STAVROS AND EUNICE HIT THE THUMB

This past weekend, Stavros and I travelled to Lexington, a charming little harbor village on the shore of Lake Huron just 18 miles north of Port Huron in the thumb. Whether you're looking for a weekend retreat, a cottage or a retirement home, Lexington is the place for you. Does it seem like I wrote that last bit? I didn’t. I took it from the Lexington website.

I’ve been to Lexington a few times in the past couple of years and Stavros hadn’t been up there for about 20 years. His people used to have a farm up in the thumb and he spent many idyllic summers there, much like my summers in southwestern Idaho, only without all the Mexican gangbangers.

We stayed at a bed & breakfast in town. The house was an 1870 farmhouse with three guest rooms. We stayed in the “Movie Star Room” which had a very nice chenille bedspread, the type that one might expect Jennifer Aniston to have, and a lot of black and white photos of has-beens like Natalie Wood.

Another highlight of the B & B was a room called “Settee.” This is what they say about “Settee” on their website: There is a coffee pot located in the room for early morning convenience. You are welcomed to relax and watch the morning news or read the daily newspaper in your robe on the provided loveseat.


We arrived in town at about 3 PM and immediately went to eat, because I must eat almost continuously. We shared a “pizzette” at a place called Smackwater Jack’s then walked along the breakwall, where we naturally ran into some acquaintence of Stavros’s. We could be rappelling in Brazil and someone Stavros knows would swing by on a rope.

We made our way back up the street and stopped in a few stores. Stavros determined that the attractive people were the out-of-towners and the homely ones were residents. This seemed to reinforce his earlier observation at a gas station in Port Huron: “Say what you will about Detroit….but the farther away you get, the weirder people are.”

We picked up some groceries for the barbecue we were attending later on that evening and returned to the B & B to lie down for while. We ran into the proprietress in the kitchen, who was wrist-deep in what I knew to be “French toast casserole,” because she told me what she’d be serving for Sunday breakfast when I made the reservation. Stavros lay immediately upon the chenille and closed his glorious eyes while I read my book in the nearby chaise and jostled the bed with my foot every time he seemed to be drifting off. Finally, he awoke and we departed for the barbecue at the cottage of some friends of ours. They were up from the Detroit area with their kids; two couples, Pierce and Joanne Nawtee and Krystal and Pete St. Patrick.

The gentlemen had apparently been sampling the contents of the cooler for several hours by the time we arrived. The ladies were busy in the kitchen making salad and mac & cheese for the children. I uncorked my Pinot Grigio and poured three glasses while Stavros trotted out the back door.

“Salud!” I said, as Krystal and Joanne and I touched juice glasses.

I helped Joanne prepare salads and do the dishes then went outside when she got to the “cheese” part of the mac & cheese. There is nothing that smells quite as bad as mac & cheese to me. The guys were standing around the barbecue trying to seem busy when I stepped out the back door. Pierce didn’t put much effort into it and plopped down in a lawn chair, his head lolling backward.

“He’s gone,” murmured Stavros.

“I see that!” said I, smiling brightly at Pierce, who suddenly lifted his head and attempted to focus on us.

We ate and played catch and chased the children and told them some scary lies about what happens to kids that try to go to the beach alone and stuff like that for a few hours. When the s’mores and the sparklers were finally gone, they were sent to bed and the adults gathered around the bonfire. It was very nice, even when the wind changed direction and fully engulfed my person in smoke and flying soot.


This sort of classic summery memory-making went on for maybe another hour and we decided to pack it in. Forgetting nearly everything we’d brought with us, including my sunglasses, the bug spray, and our baseball and mitts, we clambered into the car and bounced down the dark highway the two miles back to town. After the “Zappa Plays Zappa” show, I am all about FZ so we had to listen to “Any Way the Wind Blows” a number of times before I felt we could end the night.

We entered the front door and crept stealthily upstairs to our room. The owners’ room was directly next to ours so we had to be extra quiet. Naturally we both slept like logs and awoke 22 minutes before the official breakfast call. I took a shower and made sure to use some of every product in the bathroom, even going so far as to steal a Biore blackhead remover pad.

