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

to the Tonga room, as it’s commonly called, for the Szechuan beef or the Canton prawns. I went for the atmosphere. In terms of sheer delight, the Tonga room is the Rainbow Room of Polynesia.

On weekdays from five p.m. to seven p.m., you can sit in the bar, listen to recorded Waikiki luau music, and quaff Polynesian drinks served by waitresses clad in red Susie Wong–style dresses. (Susie Wong was another mid-century icon.) I ordered the Bora Bora Horror, a blend of rum, banana liqueur, orange-flavored brandy, and pineapple juice. Do not repeat my mistake, for this was the worst Polynesian cocktail I’ve ever tasted. I liked the five-dollar all-you-can-eat happy-hour appetizer buffet, which included admirable miniature pork buns, tiny spareribs, and steamed shrimp dumplings.

I stayed on for dinner, happily paying the three-dollar entertainment charge. And what entertainment it was. A three-piece floating—

1 1 2

A L A N R I C H M A N

yes, floating—combo adrift in a large pool that is the centerpiece of the room played perky show tunes. But the real fun came at the breaks, when lightning crackled, thunder boomed, and rain—yes, real water—

fell around the periphery of the pool. As I sat listening to the native rhythms pulse savagely and watching the lightning flicker wildly, I felt as though I was being swept away, as they used to say, to an island paradise.

It was supposed to be that way with her, all those decades ago. Our meal at the Pub-Tiki in Philadelphia was perfect, but she never looked at me the way she looked at older men. Not long afterward, we lost touch.

I called her a few months ago, just to see if she had any regrets. She told me she was divorced. I expressed my sympathies. Then she told me she was living with a man she had met in college when she was a soph-omore and he was a senior. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it.

Nothing had changed.

I told her I had never forgotten our one dinner date. She told me she hadn’t, either.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “the steak came on an inch-and-a-half-thick wooden board, and there were mashed potatoes all around it—they looked like they had been put into a tube and somebody had squeezed them out like whipped cream.”

I stopped her. She was speaking of Chateaubriand à la bouquetière, a thick cut of beef for two that was the epitome of romantic dining in the fifties and sixties. She was, of course, remembering dinner with another man. I told her how I recalled every detail of our dinner, too, especially how beautiful the Sesame Chicken Aku-Aku looked that night.

GQ, march 1996

N O T M U C H O F A M A N I N H A V A N A On my first morning in Havana, this was my breakfast: six kinds of fruit juice, kielbasa, Vienna sausage, breakfast sausage, smoked bacon, unsmoked bacon, chickpeas, peas, cucumber slices, red peppers (mixed with corn), green peppers (sautéed), french fries, ratatouille, smoked salmon (after I elbowed my way past insatiable South Americans assembling overstuffed lox sandwiches, a habit they surely picked up at Wolfie’s in Miami Beach), scrambled eggs, fried eggs, a cheese omelette (inexpertly made to order), a chicken wing, a jelly-filled crêpe, a sugared doughnut, a sugared roll, a chocolate-covered doughnut, a chocolate-covered roll, a raisin Danish, a cream-filled Danish, a cheese sandwich, a lunch-meat sandwich, a lunch-meat-and-cheese sandwich (these last three, all dreadful, out of my desire to be one with the Cuban people, who appear to eat little else), a banana, a chocolate-drizzled banana, grapefruit sections, orange sections, pineapple sections, melon sections, plain yogurt, orange-flavored yogurt, pears in syrup, four kinds of jam, two kinds of cellophane-wrapped cakes, picadillo de res (a sloppy joe–

like hash so delicious I went back for seconds), eleven cereals (I was getting full so I didn’t try them all), eleven kinds of cereal toppings (Special K with chocolate sauce is tastier than expected), sparkling water, mineral water, coffee, and tea.

A string trio played softly as I dined, slowly and with enormous resolve, finishing everything I took from my hotel’s breakfast buffet except the omelette, the sandwiches, and the chocolate-drizzled banana.

1 1 4

A L A N R I C H M A N

In a country where almost everyone except tourists goes hungry, wasting food feels even more immoral than eating too much of it.

On that same morning, I visited a sixty-two-year-old Cuban woman named Nilsa. This is what she had for breakfast: a kind of powdered cereal commonly thought to be made from soy, to which she added water to make mush.

As patently offensive as the contrast in our fare appeared, I was almost as dismayed by the explanation behind her request that I not use her full name. In Cuba, the spoken word can be judged inappropriate by all manner of overseers, including the ever-watchful Commit-tee for the Defense of the Revolution, a semi-vigilante, semi-volunteer organization made up of people who in most countries are referred to as neighbors. The members of the CDR are not gossips. They are for real. Even a Cuban as patriotic as Nilsa, a supporter of the revolution, a woman who went into the mountains during the literacy campaign of 1961 to teach reading to farmers, has to worry that her words will be harshly judged.

I spent two weeks in Havana, entering without a visa and violating all manner of Cuban and American restrictions—the American government forbids tourism to Cuba but readily allows journalists to go there, while Cuba welcomes American tourists but insists that journalists apply for authorization. By going in the way I did, with permission from nobody, I was able to spend my time without government supervision.

I met with no officials, took no specially arranged tours, and wandered wherever I wished. I did not enter the country to promote Cuban cigars,