Alva and Irva - Edward Carey [80]
There is no menu, only one dish is available here at a time, generally soup, served with our local black bread. But it is good wholesome soup and excellent strong-tasting bread. This is a subsidised restaurant and you will find your soup and bread will cost you roughly US$ 1.50. Backpackers extremely welcome.
TELEVISION TOWER, remarkably a survivor of the Great Entralla Earthquake. Few people frequent the Television Tower’s famous revolving restaurant for its food. It specialises in averagely priced fare (a typical meal costing around US$ 10–15), of which but little skill has gone into its preparation. Nor do people ascend the lift here for the excellence of the service found at the top. But despite the service, despite the food, this is a popular place; for Entrallans positively do visit the top of the Television Tower for the view. As their meal is consumed our people look down on Entralla and try to work out exactly where their homes fit in amongst that maze of buildings. At night, with Lubatkin’s Fortress floodlit, it is an extremely pleasant sight.
The proprietor of this restaurant has pointed out to me that since the Plasticine Galleries were opened in the Art Museum of Entralla, he has suffered a fall in customers.
LE GRAND LUBATKIN. Even with a 10 per cent reduction, the Grand Lubatkin restaurant is really only for our most well-heeled visitors. Subtly furnished, with exceptionally attentive service, only the elite of Entralla have been privileged enough to taste its culinary masterpieces: red pepper mousse with aubergine caviar, crab flan in a parsley emulsion, red mullet cooked with aniseed and homemade pasta, coddled eggs with asparagus, terrine of rabbit with stuffed artichokes. Reservations are generally necessary, and the restaurant is often booked up for months in advance, but every effort will be made to squeeze in visitors carrying Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City, but, to aid success, discreet donations to the maitre d’ are welcome and advised.
The secret behind the success of this gastronomic palace is to be found in its French chef, Monsieur Daniel Arlin; indeed the restaurant serves only French food (which every Frenchman will tell you is the greatest of all the world’s cuisines). Monsieur Arlin’s mother, the stunningly beautiful Isubel Blukk, however, was an Entrallan, who left our city for a school outing to the capital of France and, having been spotted in a café on the banks of the River Seine, became the lover and then the wife of a Parisian chef and never returned home again. Their son spent much of his childhood in the kitchens of the Ambassadeurs Restaurant, inside the grand Hotel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, while Isubel in a fetching uniform changed sheets and dusted rooms. The boy was equally fascinated by his father’s profession and his mother’s stories—stories of her old home so far away—which she used to tell him at night just before he went to sleep. He vowed one day to visit that home, and he was true to his word. The result: the Grand Lubatkin.
Bon appétit.
PART FOUR
Entralla & Entralla
TWO SISTERS OF PULT STREET
WERE ONCE GIVEN
THE KEYS TO OUR CITY
Pult Street
Pult Street, of predominantly red-brick buildings, is at first glance an unremarkable street of Entralla. Accessed by trolley bus 12, the ninth stop from Cathedral Square, it was on this street that the twins passed their remaining years in our city. No. 42 Pult Street was their home and is now of course the residence of the Alva and Irva Dapps Museum, open from 12:00 to 23:00-so late a closing time to ensure our distinguished foreign visitors a chance to visit it at the end of their tour. The museum contains such treasures as Linas Dapps’ fatal stamp collection, many of Postmaster Grett’s matchstick models, Dallia Dapps’ book on baby care, numerous press cuttings and photographs,