Alain Ducasse (cont'd)

<< back

And the eight waiters — or the three to five — would glide around silently on the carpet with plates and platters and bowls crowded with two types of tiny breads and silver trays balancing big domed lids and tiny ceramic salt and pepper cellars with tiny ceramic spoons dug into their contents and glass plates carrying two types of butter (I liked the flat-pressed shell-shaped kind called "demi-sal" with some saltiness to it over the wheel of yellowy butter that left a filmy oil feeling on your tongue). Or the waiters would be gliding around on the carpet fetching bottles of wine to splash out a dollop or two into a glass before returning the bottles to their exile on the far side of the room.

And these eight waiters would glide across the room and, over by the door especially, would almost bump into each other all the time in their quiet and unobtrusive rush. Only there were so many of them, weaving and scraping just past each other by the door, and being so silent and so unobtrusive, that it made a mad whirlwind of suits and bow ties and silver plates and platters, like an eight-lane highway with the sound turned off and no barriers. They were so unobtrusive it was distracting at your peripheral vision, like a headache that starts down behind the base of your skull and creeps up your jaw as silent as those waiters so by the time it makes itself cozy in your temples you know its too late to take any aspirin but you take some anyway.

Then, at one point, there were nine waiters in the room, which was one more than there were tables and seemed a bit excessive to me. One of them was an Important Waiter, who only appeared occasionally and was allowed to wear a straight tie and not-short hair and glasses and who never carried anything into the room as the others did but who I had seen several times taking platters off the trays of the other, bow-tied waiters and serve the trays to the appropriate tables himself, stealing the other waiters' thunder, which was a bit unfair considering all the silent, unobtrusive dodging of one another they had been doing.

The Important Waiter came over to my table but he wasn't carrying anything, not from another waiter's tray or at all, and instead he leaned over and pardoned himself and told me that I really must eat that slab of turbot perched atop its sliced mushroom discs showered with almond slivers as it was gong to get cold and was really much better warm, and I felt like telling him that for $260, which was what my bill ended up being, that I could damn well do as I pleased regarding the temperature of my turbot. But instead I took it as a cue to close up my little black notebook and put away my little black pen and get down to the business of eating these victuals, seeing as how I was paying them a very great deal of money to make such a very big fuss over my lunch.

Copyright 1999 © by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.