I don’t notice them at first – they’re just another sloppily-dressed couple in cheap flipflops, she with every item of clothing two sizes shrunken and he with his entire outfit a size stretched out and hanging. His manpris hit his calves at exactly the point to utterly stumpify him. Yes, he is wearing his cap in the restaurant. No, skinny jeans are not her friend.
But when I do look again, I think they’re a little… wrong for this place, and wonder how they wound up here. Ristorante a Mano at Bishop’s Landing is simultaneously trying too hard and not trying anywhere near hard enough. It attempts the welcoming atmosphere of an Italian trattroria, but is somehow trapped in the brittle formality of a ristorante. It tries to be gracious, and just winds up stuffy and lacking. It tries to be friendly, but only manages to be stilted and confusing, like that one friend’s boyfriend who never really liked or approved of you, and with whom you always had epically disconnected and random conversations. God, remember the time that guy got drunk and tried to hug you? Like that. This is the kind of place you wind up at after your favourite first choice is full. And maybe your second and third choices, too.
Looking at the couple again, I begin to notice details I missed at first: she has the scrubbed look of no makeup, but her face is hectic with pink splotches, even in the low light. He has picked up and folded his entire personal pizza together into one bundle – like a frat boy with a slice on pizza corner – and is methodically consuming it, constantly shifting his grip to support the splitting crust as it protests this uncouthness.
(I’m having pizza too – with fig confit, arugula, prosciutto and bocconcini (I know, I know: it’s like the Italian equivalent of Hawaiian pizza, with figs standing in for pineapple and prosciutto for ham). It’s good – and it’s definitely a fork-and-knife thing.)
She’s in animated monologue with him, one finger stabbing at the table emphatically. She’s pitched forward in her chair, searching for eye contact that he never makes while he chews, and chews, and chews. I catch the occasional squeak of her voice pleading a question that he doesn’t answer. She plunks against the back of her chair and stares at him. She bustles herself together and goes to the bathroom.
I suddenly realize they do belong here: this is the perfect place for them, maybe the only place. They’re here because they’re not happy. They need to be somewhere awkward and painful and wrong, because they don’t fit anywhere anymore. They can’t stand themselves or each other at home, but they don’t know how to get away from themselves. So it doesn’t matter where they are, or what they wear, or if he even tastes what he’s eating. It doesn’t matter that she’s obviously been crying. Right now, they’re simultaneously trying too hard (like her), and (like him) not trying anywhere near hard enough.
I didn’t notice at first. I didn’t even realize when I ran through my own choices. When this became the perfect and only place for me, too.
Comfort me with milkshakes
Think of all the small things we do to carve out just a little comfort for ourselves over the course of a day. The rituals we put in place, with cups of coffee and tea prepared just so. Think how the smokers have all found a space to huddle into themselves, ever-so-slightly out of the wind and rain. Think of the familiar, friendly items you surround yourself with, and the elaborate place settings we convince ourselves we can’t do without: favourite sweaters at the office for when the air conditioning gets too cold. Cupholders. The cool side of the pillow, for when your hair clings to your temples with moist warmth in the night. Think of the things you really need, and what you take for granted, and what you’ve built up that may be smothering you in comfort’s gaspingly soft embrace.
We all expect we’re entitled to comfort. There are so many places and things that should be designed to deliver pure comfort, and instead are just soul-numbing. Think of all the places you go and suddenly find yourself vulnerable: hotel rooms, so insultingly generic they resist any stamp of personality or acknowledgement of the individual. Waiting rooms, clinically depressed down to the sparest square inch. When we’re stripped of our tchotchkes of comfort, we appreciate real comfort all the more: a kind word from the nurse as the paper gown droops. Sleep that restores you, instead of leaving you spent and buried by another night’s strata of worry.
Comfort food is another whole level of entitlement, weakness, guilt and pleasure, all baked together with a raw Proustian centre. Does comfort food drag you backwards, when you most need to progress? Or does it support you, and bulwark you for challenges to come?
This episode of Hungerdome, lest you think we’re chucking it all and going Spartan, is about milkshakes. Darrell’s versus the Armview‘s.
I’ll come right out and say the milkshakes at the Armview are perfect. They come in traditional, heavy, soda-shoppe glasses, and give that satisfying deep-sea thump when you tap the bottom with your finger. They’re vein-poppingly thick, and taste ever-so-slightly malted (that may just be the nostalgia talking). From the small splurt of fake whipped cream on top, to the straw-clinging, popped-bubble dregs at the bottom, they deliver exactly what they promise: pure, ingestible, liquified comfort, along with a startlingly intimate stroke of your trigeminal nerve. You’ll find this perfection on the Comfort menu at the Armview. Yes, they know what they’re doing.
Darrell’s makes the claim of Best Milkshakes, and there’s no arguing with taste or university students, but no. Over-syruped and underwhelming, they actually leave me preferring a ridiculously expensive Cow’s milkshake rather than a repeat performance.
We all have our reasons for seeking comfort, and our own thresholds for attaining it. We all have to answer to our own God when comfort stops being a panacea and starts becoming a crutch. But you can let yourself be comforted, and grow stronger from it. Relax your guard, just a little. Have a milkshake that makes you remember things you’ve involuntarily forgotten.
It is plain the object of your quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in thyself.