Well, I will admit right off the bat that if someone cooks for me I am what might be called easy. Meaning, basically, that I am close to being putty in their hands. Adorable putty, but still: putty.
I'm a cheap date is what I'm saying. If someone starts plying me with good beer, it doesn't take much to get me messily shitfaced and into the back seat with my pants down around my ankles. (One of the several reasons I do not really drink, apart from having a good beer with a meal. That along with a healthy loathing of hangovers and a face that breaks out when I begin pouring more than one or two beers into it.) Same thing with a decent meal. (And please note the word 'decent.' I do have some standards, as flexible as those standards may get when someone goes to the trouble of preparing me a plate of good-looking chow and sets it in front of me.) If a member of the opposite gender -- that lovely, eternally fascinating gender that does not consist of males -- wants to get to me, spending time with me over good meals is one effective way to make inroads. Prepare the food yourself and the odds of bending my will to yours are increased by factor of (pauses to calculate, lips moving pathetically from the effort to wade through higher math) many hundreds.
All of which is to say that I just came back from lunch in a neighborhood joint, a meal that underlined one of the reasons I love this city, this country: it's so easy to eat well here.
I'm not talking about a high-level bistro. Just a barrio eatery, the kind of place that pushes coffee and sweet rolls in the morning (plus harder stuff to the occasional a.m. boozehound), breaks out the white paper tablecloths for the lunch crowd, then sells espresso and beer into the evening hours. Nothing special, nothing even close to fancy. But an hour and a half ago, I stumbled in looking for a meal and they responded by throwing a couple of plates of excellent food in my direction, leaving me in an altered state, babbling grateful nonsense to the patient, plump 50-something waitress.
The kind of food that makes it easy to page through the paper, all the bad news rolling ineffectually past, the sports and arts sections bringing simple, superficial pleasure. That makes it easy to sit and eavesdrop now and then on the 50-something couple next to me, with benign enjoyment. That leaves me even happier than I would normally be to see how half the place began paying attention to a game show on the telly, the help calling out possible answers.
Simple pleasures. Not that more sophisticated pleasures aren't a ball, I just get huge mileage from the simple ones.
Like I said: a pushover. A cheap date. And then some.
España, te quiero.
rws 10:58 AM [+]
Comments:
well they do say that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach but I never realised that you're such a pushover!
Post a Comment
# posted
by 
: 4:54 AM
: 4:54 AM