I got home late on Friday with no real plan for dinner, other than to roast some turkey breast I had in the fridge.
Having no plan is a bad idea: it makes you vulnerable to a rushed improvisation that isn’t fully thought through. This time, I was doing ok—I roasted the turkey, roasted some potatoes, and cooked some pasta, while making a simple alfredo sauce with some bleu and fontina cheese melted in it—and then suddenly I wasn’t doing ok because I thought “oh, use a bit of the cooking water and a couple of eggs to enrich the sauce” and I ended up turning a really nice thick alfredo sauce into a watery pasta soup that lost most of its flavor. It looks ok here, but trust me, it wasn’t.
Then we went to see “Dune 2” the next day, which I quite liked. I may write about it this week as a case study in adaptation, which I’m thinking about again because I’m toying with teaching my course on adaptations of history again. (It didn’t go that well last time, substantially because my first time out it was Spring 2020 and the pandemic pretty well crushed the momentum, but also because there were some design issues.)
Anyway, afterwards, we went to a favorite restaurant on the Main Line that we’ve probably eaten at thirty or forty times over the last decade, a gastropub that’s known for its bar and some Belgian dishes in particular. We’ve never really needed reservations before, but just recently the place seems to be slightly more popular than it has been, though it’s always had a steady crowd.
There’s that uncomfortable moment with a place you go to a lot where something seems off in how they’re handling the front-of-the-house part of their operations but where the kitchen is still doing the same good things. You wonder if maybe the place changed hands, but then you see the owner there and realize that’s not it. In this case, we got seated despite not having a reservation (there were actually a lot of vacant tables and it was early) and then for more than twenty minutes, nobody acknowledged we were there. Even worse, we got the famous averted eyes thing from all the servers every time they passed by us—that thing that servers do when there’s some strong reason they don’t want to make eye contact with a particular table. I ran through theories: a shift change? feuding between servers about evenly dividing tables? kitchen got hammered and asked the servers to slow down taking new tickets? Just as we were about to get up and leave, we got waited on and everything went smoothly from that point on.
It was odd—and really aggravating—just because we’d been there so many times and it was consistently good with service as well as food. But it made me realize that it had been years since I’d run into something like this in a restaurant of any kind. Maybe that’s because I’m pickier the older I get even when I go to affordable everyday places, but I also think it’s another sign that restaurants generally have improved in overall quality over the last three or four decades, including with service and professionalism. I almost miss going into a place and being able to quickly diagnose some profound what-the-fuckery about the front-of-the-house set-up. There was a weird ambitious place more than a decade ago just off of Route 476 in Villanova where they had a fancy white-tablecloth place upstairs, a kind of food-court gourmet market on the right on the ground floor and a gastropub on the left side of the ground floor and the staff were hopelessly confused about traffic through the whole operation—they’d tell you they couldn’t seat because of reservations for the gastropub when it was essentially empty but it turned out they were looking at the reservations for the upstairs joint, which was also keeping its own reservations list despite the downstairs manager being responsible for the whole place. I don’t see too many of those “oh no this place is dead before it even starts” kind of front-of-the-house misfires now. The food’s a different matter—sometimes you go in a new place and see that the place is just never going to make it unless they get a different chef or a different food concept.
Anyway, yesterday I decided to do noodles right. So this time I stir-fried up some ramen noodles with a bit of roasted pork belly and some vegetables and just a small amount of soy sauce, sake and rice vinegar in order to redeem Friday’s failure.
Victory! And so the weekend ended on a culinary grace note.
I also found this to be a 21st century improvement on the Herbert original take on Chani. I guess we’ll see if Zendaya is able to carry off a grander role in Dune 3. She still has such a baby face. Paul becoming Harkonnen in more senses than one was an interesting read on the problem of routinizing charisma.
I am up to hear your comments on Dune 2. I also saw it and found it better than Dune 1. Maybe it’s because Timothee C’s scrawny look is right for desert warfare and still suits, somehow. I like to see him scruffy.