Day-Glo Denouement
Mr. Chow
By Arty Nelson
It was morning, and the skies were showing hints of something other than what I had initially expected. It was a good day, quite simply. A day when the dice seemed to be falling in my favor. A day designed for a step upward and onward. A day when I decided that I was feeling so bold that drastic actions weren't so drastic anymore. A day when galloping into the 310 with a sharkskin suit on seemed like a really fine idea. A day when a dream presented itself, in all its glory, ready to drop into my shiny lap, fully formed and primed for consumption and, with a little bit of good fortune, my undying devotion.
Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills, as I learned on this day, may actually earn the distinction of executing the highest-end version of fake food currently in human captivity. What I mean to say is that, sitting in that storied bistro watching as the pink and green food rolled out steaming atop shiny silver carts, I had no choice but to admit that, in my own personal experience, I've never seen it done better, bigger, and/or more tastefully in Day-Glo colors in all of my desperate dietary days. That shit ain't for realio! It's glistening and screaming out in a language that's either dead, ancient, or wholly fabricated for purposes that, naturally, I will categorize as unspeakable.
I had a date with a pile of drunken fish that I would guess never traversed water deeper than the puddle of white wine sauce where it lay in wait for me. I death-wrestled with a duck that was both steamed and fried in a way that I haven't seen or enjoyed since I spent a long night in Thompkins Square Park back in 1989. I nibbled on a plate of noodles covered in a sauce brimming with all the spunk of chili, all the sass of marinara, yet tasted exactly like neither. I went all the way with a plate of sliced filet that was both crispy and medium rare, floating once again in a sauce that could only be considered alien territory.
I'm not kidding around. I can't be, because it's illegal to kid around about a restaurant where there's a $30 minimum per person. Save your pennies. Lie to your relatives. Tell encyclopedic truths to your underlings and blame it on me. If you like it wanky and tasty, Mr. Chow is a spot well worth the hectic pilgrimage to B.H. Accept that you'll be sitting comfortably amid hookers and blue-hairs, overgrown party boys from Houston with private jets, strangely hair-colored henchmen from countries you've honestly never heard of. This is the place where it happens. This is the location where the '80s took a holiday and decided to retire.
Like all things really good and really horrible, it's hard to remember exactly what happened from one second to the other. I do remember this, though: There was a whole side of Sting playing. Early Sting, but Sting nonetheless. It got kind of hard to take, too. I found myself wishing that Sting had taken a darker path. A more devious route to whatever version of serenity his current palate of pastel melodies point toward. I'm at something way short of a loss on that guy, but I'm trying to be a better person, and that requires that I refrain from judgment until the final ballots have been cast.
I have no answers but, luckily for me, I had some kind of strange chicken, candied walnut, and crispy seaweed appetizer that took me where I needed to go. It's been a long time since my alleged adventures in food writing have taken me to a place where there's a champagne cart being pushed around by a tall white boy with an under-beard. But it happened here, and, sadly (due to a lifetime of battling with my own less sexy proclivities), I was forced to decline. It might have changed everything. Maybe a blast of the bubbly would have had me dancing and weeping on the tabletops, but instead I was comfortable enough to appease my own desires by merely wiggling my ass in my seat. And that, my compadres, is exactly what I suggest you do as well. It might hurt a little, sure. Because there's a damn good chance that you're more real and, more importantly, they say, more spiritual than everyone else in the room, and that's never easy.
Winning isn't everything. It comes with a lot of responsibility and baggage. Always best to settle for something else, something more philosophically aligned with a kind of enduring metaphysical bloat. Happy, a little bit chubby, and fully accepting of the time you must eventually repay for your dalliances on machines like treadmills and pec-decks. Ciao.
Published: 10/23/2003
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