Would you like…
Would you like to eat one of the best meals you can remember?
Would you like it to be at a Caribe-French restaurant?
Would you like it to be at a restaurant that is BYOB, and charges no corking fee, so you can pick up an $8 bottle of Cotes du Rhone [sic] at the Astor Warehouse and drink it at your speed?
Would you like to start your meal with some beautiful seeded bread and spicy olive oil, while a busboy opens your bottle of wine?
Would you like, as an appetizer, the most delicate, balanced, perfect apricot-and-caramelized-onion tart, topped with the most heartbreakingly delicious pieces of foie gras?
Would you like the foie gras to be so good that you actually moan when you bite into it?
Would you like that appetizer to cost eight dollars?
Would you like, as a meal, a gorgeous duck breast with a passion fruit glaze served with a slaw and potatoey mixture that is so good you will not even remember what it was called, and for the smell to overwhelm your senses with the most seductively rich flavors you remember eating at a restaurant? Do remember that you live in New York City, arguably the best food city in the world, and eat out relatively often.
Would you like that whole thing to cost 15 dollars?
Would you like to taste your companion’s meal, a jerk chicken breast in some sort of goat cheese/tarragon/honey sauce, and enjoy it so much that you briefly consider ritual suicide?
Would you like his meal to cost 14 dollars?
Would you like, as a dessert, a spicy chocolate cake that hits you with dark sweetness at first and then, a few seconds later, for a peppery spiciness to hit the back of your throat?
Would you like it covered in coconut cream?
Would you like it to cost 6 dollars?
Would you like a friendly, laid-back staff that treats you like they would treat guests in their home, or whatever?
Say it with me, people. Breathe in, breathe out:
