Shortage of lamb at the French Fawlty Towers
After four hugely humiliating visits to the dentist that involved my boyfriend having to hold my hand whilst the dentist attempted to perform root canal treatment, I have rediscovered the joys of eating and am now making up for lost time. To celebrate this newfound pain-free experience Lovely Boyfriend took me out for dinner the other night, and rather than go to one of our usual restaurants, we decided to head out of town and try a French restaurant on the coast that we’d heard a lot about.
As usual we were running late, so we called and asked if we could change our booking from half eight to nine o’clock. Our request was met with a certain amount of reticence, and we were told that they would need to see if it was possible. They would call us back once they had checked it was okay.
Ten minutes later the phone rang, and we were asked to make it as close to half eight as possible as they were expecting a large amount of people and didn’t want us all to arrive at the same time. Wow, must be a really popular place we reckoned. Hastily throwing some clothes together and making a laudable effort at putting my make up on in the car, we arrived at twenty to nine and, aside from the staff, were the only ones there. A fantastically exuberant Sri Lankan woman with the improbably sounding name Elizabeth, greeted us and took us to a little table crammed at the back. Her colleague, a tiny but somewhat formidable-looking French woman, cast her eye over us but our cheery hellos elicited little else but disinterest.
Within nanoseconds of sitting down, Elizabeth reappeared with menus as thick as airport blockbusters and, just in case we were in any way reluctant to give the menus our full attention, proceeded to describe every item enthusiastically, and again with an energy I would normally put down to illegal substances. Once we had chosen a bottle of wine – one that Elizabeth heartily approved of – we had a few minutes to look through the extensive menu ourselves and make our choices.
Elizabeth seemed a little disappointed that we weren’t going for the seasonal specials and after a lengthy attempt at gentle persuasion finally accepted that we weren’t going to change our minds although she wasn’t terribly confident that what I had chosen would be available. After checking with the kitchen she returned to explain that indeed it wasn’t. Apparently lamb is not a terribly popular choice in Cyprus (?!) so they usually only have one piece available and it had already been taken by a diner in that evening’s previous sitting. As we had arrived at twenty to nine and the restaurant looked like it hadn’t seen a customer since 1989 I was a little surprised to find we had missed the rush. Perhaps that possibly explained why the place was so empty.
Finally, at twenty past nine, the restaurant looked to be showing some signs of life as 14 Cypriot men and woman dressed to the nines descended upon the place. After rearranging the entire restaurant in order to accommodate the group’s somewhat picky seating requirements, they finally sat down and Elizabeth headed over to regale them with the delights of the menu. She needn’t have bothered. I suspect the table had arrived at a French restaurant completely by accident as their starters order consisted of 14 Greek salads and they were making loud requests for zivannia.
At this point the formidable French woman was starting to show signs of thawing and came over to our table to see if everything was satisfactory. The food was excellent and we were having a great time people-watching, but after finishing main courses that could easily have fed an entire family there was no way we could manage any pudding.
If the scary woman was slightly disappointed in our option to miss out on a course, Elizabeth was barely consolable. Despite her best efforts, we could not be cajoled into even sharing a cr?me brulee. Eventually accepting defeat she brought us the bill on the condition that when we return we make sure to leave room for pudding. As we were leaving, the French woman, apparently concerned at us missing out on something sweet at the end of the meal, came up to me and pressed a handful of toffees into my hand saying they were ‘for the road’.
It was a really quirky little place, rather like a French Fawlty Towers. I’m looking forward to going back, but next time I’ll book for seven o’clock and get that piece of the lamb.
