The good, the bad, and the ugly: pt. 1

The Good: Another charming food experience.

I hurried home last night in order to tackle my laundry. I was furiously hungry, but all I really had time to do was fry up the leftover vermicelli from the previous night's visit to the best Thai place in E-town and wolf it down between loads. After getting my most important calls out of the way, I set off for the sushi place down the street from me. (Don't get excited: I had no intention of taking the sushi home and frying it--as delectable as that would be. Nowadays, more and more sushi places are willing to fry it for you anyway.)

There used to be a wonderful, reasonably-priced place just down the block, but it changed ownership over a year ago. We tried out its replacement and weren't impressed. Months later, however, I returned on another laundry night and had a very yummy fish salad, which made me think either we hadn't ordered the right things before or it took them a while to hit their stride. It was very busy and crowded that second visit--the entire dining area is no bigger than a studio apartment--which wasn't what I was in the mood for that night.

Fortunately, the sputtering near-rain had kept most people away. The take-out business is lively, so three chefs behind the counter were beavering away despite having only two customers at the bar. I took a seat in front of one of them and leafed through the menu. "Ginger Saba"--chopped gari and mackerel maki--was the special that caught my eye, so I ordered it. The chef eyed me.

"Saba has a very strong taste."

"That's okay," I replied.

Still, before he began preparing the roll, he cut off a sliver and asked me:

"Do you want to try a bit first?"

Amused, I ate it and gave him the green light.

Usually, I bring something to read when I go to a restaurant alone. This time, I deliberately didn't so I'd be forced to talk to people and it paid off, big time. The chefs were chattering animatedly in an Asian language with the two young women at the counter with me. I foolishly assumed it was Japanese when I came in and upbraided myself for not being able to make out a single word. It took surprisingly long for it to dawn on me that the language sounded nothing like Japanese at all.

"You're Thai, aren't you?" I said to the chef.

He looked startled. "How did you know?"

I thought about explaining the process of deduction that led me to that conclusion, but in the end, I just shrugged and said, "It sounded like Thai."

I turned to the rest of the group and said, somewhat stupidly:

"You're all Thai."

"One big happy family," replied the woman nearest me.

At first, I thought she was being metaphorical. Eventually, though, I realised that she and her companion were getting free food from the chef, particularly the older one nearest them. Before then, however, she offered me samples of their spider maki and whitefish. Thus, far from being put off by everyone's chumminess with one another, I felt included. "It is" and "it isn't" were about the only words I could understand, but everyone spoke and joked so expressively it gave me the sensation of following along.

At one point, the chef in front of me showed off his new knife to the women. It had been made in Japan and then sent by ship rather than by plane, forcing him to wait three months for it. There were characters inscribed on the tang.

"What's it say?" I asked.

"It's my name."

He held it up for me and I read out the characters. Another astonished response. Jeez, they must thing us whey-faces don't know anything!

I ended up hanging out for over an hour. In between bursts of chat, there was plenty to observe from the bustle and teasing of the chefs to their interaction with the regulars who filtered in. At one point, I tried to draw the waitress into conversation. She had just served a dragon roll, which they made by covering a reverse-maki with avocado slices and inserting kaiware-daikon antennae and carrot eyes. It looked like a slug, and I said so.

She didn't know "slug".

"Like a snail without a shell."

She didn't know "snail".

"Hoy thaak," I said. (My favourite Thai restaurant for years was named "The Snail".)

She turned to my chef and asked him, in Thai, what you call a snail with no shell. He smiled and said:

"Naked snail."

I left shortly after the young women. The master chef pretended to wipe away tears at their parting and everyone bowed with their hands folded in front of their noses.

"See," I told my chef, "if I hadn't guessed it before, that would've given it away. Only Thais bow like that!"

I bowed myself, first to the master and then to his apprentices, and headed home in a buoyant mood.

The good, the bad, and the ugly: pt. 2

The Bad: My first termination

I guess I finally popped my cherry as a manager today: I made my first fire.

As such things go, it was rather painless. No lengthy probation, no attempts at mediation, no slow accumulation of incriminating details. I only spoke to him once, at the interview. Even then, there were one or two warning flags that made me think, This one is going to be difficult. But I was still recovering my senses and not as critical or as cautious as I should've been. (At least, that's my excuse.) And I was pleased with myself at the thought of having my hiring done before many departments have even started.

A week ago, two days after the hire, I spoke to his former supervisor, who told me point blank, "I wouldn't hire him." (That was startling. The strongest thing Monshu ever says, even if he's fired someone, is, "So-and-so worked for me from such-and-such a date to such-and-such a date.") Too late. So I spoke to Personnel, to see if it was possible to unhire him. Nope. So I contacted him and told him I needed to speak to him before the end of the week. No response. I kept trying and didn't hear anything until Monday. I told him he'd better come in the next day or else. When he didn't, I mailed my documentation of the events to Personnel and they told me that if I had no word by the end of the day, they would terminate him.

I don't really feel bad and I don't really feel relieved. This time last week, I felt like the biggest idiot in creation. My boss made it worse by bragging at the departmental meeting that we had completed our student hires. After I'd told the student to come in and started rehearsing my talk with him--blah blah blah his expections blah blah blah my expectations blah blah blah do this again and you're out--I was anxious. Fortunately, I was able to channel it into my work (note the drop in entries for that period), which left me tired enough at the end of the day that I didn't lose much sleep.