We trundled down the stairs and onto the wide front porch, where the B & B’s two other couples were already tucking into breakfast and revealing dull things about themselves to one another.

“Thank God we don’t have to sit with them,” I whispered, as we took the other table.

A margarita glass filled with fruit salad was at each place setting and within seconds, the proprietress rushed out with platters of French toast casserole topped with warm berry sauce and grilled sausage patties. Regular readers of Modern Coastline will not be able to believe the following statement but I assure you it is true: Stavros did not like the French toast casserole. His official explanation was that it “didn’t taste like anything,” but I suspect that it simply didn’t taste like sugar. I thought it was really good, as far as those things go, but the sausage was spectacular. I ate all of my sausage (two large patties) and most of the fruit salad and about half of the giant French toast wedge. The proprietress came to take our plates and looked genuinely hurt that Stavros had left one sausage patty.

“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed enthusiastically as she took my plate. “Those sausages were wonderful! I am just…so full! Aren’t you full?”

“Yes,” Stavros agreed, pushing back from the table and standing up.

“We have a child in Indiana,” commented one of the time machines sitting behind us.

We packed up and left at once. Following a brisk stroll through town, we decided that maybe we weren’t full after all, and we popped into Wimpy’s, Lexington’s famed hole-in the-wall hamburger joint.



We ordered and perused the local “paper,” which was actually more of a pamphlet; a four-page (cover, inside front cover, inside back cover, and back cover) homemade effort. Most of it consisted of ads for real estate agents and rib night at the golf course restaurant, but there was a smattering of “content” also. My favorite part was the joke sent in by a reader about the guy who went to the store to get his wife some tampons but got her string and cotton balls instead to pay her back for getting him loose tobacco and rolling papers instead of a pack of cigarettes the night before. Also I enjoyed the riddle about “I am having lunch with my only sister’s husband’s mother-in-law’s daughter in law. Who am I having lunch with?” (The answer to that one was supposed to be somewhere in the paper but it was not so if you know the answer please tell me.)

“I gotta go the bathroom,” Stavros announced.

While I waited I puzzled over the riddle and stared at the 8-year-old Wimpy’s employed to bus tables wipe counters until Stavros abruptly returned and whispered to me that he hadn’t been able to go because while he was in the bathroom, some man kept rattling the door, trying to get in. I turned around. “Who?” I asked.

“I dunno.”

Two hamburgers (the misshapen blackish sort with greasy fried onions clinging to the surface) and a large chicken fries and order of onion rings later, we were finally really full.

We hoisted our hugely fat selves into the car and made one last tourist stop at the swinging bridge in nearby Croswell, home of Pioneer sugar. I climbed on the bridge and started trying to make it sway.

“Nice Biore blackhead strip,” said Stavros.

My hand flew to my back pocket and felt the edge of the package slipping out.

“You ever use one of those?” he asked. “It’s gross. You leave it on for like, eight, ten minutes, then peel it off and it’s like a forest of blackheads.”

Well, after that special moment, we bade a wistful farewell to Lexington.

And then the drama began.

About 45 minutes into our trip and during the zillionth playing of “Wowie Zowie,” we heard a noise. It was a repetitive sound, the kind of sound that follows the revolution of a tire going about 70 miles an hour. A tire that used to have air inside of it, but no longer does.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” screamed Stavros, “PULL OVER!”

Well, he didn’t curse like that but he did suggest pulling over. So we slowed down and stopped and he got out to examine the suspect wheel. It was indeed flat.

He opened my trunk and fished around under the Tupperware and paperbacks and old sweaters and newspapers and coffee cups, looking for the jack.

“Where’s the jack?” he yelled over the nonstop stream of semis blazing past at 120 miles an hour.

“I don’t have one.”

Well, to make a long, sweaty story short, a very lovely police officer stopped and offered to call a towing associate of his to come help us.

