Bondir

     There is something to be said for a restaurant where you order your favorite dish every time you go, and it always tastes the same.  It’s as comforting as the pillow upon which you lay your head, but Bondir isn’t that sort of place. Oh it’s comfortable enough, and the staff is welcoming, and there are no snooty waiters peering down their noses to see which fork you choose.  We entered the premises at 279A Broadway in Cambridge on a chilly evening and were offered a seat by a warming fire.  We sipped Spanish cava and enjoyed the homelike atmosphere. 

     But as soon as they brought the bread basket, what we thought of as reality began to twist and bend.   There was “sea bread” in which black squid ink ranged across the slice like the negative of a photo of the Milky Way.  The bread also contained shrimp and seaweed.  I think the shrimp may have been dried and ground to a powder. The bread had the heartiness of wheat and a briny flavor that reminds you of the scent of the ocean when you walk in the froth of waves in the cool of a summer sunrise.  I ate it in fascination tinged with disbelief.

     I’ve often read about foods like this.  Restaurant critics in the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century knew exactly how a dish was to be prepared, and a chef who didn’t send it out in in the classic fashion suffered the eloquence of their disdain.  Now critics, not wishing to seem like the concert-goers who rioted during the first performance of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” are content to list ingredients with an adjective thrown in here and there. I, on the other hand, know that you, dear reader, want me to tell you whether or not you’d like it.

     My answer is that depends on your ability to shed preconceptions and be open to new experiences.  When a chef leaves the safety of the orthodox there is a danger of his creating an abomination, and the only safeguard from this is his talent. Brendan Joy, the head chef of Bondir is a man in whose hands the diner is safe.  Once you realize that you will have entered an alternate reality, you relax and enjoy the ride. There are delightful surprises. 

     You don’t have to ponder the menu; they bring it to you, and that’s what you’re going to get.  Of course you have a little wiggle room.   One of our party was a vegetarian, and she requested a substitute for the Beef Rib, with a confit of radicchio, bordelaise, and pickled kumquats.  She got fluke instead, and they left the crisp curls of Parma ham off her portion of winter squash tortellini with black walnut. 

     The staff believes wholeheartedly in the excellence of what they offer.  We were brought a large bowl containing celery root and shreds of black trumpet mushrooms sitting in a warm broth made from those ingredients.  When Erin, our server, saw me lift the bowl to my lips and drink the exquisite liquid, she beamed. 

Chef Joy sent out a little extra consisting of a wild rice chip with Umami powder and black cherry puree.  You will recognize the consistency of the chip if you eat Cheez Doodles.  There are many crisp snack chips in Asian cuisine that are similar to it, but despite the wild rice base, it was still a chip.  The powder ramped up the savory flavor, and the sweet fruit astonished the palate.  Joy is not without audacity.

     The prix fixe menu is $68 per person for five courses.  They are small, but if you don’t make a face and push some of them aside, they make a satisfying meal. For $35 more, i opted for an extra of risotto with black truffle.  I was excited at the prospect.  The risotto was the best I ever had, but I reached for the flavor of the truffle and didn’t find it.  Annette, who sampled it, thought it was fine, but a truffle should knock your socks off, and this one didn’t. 

     That was my only complaint.  With the bottle of the cava and three other glasses of wine plus my risotto, the bill was a budget-buster, but considering the excellence of the ingredients and the amount of skilled labor that went into their preparation, the dinner was a bargain. I advise you to skip bacon and egg breakfasts at your favorite café, forgo hamburger lunches, and even a steak dinner kicked off with a martini. Save your money, push all your chips onto the table, and take a chance.  I’m betting you won’t be disappointed, but if you’re the timid soul, stick with IHOP.

     We finished with what the menu lists as a Red Ida Fritelle.  I’ll call it apple fritters with white chocolate, caramel sauce, and a topping of brown bread ice cream.  It was perfect and sent us out into the December night a happy group.

Autumn

Green leaves that were pristine in spring

Are torn to tatters

But the late September day,

Nearly resembling,

The welcome warmth of May,

Seems all that matters,

Though should I stoop to pluck

An autumn aster

I’d wish I had the luck

To rise a little faster,

And roses that were once like girls

New and tightly furled

Now resemble, truth to tell,

Old women with their face lifts gone to hell.

Old Age

The glue

That holds my

Soul to body fails.

It dries and cracks

To strew

My pillow nightly.

I’m doing all I can,

But nails and tacks

Are painful,

And duct tape

Is unsightly.

Fogy Fashion News

I had occasion recently to attend a function where the attendees were required to dress up.  This was no problem for me.  I have two suits, one for winter and one for summer, and I plucked from my closet the summer one.  I wore my best white shirt and a nifty pink bow tie with flowers on it.  Annette had bought a simple dress of an attractive color and a pretty sweater to go over it.  I thought we looked nice. 

When I arrived at the shindig, I was as flabbergasted, as fogies often are, at how things had changed while I wasn’t looking.  I noticed the featured element of today’s style seems to be skin.  Total nudity will never be fashionable until someone discovers a way to make money out of it, but revealing garments are the rage.

 I suspect today’s dress shoppers are influenced by “Dancing with the Stars,” and the red carpet at the Academy Awards.  The trouble is the attendees at these televised events have bodies they labor upon daily with diet and exercise.  If these methods fail, there are procedures collectively known as ”work.” Limbs, necks, tummies, and breasts are shapely, firm, and upholstered with flawless skin. 

