Saturday with the Siblings

December 6, 2005

On Saturday night, the missus and I went to dinner. The establishment we patronized that night is called Sibling Rivalry.

(So you know the wife picked it out, because it has its own web site.

The places I choose only get on the web when the police blotter makes it into the online copy of the local newspaper. Someday her class and good taste will rub off on me.

But not today.)

The restaurant was a good time, actually. It’s run by two brothers (hence the name), and the menu is set up in an Iron Chefesque sort of way. In the center column of the menu was listed an ingredient; to either side, each chef listed a dish containing the ingredient. Thus, you could choose an appetizer and entree from one chef, or the other, or mix and match between. To keep it fair, of course. An equitable kitchen is a happy kitchen, after all.

Luckily, the place wasn’t entirely Iron Cheffian. There were no squid innards, or kangaroo testicles, or Buick LeSabre carbeurators among the list of ingredients. So the menu was fairly safe — apart from the fear that the chefs would sabotage each others’ creations in the kitchen, of course. The last thing you want is to order roast chicken and end up with kangaroo testes. Because that would completely ruin the choice of wine.

I was genuinely worried, though. They really play up the ‘brother vs. brother’ angle, and lord knows there are enough people spitting in my soup for good reasons already, without getting extra loogies because TweedleDee is hogging the best ladles tonight. But the waitress assured us that both of the chefs were far too busy and important to actually be in the kitchen, ever. Sort of how Todd English hasn’t stepped foot in his Boston restaurant since the Clinton administration. It’s all minions and recipe books these days, it would seem.

Anyway, dinner was generally pleasant, interrupted only sporadically by a group of older — and hopefully drunker — ladies at the next table. For a while, I heard laughter and soft singing coming from their direction, but managed to tune them out. Then the woman facing our table exclaimed, in a loud, nasal, Long Islander accent:

‘I’m tellin’ ya, that’s Nelly FurTAHDo! Seriously, it’s Nelly FurTAHDo. Trust me, I’m nevah wrong about these things. Nelly FurTAHHHHHHDo!‘

I prayed that was the end of it. But a few minutes later, I saw her singing to the rest of the table, with that self-assured ‘See? See?!?‘ look that we all get when we’re hopelessly drunk. And wrong. And from Long Island. Soon enough, she cackled again:

‘No, you’re WROong! That’s Edie BrickEHLL. What does Edie BrickEHLL have to do with Nelly FurTAHDo? Nothing. That’s what.‘

Frankly, it was a bit annoying after a while. It nearly put me off my turkey wattle and corrugated aluminum siding risotto. But I soldiered on, and eventually things quieted down.

Then, we walked next door to see a play. Kiss of the Spider Woman, specifically, which is about gay men in a South American prison. So maybe the wife doesn’t have the ‘class and good taste’ trump card, after all. Because if you replace the ‘men’ in my description with ‘women’, that’s exactly like the movie I watched on Skinemax the night before. And in both shows, I saw a man’s bare ass. Which is one bare man’s ass per show too many, in my book, but hey — that’s ‘the arts’. You have to take the bad with the good sometimes. To put it another way, into every blissful life of ‘tasteful’ nude lady photos, a little naked dude ass must fall.

Hey, I don’t makes the rules, people. Talk to the NEA. I’m out.