This was terrific because my insurance carrier, to whom I pay a large sum of money for the specific benefit of roadside assistance, chose first to be baffled by my inability to describe my exact coordinates, then to react by putting me on hold for 10-15 minutes.

A tow truck arrived lickety-split and a burly sort changed the tire after being sort of a prick to Stavros when my dear asked a simple question about my being billed. We chalked it up to the distance-from-Detroit thing and let it go.

Forty-five minutes later we were pulling off the freeway on our exit when Stavros received a text message from his next-door-neighbor, Arnie. “'Fuck the cops—Arnie,'” he read aloud. “What does that mean?” He called Arnie back and got voicemail. We decided to drive past his house—maybe there’d been a break in over the weekend? Some sort of crime on their block?

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I bet he was driving by and saw us on the side of the road with that cop.”

Stavros turned and fastened his heavily lashed orbs on me. “My God,” he said. “You’re right.”

Moments later Arnie called and confirmed my guess. He couldn’t believe what a dick the cop was, making us both get out of the car after pulling us over! We all were laughing, whooping, and hollering and high fiving over that one for a while.

INYO!

We had been looking forward to the opening of Inyo as much as our ill-fated anticipation of Da Nang (see “THANG LONG”). For months, the signs in the window along Woodward had been taunting us with the promise of a new Asian restaurant. I checked their website every day. Finally there appeared the option to make a reservation, so I put us down for two for last Friday.

Our reservation was for 6:45 because we had plans at 8 to go to the local comedy club. I was kinda nervous that we’d be the only people in the restaurant but I noticed a few other tables occupied by fellow early birds when we walked in. We were greeted by a tall, blonde Russian woman in a stunning black pantsuit. She showed us around so that we could get a feel for the place and choose our seating. In addition to a large bar in the front, tables are lined along the L-shaped northern half of the restaurant with a handful of very cozy, high-backed booths beyond them and a small, dark sushi bar in the rear, although it was a struggle to make note of these things because I was totally mesmerized by the swish-swish of the hostess’s pants in concert with her Slavic sussurations.

We selected a high window table along Woodward so we could keep an eye on the door. And when I say “we,” I mean I exclusively close the table for this reason. I don’t think Stavros cares where we sit as long as there is no heavy a/c blowing in his face. The table was set with red plastic chopsticks and black cloth napkins (chic!) and everything smelled new, new, new. There was the requisite techno music that every Asian restaurant in town (Ronin, Sakana) seems to favor, and two televisions above the half-circle bar, but the atmosphere was nonetheless reasonably pleasant. An abundance of wait staff stood nervously about, and a tallish fellow I presume was the owner hovered between the bar and the door all evening, making fleeting, suspicious eye contact with me, which added an element of intrigue to the evening that I found refreshing.

Our waitress was a very perky and white-toothed Katie. It seems like everyone lately has unnaturally white teeth. It’s very distracting. Anyway, Katie took our drink orders and I was pleased to note a lot of wine by the glass available. Stavros and I looked over the menu and decided to try a bunch of things and share instead of ordering entrees. Most everything on the menu was Japanese, with the exception of a few side dishes (fried rice) and I think two out of three of the poultry entrees (General Tsao’s Chicken, etc). We stuck with the flavors of Nippon for the most part. Here is what we ordered and what we thought:
• Hot and sour seafood soup—Excellent job on the “hot”; not too much white pepper. Could use some more of the “sour,” though.
• Seaweed salad—Good, standard seaweed salad, only served in a martini glass atop three thin lemon slices which made the bottom of the salad very lemony and not so good.
• Agi dashi tofu—Very, very good deep-fried tofu with bonito atop. Only complaint, was supposed to have sauce accompanying, none was provided.
• Ohitashi—Boiled spinach with bonito and dipping sauce. This was great; I have never seen this offered in Detroit and all it needed to be perf was a little soy sauce. (NOTE: We had to ask for soy sauce; none was on the table)
• Fried noodles—This was a $4 side dish that was unexpectedly great. Julienned celery and carrots with bean sprouts and scallions mixed with fried thin egg noodles. See pic here of Stavros with fried noodles and the next item on our list.

