Deceiving appearances in a ’swanky’ restaurant

It had been a while since I was in one: The old-style restaurant. By old-style, I don’t mean a mediaeval tavern where food is served by lusty maids who slam down jugs of ale in front of you while looking at you lasciviously. I mean pre-2000 old-style.

This is the type of restaurant that you don’t see so much now. The one you’d bring a parent with your second pay-cheque.

The one where things are kept hidden. There is a trend now in restaurantology to let you see the total inner-workings of the restaurant. You are shown the piping on the ceiling, while the lights hang down from metal cable ducts. The brickwork is exposed to show that the walls are real. You can see right into the kitchen where the staff are hard at work.

All that’s missing is a very visible playing out of the affair between Emily, the feisty waitress, and Alvaro, the brooding sous-chef; or a man welding together bits of an art-installation in the corner.

This wasn’t that kind of restaurant. This was an “isn’t-this-swanky?” restaurant, where you were like a visitor to a Mammy’s house and everything was kept hidden.

The ceiling and all its nasty untidy wires and air conditioning were safely tucked away above the tiles. One waiter was taken aside and whispered to severely by a woman with the steely smile of a Duchess of the Dining-room. Someone took our coat. The menus were leather-bound, not carved into dried yam-skins. This place was not full of millennials telling each other that “YOU SOOO HAVE TO WATCH IT — IT’S ON NETFLIX NOW”.

Instead the predominant constituent seemed to be rural parents and their adult children-with-notions. It was a great place for a thing I call casting. Casting is a cross between eavesdropping and people-watching. But unlike people-watching, you only have a limited amount of time to observe your targets because they are all watching as well, and you can’t eavesdrop because people don’t talk loud enough. After a surreptitious look at a nearby table, you then cast the diners in a short film in your head, where you’ve written all the dialogue.

Near us were two parents and a son. The father looked like the father in Cyndi Lauper’s music video for ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’.

The son — who had an enviable beard — looked like he might have a long CV of ‘dynamic roles’ that didn’t add up to a whole hill of black beans. And as far as I was concerned, this is what they were saying:

“Answer your father, Brian!”

“Dad we’ve been through this. I’m not interested in taking over the business and I’m not Brian any more. I’m B7 — Design Guerrilla.”

“Well B7, I don’t care what kind of monkey you are, I need you on Monday morning at the warehouse to unload those pallets.”

Dad, I’ve told you. I won’t be there. I’ll be in Berlin at the ‘WHAT R OUI? conference.”

“That mash is lovely – so soft.”

“Don’t mind the mash, Kay. So this clown doesn’t want to go into business. What have I spent the last 20 years building it up for if he wants to go off to his oul conferences?”

And so on.

Of course, as we left the restaurant a little late, it turned out they were deep in conversation about a film and they were having a very friendly time.

Which just goes to show, appearances can be deceiving — which is the best thing about them.