This is not the case with some of the women present at the do to which I was in attendance.  They seemed to have chosen garments that the reminded them of professional beauties without considering what the revealing elements were liable to reveal. Skirts that my out-of-date vocabulary might term micro-mini fluttered provocatively above legs that had long been absent from the treadmill.  One damsel seemed to have been recently jumped upon by a large dog as there were red scratch marks up and down her thighs.

Many of the gowns seemed to have been acquired at considerable expense, but they were cheap compared to those worn by the celebrities their purchasers wished to emulate. There was no designer to match dress style to body type.  No seamstress made alterations so the fabric lay in attractive folds over the flesh it was meant to conceal. One woman bulged alarmingly inside a diaphanous dress that must have been extremely difficult to zip up. It was cut low, revealing almost all of her enormous  breasts, the right one of which was decorated with a rose tattoo, which may have been provocative twenty years ago.

When I got home, I regarded myself naked in the bathroom mirror. I was glad my trousers had been held up by suspenders instead of a belt which would have pinched them in at the waist.  I was glad my shirt was not of the tapered European sort. My jacket covered my torso pretty well, but had been worn unbuttoned lest it strain at the midriff.  Despite my relative satisfaction, I was possessed by a resolve that lasted long enough for me to make do with black coffee and toast for breakfast

Oral Hygiene

Having achieved fogiedom, I've lived a good many of my years without the benefit of an oral hygienist, but times, as they seem to keep doing, have changed.  After a session of scraping and digging below the gums, the woman informed me from behind her surgical mask that I had bad oral hygiene.  I was about to tell her she had no business calling me a dirty old man, when I reflected that my teeth, like the rest of me, aren't what they used to be.  I asked what I must do.

“Do you have a timer on your tooth brush?” she inquired.  I didn't even know there were such things, but I pretended I hadn't sprung for the option.  She told me I should brush my teeth for at least two minutes; I should floss for a minute and then rinse with mouthwash for one minute.     My rebellion was quelled, and I gave it a try, but not without doing the math.

I now brush for two minutes.  I don’t need a timer on my toothbrush, any more than I need a telephone that can find the nearest pizzeria, but I have a watch.  I floss for another minute and rinse for a minute.  I figure I spend another minute getting things out of the cabinet and putting them back.  Annette likes it if I clean the sink. 

So I spend five minutes twice a day.  That makes seventy minutes a week.  Now with fifty-two weeks a year that makes 3640 minutes a year or 61 hours.  Allowing for eight hours of sleep, I dedicate the waking moments of 3.81 days per year cleaning my teeth. 

All right, I've exaggerated a little bit. I multitask and put away the toothbrush, floss and Listerine bottle while I’m sloshing the mouthwash around , and on some mornings  I make the excuse that I haven’t gotten anything between my teeth since I flossed the previous night, so I skip that chore.  So let’s forget the 81% of the fourth day and round it off to three days.  It’s still a lot of the time I've got left before what Saul Bellow called “the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act.”  

I’m reasonably healthy so If I give myself an optimistic ten more years, that’s thirty days.  Do I really want to spend a month at the bathroom sink? So far I've knuckled under, but I’m thinking it over.  I didn't rebel much in my youth.  In the fifties I had a brown leather jacket, not a black one, but it isn't too late to misspend my old age.

  

Walking at the supermarket.

It was too cold for the salt to melt the ice on the roads so even in slow motion I slewed on the curves and slid a little at the stop signs, but the day of the storm I didn’t get out at all.  In this season the pathway for my walk is the supermarket.  I estimate seven times around to be a mile.  This is not the transcendental saunter into Nature idealized by Thoreau, but neither is it a gym. 

The supermarket is better in a number of ways, the first being you get to use it for free.  The smells aren’t as sublime as the autumn woods or the summer beach, but the deli department, the fish counter, and the bakery are better than the stink of a jock on an adjacent treadmill.  As for comradery, I’m greeted by a friendly deli man, the checkout ladies, and the fellow who stocks the shelves. 

I’m not as easily lost in thought as I early on a summer morning am at the beach. In the supermarket I have to watch for carts emerging from aisles, oblivious shoppers pondering labels, and slowpokes of various ages, but it’s safer than crossing the street.   Visually, there’s nothing like sunlight filtering through forest leaves or the flight of a tern with a sand eel in its beak, but supermarket colors are bright and varied, and the displays change from week to week. 

I like being among foodstuffs, even those I don’t buy.  I pass the cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli and remember childhood suppers on winter evenings after sledding.   I don’t want to go back to Table Talk Pies either, but somehow I’m glad they’re still there.  I check prices as I go by, and if I see solid pack white tuna at 10 for $10, I stock up. I do my shopping when my walk is done, rounding the store one final time. Being almost a daily shopper, I don’t usually have more than I can take to the express checkout, but over the winter I pay for the use of the heat and light and the wear of my shoes on the supermarket floor. 

My walk isn’t as soul-healing as one of Thoreau’s but it gives me a change of scene, raises my heartrate for the prescribed amount of time, and fills the pantry too.  I don’t get nailed at a crosswalk by a skidding car or slip and break an aging hip. We fogies deal with winter as best we can.