• Tempura bowl—Also great. Perfect crispness outside, no greasiness inside. Shrimp, squash, onion…I think that’s it.
• Pickled vegetable roll—Good, nothing crazy but what do you expect with such a pedestrian dish?

I am pleased to report that the ladies’ room is very well done also. In the aforementioned Ronin, I get the distinct feeling they either ran out of money or interest by the time they got to the johns. Junky, dark, and shitty stalls. Inyo may not have a cheesy make-out-on-the-sofa zone with big, open windows, I grant you, but the food’s better and it’s cheaper. It’s also a lot nicer. It’s cleaner. There’s no sleazebag element. Yet, anyway.

Items of note:
1. While I was in the can, the suspiciously spying owner man approached our table and asked Stavros how everything was. I think he waited for me to leave to talk to Stavros alone. Why? I don’t know.
2. The blonde Russian was replaced by a tall black girl in an ill-fitting sari and hideous clunky shoes. Put the blonde back.


Our bill, as you can see here…

…was not that much. You’ll note we each had two drinks, and Stavros’s beers were pints, not the 12-oz versions. I think we’ve spent that much at the Emory (although at the Emory you’d have to combine our bills to come up with a total; see “GALL AT THE EMORY” and “EMORY ON NOTICE”).

We left without dessert (tiramisu and mango something but we were stuffed and we never get dessert but I did ask what it was nonetheless) and went across the street to the comedy club, which was noteworthy only because of my terribly inappropriate attempt to join in the fun of the audience participation of improv. (Was that sentence a bit long and clumsy? Sorry.)

As anyone who has been to one of these things knows, the emcee asks the audience to provide words or scenarios for the comics to work into their acts. Well, as you can see by the bill above, I had two Chenin Blancs at Inyo. I ordered a house white at the comedy club, which turned out to be an especially vile Chardonnay, which I guzzled down quickly to get it over with. I then ordered another one to rinse the rancid taste of the first of one out of my mouth, and the second half of the show began. I should mention that the place was half-empty (optimism varies by locale and temperment; see “CAFÉ HABANA”) and that we were seated at the front table, stage right. So the emcee’s having a hard time generating much enthusiasm from either the boring crowd (a handful of women having a pathetically sedate bachelorette party and a Chinese couple and their underage son who sat in total boozeless silence the whole time) or the performers, who seemed to be going through the motions despite each having profoundly agitating personal problems. I found myself wishing we’d gotten seats in the back so we could slip out. Instead, I guzzled down approximately nine glasses of rotgut Chardonnay in preparation for the nadir of the evening, which can be described thusly: The emcee asks the audience for a three-syllable word beginning with the letter “B.” He keeps talking, apparently describing the part of speech in which this word is used, but my mind was off and running, trying to think of a three-syllable B word.

“BUCHENWALD!” I yell out.

The emcee, who’s standing on the other side of the room, the entirety of the audience between us, glares up from his notes as me and hisses, “I said ‘adjective,’” as all other persons in the room stare poison hate daggers at me.

“BUCHENWALDIAN!” I try again.

At this point, Stavros lays an okay-shut-the-fuck-up hand on my arm and I try to make myself as small, silent, and apologetically posed as possible. Obviously I did not “participate” in the show any more that night, and when it was over, fairly ran to the car. Later I justified my contributions by thinking of the great comedy clubs and comic performances of yore. What kind of stiffs are we growing around here? Reminded me of the time I had the chutzpah to stand up at an Elvis Costello show at Pine Knob and the lady next to me threatened to call security unless I took my seat.

See you at Inyo.

THINGS GET HOT AT HOME WITH EUNICE AND STAVROS

Stavros and I had a truly incendiary evening yesterday. It was a beautiful afternoon, and since Stavros’s plans were unexpectedly canceled, we decided to grill. Earlier in the day, I had been to the very expensive Plum Market where I purchased a pound of hot Italian chicken sausage and some corn on the cob, and Stavros loves hot dogs, so I figured I’d make a side of pasta and we’d have a genuine smorgasbord. (“Smorgasbord” is French for “full stomach.”)

