Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

the space is occupied by an oversize Italian restaurant called Chez Guido, which is the most dispirited eating establishment in the F O R K I T O V E R

9 7

city. The room is high-ceilinged and filled with pillars and chandeliers, which makes it look more like a cavernous meeting hall than a restaurant. There’s so much space between tables that the place feels empty even when it’s full, and there’s no music, just eerie silence. In a city of terrible service, Chez Guido offers some of the worst, inasmuch as the waiters tend to congregate in the back room and read magazines.

I started my meal with a carpaccio of fish the waiter claimed was tuna. It wasn’t like any tuna I’d ever eaten, not in texture, taste, or appearance. It was pale, a ghost of seafood past. A risotto was gummy but the scaloppini “chez Guido” was absolutely first-rate. The noodles were fresh, the scallops of pork the best meat I ate in Saigon, and the tomato sauce not bad at all. I sniffed and skipped the grated cheese.

Prewar, perhaps?

The Caravelle, the third in a lineup of top-notch hotels surrounding the theater building, was a favorite spot for American journalists during the war and is remembered as the home of the Caravelle Man-ifesto—in 1960, a few enlightened Vietnamese politicians met there to draw up a document calling for civil rights reforms. They were promptly jailed. During the war, I liked the restaurant on the top floor.

My unit held farewell dinners there for officers about to return home.

Now there’s a restaurant serving Japanese food on the tenth floor and one with a menu of French, Vietnamese, and Chinese dishes on the ninth. That’s where Ron and I ate, mostly because I was taken with the decor: huge overhead fans that resembled propellers on WW II fighter planes; bizarre, spidery chandeliers; badly tended plants; and a brightly lit advertisement for Ken Y ice cream over the cashier’s desk. Nothing on the menu cost more than three dollars, and while the food wasn’t exceptional, it was worth the price.

The two most famous restaurants in Saigon are Maxim’s, which has a cabaret downstairs and a girlie bar upstairs, and Madame Dai’s Bib-liothèque, where guests dine in the library of a beautiful home. At least the fortunate ones do. When Ron and I arrived, we were shown to a table in the garage, right next to Madame Dai’s motorscooter.

We declined, to the surprise of Madame Dai, and moved on to 9 8

A L A N R I C H M A N

Maxim’s, lured by the famous name. The downstairs cabaret and restaurant offer a lot for your money: an amateurish but enjoyable floor show, a bathroom attendant eager to shpritz customers with an evil-smelling cologne, and reasonably priced French and Chinese food. As soon as we sat down, we received complimentary snacks, including cashews in airline-type packets. We ordered Chinese mushrooms with shrimp stuffing, baked squab with rock salt, fried shrimp on toast, steamed fish with ginger, and braised spinach with crab meat. Every dish was bland.

Our check, including the meal, the floor show, the tip, and two beers, was less than $35.

The entertainment highlight was a young woman in what looked like a prom dress—do Communists have proms?—holding a rose and singing “Unchained Melody.” Men flushed with ardor jumped from their chairs to press carnations into her hands. As soon as she finished her performance, everybody got up and left. Everybody but us. Only Ron and I remained to applaud the tenacious young lady who performed a less-than-haunting “Ave Maria” on her cello.

For dessert, I ordered a mocha soufflé. Ron had crêpes Suzette.

Extravagant? Perhaps, but where else in the world can you get two luxurious French desserts in a place called Maxim’s for $1.44.

As I sat there on my final night in Saigon, eating my slightly collapsed soufflé, the seven-piece orchestra broke into a lush arrangement of

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” I glanced up and realized that the eyes I was looking into were my dentist’s. And you thought the Vietnam War ended badly.

GQ, september 1994

M I A M I W E I S S

Early Bird humor, overheard outside the Publix supermarket, Coconut Creek, Florida.

FIRST MAN: I can prove Jesus wasn’t Jewish.

SECOND MAN: How?

FIRST MAN: If he was Jewish, he wouldn’t have been at the Last Supper. He’d have been at an Early Bird.

I’ve come to south Florida to explore one of the nation’s oddest food trends, the Early Bird Special. If you’ve never had an Early Bird, it means you are too rich, too thin, or too Christian. I’ve found my way to the city of Coconut Creek, which is ground zero for the Early Bird phenomenon—nearly a fifth of its population is both elderly and Jewish.

At the moment, I’m sitting in the kitchen of the world’s absolute authority on the Early Bird. (The Formica, incidentally, is spotless.) The authority is a woman of more than seventy-five years who reacts to a few dollars off the price of a stuffed-flounder dinner the way others react to a winning Lotto ticket. The woman is my mother.

I know what you’re thinking: pretty cushy work. Fly to Florida, see Mom, take a few notes, fly home with a slab of brisket packed in ice.

You don’t know my mother. Food she gives you. Editorial cooperation is something else. This is what happens when Norman, my father, suggests to Ida, my mother, that we begin our explorations at Love’s, a legendary Fort Lauderdale Early Bird eatery.

1 0 0

A L A N R I C H M A N

IDA: Don’t tell him to go there. Nobody goes there.

NORMAN: What do you mean, nobody goes there? It’s been in business five years. When we went, there were lines. Everybody goes there.

IDA: When we went there, it was called something else.

NORMAN: It used to be called Belaire. You have to say, for the price it wasn’t bad.

IDA: