My Dinner at Chef Luis

Mrs. Banks and I had dinner at the other night for the first time since they expanded the place, and the only thing I could find to gripe about is that the bar’s too narrow. I’m disappointed by my lack of disappointment. One of the underappreciated pleasures of dining out, I like to think, is the opportunity it affords for working oneself into highly enjoyable fits of righteous indignation. If all goes well, the service will be slow, the veal soggy, and they’ll forget to add the anchovies to your Caesar salad. And what’s a guy have to do to get another beer around here? Pile enough small disappointments like that on top of each other over the course of a leisurely meal out, and by the time the dessert menus arrive one can really have gotten the needle moving on the sanctimonious-outrage meter. I remember when one place in town (which shall remain nameless) was going through a period a few years back of following the Health Department’s rules perhaps too closely to the letter, I’d take an odd pleasure in occasionally ducking in and ordering a bacon cheeseburger, very rare, and then once it finally arrived grey, dry, and shriveled, spending the rest of the meal happily nursing my high-minded outrage. The place has since gotten over its obsession with food-borne illnesses, so now my burger arrives just the way I order it. The food’s much better, but the overall dining experience still isn’t what it used to be.

But at Chef Luis that night, our meals were spectacularly good. It wasn’t until I took the first sip of my dessert Manhattan that it occurred to me that I hadn’t had anything to complain about the whole night. “I thought you said your entrée portion was awfully big,” Mrs. Banks mentioned, trying to cheer me up.

“Honey, that’s not a bad thing,” I told her. And it wasn’t. As it happens, I’d cleaned my plate.

By the time it came time to leave, the only plausible complaint I could come up with—and I admit I’m descending into nitpicking at this point, but one can only work with what one has been given to work with—is that maybe the bar is a little tight, and perhaps the bartenders behind it might have been provided with more room to maneuver.

“That’s it?” Mrs. Banks told me when I made the observation. “You don’t like the bar? There’s not a bar on earth you don’t like.”

She’s right. I withdraw the complaint.