We had a preprandial cocktail on the patio and tossed out a box of Carr’s Water Crackers to the squirrels, who had to then run around and dig up chunks of buried brie—a chore but worth it—and chatted about our respective days at work. Stavros is a busy manager for a highly-regarded showbiz firm, and I provide online content for some of America’s leading retailers of GDP-type items. Stavros, all in black, did not even glisten in the early-evening sun as he described his day. I remarked that we would likely soon run out of propane, and with that gripping observation, I turned on the grill and we went into the house to prepare the meat and corn.

I unwrapped the sausage while Stavros took his hot dogs from the freezer and lay them on a plate. I had high hopes for these sausages. Not only did I expect them to be good, I demanded it. My trip to Plum Market had put me in a rotten mood because it wound up being horrifically expensive and so far, not worth it. I originally meant to get lunch—I woke up wanting salad from a salad bar. Perhaps unwise in the season of Swine Flu, but that’s what I wanted and I had had a vague memory of Plum Market having a superior salad bar. So at lunch I drove down to ritzytown and was seduced into buying a few additional things by the subliminal messages in the muzak, among them, these grossly overpriced sausages. The salad bar turned out to be about one thin hair (I was going to say “pussy” instead of thin) better than the one in my cafeteria at work, and the potato chips were revolting—I think they had sugar on them—and cost $1.79, I realized once back at work. So I felt consummately gypped by the entire experience and pinned my salvation on these hot Italian chicken sausages. If they were good, the trip and expense would have been worth it. Capice?

I put the corn and the sausage on the grill and came back inside to make the pasta. Stavros assisted by way of attempting to make out with me constantly. As I filled the coffee pot and set the timer for this morning, I glanced out the kitchen window at the grill, from which huge, poisonous-looking clouds of black smoke were suddenly billowing.

“STAVROS!” I cried, placing the coffee pot on the sideboard. “Look at the grill!”

We raced outside and I yelled, “What do I do?”

“Put the fire out!” yelled back Stavros.

“With the hose?” I asked, in keeping with my new habit of asking the dumbest possible questions.

Without waiting for an answer, I sprang like one of Charlie’s Angels and grabbed the hose, conveniently located apprx. six inches from the smoldering grill, and squatted in front of it, aiming the water into the drip pan, which was fully ablaze from a year’s worth of collected olive oil and assorted lard. I held down the trigger of the spray nozzle and crouched in front of the grill like Jacklyn Smith taking down a rogue pimp and finally the fire died down. I dropped the hose and reached under the grill to turn off the flow of propane from the tank while Stavros extended a delicate hand to turn off the ignition knob.

“Holy shit,” said I.

Stavros opened the grill. The hot Italian chicken sausages had been reduced to anthracite. The corn was still vaguely cornlike, but with a greasy, gray sheen and speckles of soot. Smoke rose in foul breaths and blackened the cobwebs and soffit vents under my eave.

I gotta say, I took this pretty hard. I almost never ruin dinner. Especially by way of a giant fire. Stavros was kind enough to remove the drip pan, which had finally been extinguished, and I dropped the charred remains of the sausage and corn into the garbage. Luckily, Stavros had grilled and removed his hot dogs prior to the fire, so all was not totally lost. Plus we still had the pasta. So I had some pasta, and Stavros had his hot dogs and pasta, and we decided to go for a walk and get an ice cream to make up for the tragic loss of 800 calories.

We live very near each other, Stavros and I, and thus we patronize the same party store. (For those of you not in the Detroit area, “party store” means “liquor store.” Not “balloons and streamers”; booze, etc.) I should also point out that I have lived in the neighborhood for about three times as long as Stavros, which is why what happened next was amusing.

