Yeah, so...  I'm back in D.C.  I go by the restaurant to take a peek at the new computer system for ordering, take a little test run at ordering, firing the main course, taking payment for checks, etc., and there are a lot of extra steps, as if the machine were spying on you.  I'm quite leery of it.  It seems a disheartening return, one more thing to make me, besides my age, outmoded.  Service in a  given night is down and dirty, and where the service might be as good and as elegant and hospitable as it can be, the new computer system scares and demoralizes me.

I am invited up to the sister restaurant for a tasting of wines from Portugal, the Alentejo.  Chef Dying Gaul texted me a personal invite to it yesterday.  I chose to walk up the old tobacco road as grey summer storm clouds gather and roll slowly billowing up in towers above, the old High Road, the early name, Wisconsin Avenue.  The hill climbs up, passing by, underneath its retaining walls, the Holy Rood (old Scottish for Cross) cemetery and then the block of the old restaurant where I as a fool, innocent and to be taken great advantage of to my own long detriment, first worked when I came to town and wasted the best twenty five years of my life pretending I was a writer while hanging out with characters of all sorts, fortune tellers, gran marnier restaurant people, barflies, crossword puzzle with margarita and lunchers, crazy liberal Texas journalists and Texas songwriter soundtrack, and real authentic Tex Mex.   I feel enormous sadness walking up past the shady old block, and make the sign of the Cross when I pass the physical location of the bar where I worked almost fifteen years....

The restaurants have changed since then, and now the star of the show is this I'm headed to, our sister bistrot, and I continue my walk up past the Cathedral and down to the left.  The strip joint, JP's, is gone, as is the old Grog and Tankard...


Up the road, I arrive.  A couple of the usual suspects, the chef, who is visiting from overseas with his wife, the chef of the bistrot, excellent, and then some wine friends file in, importers, reps, a young man from Cahors with an oenology degree from Bordeaux, the big friendly guy who is buds with Chef, a tower of a Basque. I'm introduced to a former somm from Taberna who is now a big and important importer of Spanish wines, and he has been enjoying the grape.  Chef--I've not seen him since November--greets me well, but soon distracted by the gathering evening, already into the wine tasting.  He is quite strong, a professional, French, and he can handle it.  He is suntanned, and wearing a light lime colored tropical shirt from Moschino, his style.  He's been out on his new farm, and is in friendly good spirits about his new endeavors.  He's always taken care of me.  He's a sweet respectful guy.  Today, he is enjoying himself, and he hands me a plate of proscuitto, a quick pleasure, here, generously, and immediately I see, I've never tasted better.  But the invite now, in retrospect, seems not as personal as it did originally as a text with a note of concern over how my mom is doing these days.  Chef has lots of people to talk to, and he's only in town to check on business for one week only.  Gallic reserve of the male variety is always there, to insure everyone's dignity.

Through the course of the evening, I sense myself not fitting in.  The French talk to the French in French, and stop to speak to me with the air of one speaking to a child.  The jamon is excellent, of the best I've ever had.  And the Chef F. brings out a plate of sweetbreads with thinly sliced chanterelle, out of this world.  I try the various wines, and my opinion is humored.  I taste one wine after another, talk with the wine reps I know, a little chitchat with the boss's wife's girlfriends, and so forth.  The Chef goes behind the line, with his knife out and a nice raw on the bone ribeye to slice into steak tartar, red, meaty, the perfect balance of consistency and flavor, served by a friendly waiter over crouton toast brought round on a platter.

And then, dinner will be served, and needing to eat, feeling like a freeloader, I join them for that hospitality, careful first to leave a twenty on the bar for the barman, and then later, one on the table as dessert is served, after I eat my steak, rare, and all the thin stick-sized pomme frites.  I'm seated next to a pleasant Irish lady who's tone is calm as an Irish lake on a still and sunny day, and she has long worked for the same importing company, and her brains are always good to pick for those of us in career uncertainty.  "It all comes down to reading people," she tells me, about her job.  They've taken of her Sancerre by the glass on our lists, and the replacement is more expensive and not as good, she confides.  Cool.

Toward the end, the chef peers up at the bar shelves and orders a calvados, "a man's drink," as he says, encouraging me to have one myself.  Previously, chef lights a cigarette.  There are still some customers in the house, down below in the dining room.  And soon another is passed around.  It is handed toward me, but the Chef says, no, Ted, then you just disconnect, and I nod in agreement.  He's right.  True, in the late night, after tending the bar and the diners, as the late new crew settles in to their indulgences I retreat to a distance, one night tuning up the house guitar in the front corner overlooking in avenue while they sat back in the room with the windows open.  Or, after running around all night, then some excitement, I am wiped out, retreating into my own head.  Things run strong these days, unpredictable.

Later, it is time for something else new, tequila poppers, a glass of Herradura silver neat with a splash of tonic, and then after palmed, slapped down against a table top so that it fizzes up and, here, your turn,  down the old hatch.  As a barman, purportedly, I do my duty, my share.  And the boys now--I worked one shift here a while ago, a year ago, more or less, and found it a little too much, went back to my usual gig--are getting toasty and talking shop.  A nibble in the kitchen, after a busy night, for them.  And beer.


Finally, now that we are toasty, it all breaks up.  I'd walked away earlier, feeling an alienation such that it was pointless to say goodnight to anyone, but I go back in.  Finally, the mood is to pack up, and outside with the two chefs in the humid air of one in the morning after a huge rainstorm, I get my Uber cab home, getting picked up in front of old Café Deluxe, one a hotspot of the northwest part of the town, but long since ceding its status, a shadow of its former popularity and status.  Which happens to all things that make a splash, whereas some of us have the karmic fate to be steady, consistent, reliable, good and professional.


And I am, this next day, afterward, again, hungover around the edges such that it creeps in, yet again, and in such a mood of the next day, I see myself, I look back at trying to be a kid belonging, there at the outskirts of the crowd, and everyone knowing I don't really fit in but by some haphazard quirk of fate....  I'm even more comfortable talking about that now, though, and there is the old Catholic line, that one can not truly love the world if he loves God and tries to do the right things.  Even while behaving badly and with the great self-disappointment that will come later, after the job of "partying" is done.

My presence in this line of work is not immediately clear, nor direct.  I've taken it as a path, upon which one could build a writing life, which would therefore require the solitude and quiet reflections necessary for the job, a kind of balance to grab whenever you could, to bolster up that belonging to the great adventure of waiting, truly, time passing, waiting on customers, dealing with the slippery crowd of the dining room...

It's not that I have ever faked work, the job.  I've always taken that seriously, with prep, with hard physical work and sped-up movement and agility.   I appreciate it as a profession.  But it is not all of who I am, nor, if you could clearly see it, what I am really up when I go in and gird my loins, setting up the bar.

In it, there is a kind of overarching faith, a belief in Christ's telling of parables...