A LIFE LIVED THROUGH DINING BY JEREMY WAYNE
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WONDERFUL DINING
FOOD & SPIRITS
Like T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, I often feel as I have measured out my life in — coffee spoons — restaurant coffee spoons, that is. As regular readers of WAG may have seen in my potted biography at the front of the magazine, I began my “professional” career at age 6, when I invented a game called Restaurants, played at English teatime, in which I would “order” cheese on toast or scrambled eggs, which my late mother would then patiently cook and serve. She was a good as well as gracious cook, a rare combination indeed, and she doubled as a pretty waitress, smiling contentedly with a mother’s love and indulgence when the precocious budding critic within me awarded the restaurant 10 out of 10 — which he invariably did. Around the time I turned 9, we took a family vacation to Spain. At a restaurant in Seville, one of those rather dispiriting “tipico” restaurants designed for tourists, where the laminated plastic menu appeared in several languages, each indicated by its national flag, the typically Spanish entrées featured fish and chips and roast chicken. The chicken came in two portion sizes — either a whole chicken or a half. “I’ll have the whole chicken,” ventured squeaky-voiced, obnoxious little me, without having even been asked. “Jeremy,” my father said gently, looking down at me querulously through his black-rimmed specs, “is that wise?” He reasonably suggested that a whole chicken might turn out to be overly large. Wouldn’t it make sense to start with half a chicken? Then, if I was still hungry, he would happily order me another half. Eminently fair and sensible, but little Jeremy did not agree. “I want a whole chicken,” I said, my voice becoming a little squeakier and my little foot stamping under the table. “Let’s just start with a half, like Daddy says,” put in my mother, in that annoying way parents have of making it sound as if they are the parent and you are just a child. “No,” I said, “absolutely not. It must be a whole chicken and, if not, I’ll… I’ll….” In fact, I did not have a clue what I would do, but suddenly, inspiration grabbed me by the collar of my little pastel blue polo shirt and I jumped up, out of my chair, ran the length of the room and out of the restaurant and into the black Andalusian night. I don’t recall how I was reunited with my family but I do know that I came to no harm and my tantrum was
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MAY 2020
quickly forgiven. I also know that, forever after, when I was in a restaurant with my parents, and chicken was on the menu, I would be asked whether I intended ordering the whole bird or just the half. Key moments in my life have been punctuated by restaurants. My first paycheck, earned teaching English during my gap year at a firm of French aeronautical engineers, was blown at La Grande Cascade, the glorious 19th century restaurant located in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It was a dinner I will never forget. When I arrived in Oxford, England, as an undergraduate — lonely, nervous, knowing nobody — I passed a glorious, circular neoclassical building at dusk on my first day. There through the ground floor windows I could see what looked like people dining, each table set with a beautiful table lamp — such a magnificent setting. “Aha,” I thought to myself, delight replacing anxiety,
Selection of dishes at Chutney Masala. Courtesy Chutney Masala.
