The Hammer
You should know this: Yoko Ono didn’t break up The Beatles. It was Paul McCartney.
But, before we get into that, let’s go back to a recent dinner out with my wife and son.
Christina and I have been married for 23 years. Like Yoko and John were, we are still mad for one another. We also fight. During a particularly heightened conflagration, one of us might even suggest divorce.
My in-laws have referred to us as “Liz and Dick” as in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. As Taylor once said of their legendary rows, “Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off.”
Unlike Liz and Dick, we’ve only been married once, and we still are. While we can get loud, like many long-married couples we’re also very comfortable in our silences. Not because we don’t have anything left to say, but because we can now intimate so much about one another through feel or a glance.
We have a particular telepathy at dinner. Christina has been at the table for over 90% of my review meals. She can do this job better than I can. Honestly she’s often funnier. She would also like you to know, and you should, sometimes I crib her material for these pieces.
When we dine out, we do the “carousel”, continuously passing glasses and dishes around so we can both sample the first bites and sips together. If we simultaneously don’t like something, we both usually cock our necks a little sideways, raise an eyebrow, furrow a brow, and purse our lips.
If the comestible in question is especially worrisome, this is all often followed by a synchronized shake of the head, which is exactly what happened on a recent night out as we sampled a pair of cocktails, a Bees Knees, and a “Chilcano” filled with pisco, sherry, ginger and soda.
The Bees Knees was ok, but under-sweet, and underwhelming, not because it was awful, but because I discovered Barr Hill Tom Cat gin distilled from raw honey and had made pitch perfect Bees Knees with it just the night before.
The Chilcano promised excitement. I could taste the grape of the pisco mingling with the nutty oxidation of the sherry and ginger spice in my head, but what we got was more sour than Ben Stein sucking on a Warhead candy.
I panicked, because while it’s not fair to have such expectations for any new restaurant as a critic, a part of me believed this meal was probably going to be one of the highlights of 2024 before I walked in the door.