Bone in the Throat - Anthony Bourdain [92]
DETECTIVE CZERNY finished his third mini-chimichanga while he watched Harvey and Victor ride the escalator to the second floor. Detective Alvarez wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin.
"What is that in there? Shrimp and avocado?" he asked.
"I dunno," said Czerny. "It all tastes the same to me. I can't tell, chicken, shrimp, it all tastes like the same shit."
"You're eating enough a them," said Alvarez.
"They're still good. I don't have to know what a thing is to like it. Look, they're going in upstairs."
The two detectives wiped their fingers and headed slowly for the escalator
THE SALON GASTRONOMIQUE was a curtained-off area on the second floor. Classical music played through distorting speakers. It was the third day of the competition, and the prizes for excellence in garde-manger, charcuterie, chocolate, pastillage, pastry, and entrees had already been awarded. Harvey stood in front of a long table filled with rapidly decomposing pates and galantines and held his nose.
"We should of come the first day," he said. "It always stinks by the third."
Victor curled his lip and turned away. "Smells like rotten pussy in here."
"It gets ripe sitting under the lights three days," Harvey explained. "Will you look at that shit. . . It's getting brown at the edges." He pointed at a long pâté en croute with a clock face painted in aspic on the slices.
"This is some fuckin' food show," complained Victor. "There's nothin' here I'd wanna eat."
Harvey ambled over to the pastry area, to a table full of wedding cakes, chocolate sculptures, pulled sugar bouquets, and marzipan fruit cornucopias. He stopped in front of a pastillage cake. In the center of the cake, painted in chocolate, was a portrait of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Harvey chuckled. "You know, last year, I was here, I saw one a these chocolate paintings . . . You know what they had on it? Reagan on the phone with Gorbachev. Can you believe that? One side a the cake they had Gorby, and the other side they had Reagan, and they're both holdin' telephones. All painted in chocolate. Like somebody'd ever eat that. . . Just what I wanna do, nibble on Reagan's face. Talk about unappetizing."
"Don't knock Reagan," said Victor. "He's alright, the guy."
They walked to the next table and a life-size tallow sculpture of a bullfighter snapping back his cape in front of a charging bull.
"That's like six hundred pounds of beef fat you're lookin' at there," said Harvey.
"You can see the bull's dick," said Victor, leaning over for a better view. "You ain't supposed to eat that?"
"No, no . . ." said Harvey. "They used to put 'em in the center of the table as like decoration. When you're doin' a banquet . . . A few places, you'd get a small one, a little Eiffel Tower or somethin' as a centerpiece."
"That's fuckin' disgustin'," said Victor. "What do I want a pile a fuckin' beef fat sittin' there onna table for? They charge money for that? I can get all the fuckin' beef fat you need."
They moved away from the display.
"Are we through here? It smells like fuckin' low tide," said Victor. "I got somethin' I gotta do later." He shot his cuffs and straightened his tie.
Harvey took a last look around the room. "Sure . . . I just wanna look at a few more things downstairs. I wanna take another look at that rotisserie they got. I think that would be great for the restaurant, don't you? We got a new menu comin' and all. I think that would be a real, nice touch. Unique. We could do a lot with one a those things. We could put all sortsa stuff on there. You could do rib-eyes, chickens, ducks. They do that in Italy, don't they? In the North?"
"Fuck if I know," said Victor, distractedly. He was looking at his watch.
Harvey and Victor managed to squeeze through the crowd and approached a triple rotisserie. Two capons and an overcooked whole tenderloin spun slowly