I Remember Nothing [27]
But Graydon cheerfully persisted, and the restaurant he opened downtown became a huge success. A year later, he told me he was going to open a second restaurant, this one uptown, in the old location of the Monkey Bar. He said he hoped it would be something like the Ivy in London, which is one of my favorite places, and did I have any suggestions for the menu? I immediately sent a long list. At the top of it was meat loaf. I love meat loaf. It feels like home.
A few months before the restaurant opened, I was invited to a tasting. It included an unusual dish consisting of two thick slabs of meat loaf that had been sautéed slightly and were firm on the outside. This made for a nice combination of squishy and crispy and thus avoided the primary pitfall of meat loaf, which is that it’s so soft and mushy you can polish it off in under a minute. I would not say that this particular meat loaf felt like home exactly, but it was delicious nonetheless. It came covered with a lovely mushroom sauce, which made sense given the crisp exterior. Normally I would take a strong position against mushroom sauce, but this meat loaf seemed to cry out for it, and not in a bad way.
I had no idea the Monkey Bar meat loaf was going to have my name on it, but when the restaurant opened, there it was, on the menu, Nora’s Meat Loaf. I felt that I had to order it, out of loyalty to myself, and it was exactly as good as it had been at the tasting. I was delighted. What’s more, I had the oddest sense of accomplishment. I somehow felt I’d created this meat loaf, even though I’d had nothing to do with it. I’d always envied Nellie Melba for her peach, Princess Margherita for her pizza, and Reuben for his sandwich, and now I was sort of one of them. Nora’s Meat Loaf. It was something to remember me by. It wasn’t exactly what I was thinking of back in the day when we used to play a game called “If you could have something named after you, what would it be?” In that period, I’d hoped for a dance step, or a pair of pants. But I was older now, and I was willing to settle for a meat loaf.
By the way, I was not the only person whose name was on the Monkey Bar menu. My friend Louise had a salad named after her. It’s called Louise’s Sunset Salad.
In the next couple of weeks, I got five or six e-mails from friends complimenting me on “my” meat loaf.
Here’s what I did not say in reply:
1. I had nothing to do with it.
2. It’s not really my meat loaf.
3. My meat loaf has a package of Lipton onion soup mix in it and this one doesn’t.
I said instead:
1. Thank you.
2. I’m so glad you ordered it.
3. It is good, isn’t it.
I was proud. My meat loaf was a huge hit. It was out there working for me, even though I was not: I was just sitting home surfing the Net and wasting entire days thinking about what to do about the living room.
The next time I went to the Monkey Bar, I ordered the meat loaf again. After all, if I wasn’t ordering the meat loaf, how could I expect anyone else to? But, alarmingly, something had happened to it. Instead of two slabs of meat loaf, there was now just one, and the mushroom sauce was being served on the side. I entered into a conversation about this development with the maître d’, who listened politely and then explained that another customer had suggested that the mushroom sauce be put on the side, so now it was being put on the side. I couldn’t help thinking that I might have been consulted about this change. I gently suggested that a fairly calamitous mistake had been made. I said I was the queen of On the Side, but that this meat loaf was begging for the mushroom sauce to be served right on top of it. The maître d’ promised to think about it.
A couple