We walked into the party store. I noticed that this evening’s clerks were the two older men, not the twenty-something sons of the proprietor. I approached the ice cream vault and heard, “Hi, Stavros.” I turned around in time to see Stavros raise his hand in a wave and reply, “Hey, Pete.”

Hey, Stavros? Hey, Pete? What’s going on here? Are these two pals on Facebook now or something? Stavros looked quite proud of himself as we wrapped up our purchase, and the minute we were outside I demanded, “How does he know your name!”

“I go there every day,” he said. “He sees my credit card. He started saying, ‘Thanks, Stavros,’ so I asked him his name.”

I didn’t quite buy this and I watched him with suspicion as I ate my Good Humor strawberry shortcake bar.

By the time we got home, there was no lingering smell of grease fire and the evening had somewhat redeemed itself by virtue of the ice cream and the discovery of a 1992 Ford High School yearbook lying the road.

I will not, however, be returning to Plum Market.

THANG LONG

Our bike ride was rained out last Saturday so Stavros and I decided it was a good afternoon to go to the movies and visit our all-time favorite place: Thang Long. It’s the one and only Vietnamese restaurant I’ve ever eaten at (Notice I said “eaten at” and not “been to.” More on this later*.) and I think it is the bomb, as does Stavros, and we are wiling to overlook a number of indiscretions that would place any other restaurant on our permanent “DO NOT CALL” list.

It started to rain on our way there and was steadily spitting down by the time we arrived. I was completely starving, like the kind of starving where every McDonald’s billboard drives you mad with food-lust and the idea of Kentucky Fried Chicken sounds really good. We pulled into a parking place near the front door and I leapt out of the car.

“AAAHHHHHH!”

I was just reaching for the door when I heard the wail bleat from a very aggrieved Stavros. I turned around and he was grimacing and limping around on the sidewalk in front of the car. “Oh, Stavros! Love of my life—what happened?” cried I.

“I twisted my fuckin’ ankle!” he said, and continued his cockeyed walk around on the pavement, trying to alleviate the pain. He moved off the sidewalk and into the vacant parking place next to ours, and at once a car pulled into the space, forcing him back onto the pavement at a rather rapid clip.

“Goddamn it. What’s wrong with my fucking feet?” he asked God, or perhaps he was talking to me. He was referring to the fact that a few weeks earlier, he sustained a mysterious injury to one of his feet—I forget which, it was either the right or the left—that caused him great distress and inconvenience.

We briefly contemplated a later trip to CVS to purchase an ace bandage, came to no conclusion on the topic, and entered Thang Long.

Normally there are only a few tables occupied and we have our choice of seating, but on this day, every booth on the South wall—my preferred location—was full as was the “mezzanine,” (a one-step-up row of tables facing the front window) which is my second choice. The host, a diminutive Asian with possible birth defects, led us to a table on the North wall, and I knew this wouldn’t do. As we know from experience, these tables are unsuitable for all but the most obese persons, as the backs of the benches are approximately 3 ½ feet from the tabletop. So if you don’t have to accommodate an enormous midsection, you must perch on the very edge of the seat in order to reach your food, which hurts my back and also is just generally uncomfortable. Plus it seems kind of windy on that side. Nonetheless, we gamely slid into the booth and just as gamely slid right the hell back out and pointed to the one open table on the North wall that was unoccupied. Yes, I know I said earlier they were all full, but that’s because, frankly, I wasn’t counting the one at the very end of the row because it’s right next to the kitchen and I don’t like it. We walked over to the table, and to our waitress’s confusion, I did not sit, but stood scanning the tableau behind me for a miracle opening. Stavros was already seated on the side facing the front of the restaurant and so finally I surrendered, feeling he’d already suffered enough recently without me dragging him from table to table.

I took my seat and noted the grimy Plexiglas behind him, separating us from the lower 2/3 of the kitchen’s swinging door and whatever was stacked on the bottom shelves of the rack affixed to the wall. I could see some plastic containers stacked haphazardly and a few empty jars. Nothing in this place is too clean so it doesn’t really bear inspecting and with this in mind, I tore my eyes from the dripping hand towel on the top shelf and opened the menu.

