The summer garden is so ordinary that it can?t draw one single line, not even an ironical one. The chairs and tables are typical of the halting places on the side of the road, made of solid wood, for which the term uncomfortable is just a euphemism.
Green has always been an intriguing color for me. Maybe due to the flat joke according to which the person dressed in that color should necessarily undergo the shame of being eaten by a cow, or maybe its association to the onion from Oltenia, not quite elegant. You might think that this color with which the Romanian House in DN1 was whitewashed about a year ago should have driven me away, but since the slackers rooting the road at the outskirts of Bucharest for some years would have felt solitarily cursed, there had to come on scene this location also. A type of a small cloud appeared around it , made up of "mititei-eaters", "sausagers" and "polenters", a brotherhood that would have been eventually welcomed, had the normal people been warned from the very beginning.
The summer garden is so ordinary that it can?t draw one single line, not even an ironical one. The chairs and tables are typical of the halting places on the side of the road, made of solid wood, for which the term "uncomfortable" is just a euphemism.
The animals that populate the area (and I don?t mean the painted plaster kitsches representing hens, garden dwarfs or other types of such horrors, but the clients) is represented by male Bermuda shorts that start from under the well-stuffed bellies, matching the pretty thick chains similar to the sausages in the plates, or by a female T-shirt with nipples brought into prominence by multicolored spangles and elegantly matching the jeans out of which the fat of the one who wears them slips at the waistband.
Children run chaotically, yelling with all their might under the tender looks of the parents cast between two satisfied burps, accompanied by the champing of the greasy lips and the contented blinking of the dosing eyelashes due to the excessive cholesterol.
Here comes a waiter: definitely, the peasant house confirms its name. that boy was exactly the classical type of Romanian peasant moved from the native land straight to the side of a DN.
After a timid hello, he manages to note down two beers and attempts to exceed his condition by saying that he can take the food order also. I dictate rarely and clearly the vegetarian dish, the grilled mushrooms and the grilled zander.
Confused by the tasks that had overwhelmed his neurons, the poor boy casts desperate glances, after which, with a guilty look asks me to wait for another waiter ; three dishes had finished his one kilo-octet of memory.
Then comes the "senior" waiter, with the air of a rascal, the typical kind of neighborhood waiter, tricky, sly and slothful, weighing the potential tip from the very first eye-contact. Obviously he manages the pen and paper very well, putting down very quickly the three courses, and then they both disappear.
Kilo-octet comes back with the beer, shyly pours it into the glasses and away he goes. And the evening falls slowly over the summer garden, and everything was at its place, and the children were yelling, caddies were wolfing, solid gold bracelets were hitting the edges of plates with satisfied clinks, the beer had one- finger thick foam, and the folk songs were at their peak.
And we finished the beer, and the night fell, already more tormenting, because not even the cold, vegetarian dish had shown its aroma. And the waiters were smoking behind the bar, except kilo-octet, whom I have seen only after 50 minutes after the pouring of the beer. And he finally shows up! Ashamed by my interpellation, instinctively aggressive probably, he answers that he stood by the cook to rush him, because there had been other orders. What was there to rush, since from what I’ve seen at the vegetarian dish, all they had to do was to take out some snack from the jar and throw some peppers and olives in a plate… Stupor is a term that should be illustrated in the dictionary with Ko’s face at that moment. It?s easy: they hadn?t brought the cold plate, they had forgotten about it. He wants to disappear by whispering that he would bring it immediately, but my left hand does its duty and grabs him firmly. I didn’t want to use my right also, I took pity in him, but I understood then why some peasants were being stuck in pitchforks in the old days. Had he been born 100 years earlier he would have been ripped at Flamanzi. Whatever…