I'm not even concerned about finding a replacement yet. My other new hire is working out and my returning student is still a marvel. Right now, I just have an empty feeling, like the past week was squandered. When it actually came to mailing out the termination notice this morning, I felt squeamish. Isn't it assholish not to even try to call him? (Although I'd never once succeeded in getting him on the phone.) How would I be able to face him if he stopped by or I ran into him? I so dreaded a reply that I found work to do elsewhere in the building so I wouldn't check my mail. But the more I remembered my misgivings about his character, my fury at being misled (yes, he did quit the previous position--but if he hadn't he'd've been fired), my weariness at being ready every day for a confrontation that never came, the less sympathy I had for him. After all, this was his second chance, and he blew it. He'll never work here again. Tough shit. Yeah, he's only a student, but an important lesson for anyone to learn is that, sooner or later, playing loose with your commitments will catch up with you.

I just hope it never happens to me.

The good, the bad, and the ugly: pt. 3

The Ugly: My horrific nightmare

I don't know whether to blame it on the luscious piece of unagi I had too close to bedtime, the lingering fear that a personnel crisis would still be awaiting me in the morning, or what. But what started out as a perfectly commonplance and pleasant picaresque dream turned luridly horrid.

The sequence of scenes is fuzzy, but I remember garish preparations for a family Christmas feeding into an odd work situation (I'd forgotten to wear a shirt!), and thence into previews for a new Michael Douglas / Winona Ryder film. I was talking about it at work with my brother and then it appeared on a large screen to my right. Douglas was swimming naked in a pool in a scene edited to show as much as conceivably possible without technically being full-frontal. Apparently, a nude underwater love scene between the two stars had already made the film notorious.

Then we were at the pool and someone was with us interviewing Winona. It was either a break in filming or a post-wrap celebration, because people started jumping into the pool fully clothed. Soon, a party was in full swing. For some reason, we were joking about how prefectly edible someone's--the director's?--ear lobes were. I was egging the swimmers on with a lascivious description meant to tempt them.

Next thing I knew, one of the men in pool had leapt on top of him and actually started eating his ears. And he didn't stop there. A feeding freezy broke out and, when next I could see what had happened, the director was stripped to the muscle. Several of the men on top of him also had large patches of skin and subcutaneous fat missing. Their exposed musculature, with thick yellow and blue veins running over it, had an unreal look, as if they were only rubber costumes. But it was enough to make me flee.

I smashed through a window screen in the next room and literally flew down the hillside. Eventually, I came to a railbed. In preparation for some dangerously unsafe local festival, a line of gasoline had been spilled along the base of it for several blocks, leaving a gap of only a few feet. I knew that, that evening, it would be set ablaze and I proceeded to run inside the line of gasoline, thinking it would form a line of defence against the enraged demented cannibals who were doubtless right behind me.

Then, of course, it occurred to me that I could be caught inside the line of flames with the gang of flensed madmen. Ahead, I saw a train station and leapt up to a small concrete square beside it. In a classic reprise from bad horror films everywhere, two cops were talking about some disturbance downtown. "We'll go have a look if it turns out it's not just a bunch of kids." I knew there was no point in trying to convince them. They were both smoking and one tossed his cigarette onto my boots, which were splattered with gasoline. I leapt back.

Before I tcould think to toss the cigarette onto the line of gasoline and, hopefully, immolate my pursuers, I heard a train approaching. I squeezed my way into the station and went running along the platform until I could leap onto the back of the train. As I raced across it, looking for access to the interior, I heard the beasts screaming my name and promising to make me one of them. Although I settled into a crawl space at the front of the locomotive which left me facing backward, I still couldn't see them.

You'd think I'd feel relieved at this point, having eluded my pursuers. But I awoke in a panic, just as if the dream had ended at any earlier point. I did manage to fall asleep again, if only for an hour or less.

Around the world in Chicago

Here, for your vicarious pleasure, is a list of some of my recent food adventures. I realise that it reads like a list of culinary Clue. ("I suspect it was elthar in Hinsdale with the steak frites!") In order to make this more interactive, translations for italicised items are provided below. Those of you with a competitive streak, see how many you can match up!

• homemade nayngmyen at my place with Monshu


• master sauce duck with plum sauce and sesame paste at Monshu's


• jalea de pescado, arroz con pollo, and leche asada at a Peruvian eatery in Rogers Park with spookyfruit and welcomerain.


• Taiwanese goat milk candy and songphyen at spookyfruit's game


• nasu dengaku at Sakura in Mount Prospect with bunj and his wife


• fufu with spicy peanut soup and goat meat at Bolat in Lakeview


• grilled sea bass with a crème de cassis reduction at a bistro in Lincoln Park with Monshu


• swuntay with kelp salad and makkelli after a trip to Arirang Korean Market in Albany Park with welcomerain


• sucuklu pide at the Turkish Bakery in Andersonville


• sancocho de gallina and granida de lulo at La Fonda in Edgewater


• mixed nut, lotus paste, and winter melon mooncakes from Chiu Quon bakery in New Chinatown


• smoked rattlesnake hot dog from Hot Doug's in Roscoe Village. (Thank you Movie Man!)
  
• beef tongue and Belgian beer at Brasserie Jo in River North with spookyfruit, welcomerain, and some hanger-on


• beignets at Dixie Kitchen in Evanston. (Don't order them unless your beignet standards are very modest.)


Translations:

• rice sausage [Korean]
  
• cold noodles [Korean]
  
• crude rice liquor [Korean]
  
• pine-flavoured rice cakes [Korean]
  
• grilled eggplant with sweet sauce [Japanese]
  
• mashed yam [West African]
  
• sausage pie [Turkish]
  
• blackcurrant liqueur [French]
  
• naranjillo shake [Spanish]
  
• rice with chicken [Spanish]
  
• stewed hen [Spanish]
  
• fried fish with onions [Spanish]
  
• baked custard [Spanish]