these vandals wear the clothes that Boston Biweekly’s fashion critic has endorsed and take the attitude toward the restaurant that BW has endorsed, might mistake them for sophisticated adults, but BW wouldn’t be fooled. He often takes a swipe at suburbanites in his reviews. It increases his readership. They all think he’s writing about their neighbors.
[to be continued on Wednesday, February 1, 2023]
In Topical Guide 420, Mark Dorset considers Sophistication: Misguided Efforts to Acquire It; and Satire: Its Targets’ Blindness to It from this episode.
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