It is a book really –hysterical and not always hysterical vignettes that would be accompanied with sumptuously delectable recipes like Berbere salmon, an exotic unlikely combination of 14 spices from around the globe, homemade Caesar salad dressing, tiramisu to make you drunk, She crab soup with lump crabmeat in every scoop, roast rack of pork with mango sauce and divine soups, to mention a few.
Recipes can certainly be provided on demand, but here are just a few precious vignettes that filled the five years of restaurant life.
A 30ish short sandy-haired square-jawed woman with a thick Southern drawl came into our restaurant when we first opened and looked at the Italian greens we served with all of our meals and scoffeded, hands firmly pressed against her hips: “Give me the real stuff, the Iceberg lettuce, and not some weeds you pulled out of your garden.” My husband and I looked at each other in sheer panic, fearing our restaurant would develop the reputation for serving strange growing things that were costing us an arm and a leg.
Two years after we opened, my husband ventured into more international waters – literally — and began serving sushi. One evening, a lovely and of course very polite Canadian couple ordered the sushi special, thrilled for the rare find on this small island. Authentic to a fault, my husband placed a huge dollop of freshly made wasabi on the plate, which one of the Canadians confused for avocado and placed the entire round ball into his mouth. I say polite because this would cause any charm school trained debutante to curse like a …. Instead this lovely Canadian managed to push forth a smile as tears ran down his very blush-red and somewhat blueish face.
A very tall and very wealthy man who managed a huge severance from his former employer, Enron, frequently came in for dinner and ordered the most expensive white wine on the menu, not one but oftentimes three bottles. His extremely tall body probably processed the wine fairly slowly although on many nights, he gave us his American Express card, asked us to write in the tip and then gave us his car keys to drive him to his sumptuous beach house about a mile away.
This last vignette proves that sincerity and effort can certainly trump sophistication and knowledge. The day the restaurant reviewer came into our restaurant, disguised with a colorful scarf around her brownish hair, sunglasses and no makeup, I took the night off to be with our toddler son. In my place was our fill-in waitress who was not even old enough to serve wine. When the unbeknownst-to-us restaurant critic asked our teenage waitress to recommend a wine that goes well with crab cakes, she naively replied, “I have no idea since I am not old enough to drink.” Fortunately, the rest of the evening wasn’t that initial disaster and after the successful crab cake meal and my husband’s homemade chocolate pot du crème, we received a startling four stars.
And there you have it, a “taste” of restaurant history, a memory as delightful as every single one of our customers – from the seriously unsophisticated to the very wealthy who love to pay homage to this very pristine undeveloped small island in the South.
Arlaana's Lane 