“What are you going to get?” I demanded of Stavros immediately. “Are you getting the Hue?” Hue is some kind of spicy beef soup and Stavros orders it every time we eat there.

“Yes,” he said, and I briskly replied, “Alright, maybe I should see if they’ll let me get that one soup in a big bowl. I wonder if it comes that way, or just in a cup. Then we can get that salad, the one with bean sprouts. That seems like it would be enough. Or maybe I could get that one thing, the one with the noodles. We don’t want leftovers. They’ll rot while we’re in the movies. What do you want? Do you want some of the noodles? Maybe I should get that and a cup of the soup. Do you like that salad?”

I kept up this prattle for a good ten minutes until the waitress arrived. I believe she is the matriarch of Thang Long. She is always our waitress. I think a family owns it, and they are the only people who work there. Anyway, she stood at the table, pen poised over her pad and an expectant and slightly mocking look on her face as always.

“Well,” I told her, closing my menu, “After much deliberation, we’ve decided to get what we always get,” and I recited not only my order, but Stavros’s too, as at some point I had made the unconscious decision to steward our luncheon experience due to his injury.

“Wait.” She was confused. “C75 plus Hue? You want crunchy roll?”

“No. No crunchy roll,” I tell her. “Mine comes with one. You can have it.” I direct this last comment at Stavros, who was feebly attempting to protest and break into my dictatorial dictation of our menu.

I think Stavros was beaten down by his ankle pain because he capitulated and allowed me to issue further commands to the waitress. After she read back our order in an obviously annoyed tone, she retreated to the kitchen and I sat back and sipped water, occasionally allowing my eyes to drift around the area behind Stavros. There was a bicycle leaning against the wall next to the restrooms. Whose is that? I wondered, visions of a steamy Asiatic marketplace forming in my mind. Chickens flapping amid the teeming crowds of sweaty brunettes in gray sweatpants and flip flops. Asian men on bicycles wearing those big round straw hats transporting miscellaneous carcasses in baskets hanging from their shoulders.

“Hue. Chicken soup. Salad.” The waitress returned and I was jolted from my reverie. She slammed the bowls on the table and walked away. I noticed Stavros’s soup was a small size, what they call a “cup” at Thang Long.

“You just got the cup?” I asked.

“Yes, this is why I wanted my own crispy rolls,” he said patiently, stirring his soup.

“Oh.”

I felt kinda bad. Poor guy hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise during my attempt to control some portion of our experience. Sitting in that lame booth that was rejected by all other persons in the restaurant had really left me feeling at loose ends.

The rest of lunch passed without incident as I stuffed wad after wad of beansprouts and cabbage and noodles into my piehole. The tabletop before me was scattered with debris. Stavros ate his soup with his usual delicate good manners, and gracefully accepted my crispy roll without complaint as to its singlehood. Finally, we folded our napkins and got up to leave. As I was standing at the cashier’s desk (manned by the matriarch), Stavros limped over to the wall of reviews from local papers.

I took his arm to leave and once we were out, he told me that one of them hadn’t been particularly flattering.

“Located in a derelict strip mall sandwiched between a pregnancy center and a shuttered fast cash shop, Thang Long is best when you stick to the simple fare,” he recited from memory.

Okay, so at this point I should also mention, as a testament to how good this place really is, review be damned—on one of our first trips there, I found what was unmistakably a pubic hair in my “C75.” And we still went back.

* Last fall we noticed a storefront under construction in Clawson promising the imminent arrival of “Da Nang—Authentic Vietnamese Cuisine.” We waited months for them to open. I was in contact via email with the owner. Finally, two months overdue, they opened and we drove down one Saturday afternoon. First, it was overclean and smelled of construction. Not food. Paint and wood and cement. Secondly, there was virtually nothing on the menu but beef, which I do not eat. And third, it was about twice or three times as expensive at Thang Long. We slipped out without ordering anything and drove to Thang Long at once.