Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

After hanging up, he’d immediately called Washington to gloat, and to invite him and Veronica to dinner. Washington pretended to be only mildly interested.

“How can it be a secret restaurant?” Corrine asked when they were en route in a cab. “What does that even mean?”

“Well, basically that they don’t have a listed phone number or address or a sign or even a name on the door and in order to get in you need to be referred by somebody who’s already been there.”

“Do we know anything about it?” Corrine asked. “Such as what kind of food they serve?”

“I think it’s kind of Japanese avant-garde.”

“How can food be avant-garde?”

“If it’s really, really fresh? Anyway, Carlo said it was brilliant.”

“It all sounds deeply pretentious. And Carlo weighs three hundred pounds, for God’s sake. He’d eat his own children if you dunked them in Bolognese sauce.” Corrine could happily subsist on green salad and canned salmon and had limited patience for culinary adventurism.

“Actually, he’s lost a ton of weight,” Russell told her.

“Ah, the cocaine diet.”

“No, he stopped that after his heart attack.”

—

At the corner of Lafayette and Bond, they found the Lees, who’d been searching for the place. Russell had been less precise with his directions than the woman on the phone, but after locating the clothing boutique, he tried the buzzer one door to the west. Just as they were about to try the door on the other side, they were admitted by a slim young man in a tight red suit. After a brief interrogation, they were led through a long hallway into a small room furnished with a heterogeneous mix of tables and chairs — from a store on Fourth Avenue dedicated to fifties design — all of which were for sale here. The walls were adorned with framed book covers — Japanese manga featuring pop-eyed schoolgirls and ninjas, as well as the equally lurid and stylized covers of Avon paperbacks from the forties and fifties— The Chastity of Gloria Boyd, I Married a Dead Man, Six Deadly Dames.

It was blessedly free of the standard tchotchkes of the typical sushi joint. Only two very young couples were already seated, leaving four tables vacant.

“I hate it when I feel like I should whisper,” Corrine whispered.

“We’re just a little early,” Washington said. “Apparently my man here couldn’t get us a prime-time reservation.”

“I could have gotten a later reservation for two, ” Russell said. “Maybe I should have.”

“You boys sit across from each other so you can rhapsodize about the food,” Corrine said. “Just don’t start arguing about Clinton and Obama again, please.”

“Yeah, let’s definitely give that subject a rest,” Veronica said. Their household, too, was divided on this issue, Veronica being a staunch backer of Hillary, Washington equally ardent for Obama.

The waiter, who didn’t appear to be of legal drinking age, informed them that the house cocktail was called the Rudyard Kipling and combined umeshu, Japanese plum brandy, with a fifteen-year-old Kentucky small-batch bourbon and house-made blood-orange bitters.

“What the fuck’s the difference between house-made and homemade?” Washington asked. “Everywhere I go lately, it’s house-made fettuccini and every other goddamn thing.”

“Homemade, technically, could refer to something made elsewhere, in some kind of artisanal environment,” Russell explained. “House-made tells you it was made here, in-house.”

“Hallelujah!” Veronica said. “My vocabulary is growing by the minute. But really, Russell, artisanal environment ?”

He shrugged and ordered the house cocktail for all, declining to ask, given the existing level of skepticism around the table, why the miscegenated blend of Asian and American ingredients was named for the poet who wrote that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The bartender, he’d been told, was one of the new breed of scholar/mixologists who’d made a name for himself at a celebrated Lower East Side absinthe bar.

“Russell,” Corrine said, “you know I hate it when you order for everybody. Maybe some of us don’t want the damn Kipling.”

“Forgive me, my love, but Carlo said it’s not to be missed. And as for the food, there’s no choice anyway. It’s a tasting menu.”

“Oh God, the dread tasting menu. Another night of endless plates. Death by a thousand bites.”

“Seriously,” Veronica said, “Washington took me to AKA last week and I thought I was going to puke, there was so much food.”

“That wasn’t the food; it was the four bottles of wine we drank while waiting for the food to come.”

“God, I know, Russell took me there last month,” Corrine said. “Thirteen courses spread over four hours. He definitely didn’t get lucky that night.”

“ Tasting menu, ” Veronica said. “Two of the scariest words in the English language.”

“For you girls, maybe,” Washington said. “For us, the two scariest words are breast reduction. ”

“Hilarious,” Veronica said.

He couldn’t get away with that joke, Russell thought, if Veronica wasn’t a C cup. “The portions here are very small,” he noted.

“You’ve never even been here,” Corrine said.

“I’ve read about it,” Russell said.

“I thought you said it was totally under the radar.”

“There’ve been a few blog posts.”

“I feel like nobody has any primary aesthetic encounters anymore,” Corrine said. “Every time we pick up a book or sit down to a movie, we’ve already read the commentary.”

“I’m surprised to hear you admit that dining could be an aesthetic experience.”

“Some of you certainly think so.”

“Look at the waiter,” Washington said. “That motherfucker’s positively anorexic.”

“That’s a good sign, at least,” said Veronica.

The cocktails arrived, along with tiny plates of minuscule crabs. Corrine and Veronica studiously ignored the tiny crabs and resumed their conversation.

“Not bad,” Russell said, crunching on a crab pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

“Boring,” Washington countered.

“The cocktail’s good.” Since Russell had gotten the reservation, he assumed a proprietary degree of responsibility.

The waiter arrived with the first course: “Chef would like you to begin with O-dori ebi, ” he said, placing in front of each of them a plate with a squirming deshelled prawn.

“It’s alive,” Corrine said with horror.

“This is known in English as dancing shrimp. After shell is removed, chef place a small piece of wasabi on spine of shrimp, which stimulate him to dance.”

“That’s so disgusting. And barbaric.”

“Enjoy.”

“I’ll take yours,” Russell said once the waiter had retreated.

“Take mine,” Veronica said to Washington.

Russell downed his shrimp and then Corrine’s.

“Tasty,” Washington said. “Simple, but strong presentation.”

“You two are appalling,” Corrine said. “I’m going to call PETA.”

“Let’s just hope the vertebrates don’t dance,” Washington said. “So what’s happening with the Kohout book?”

“He sent me some pages. They’re good. We’re publishing in the spring.”

“You do know that Briskin called me to shop your offer?”

This revelation caught Russell entirely by surprise. “Well, thanks for not playing the game.”

“I don’t know how glad you should be. I always thought he was a slippery bastard. I heard Harcourt passed, too.”

“That worked out for me, then,” Russell said, trying to sound nonchalant.