Sushi... Well I do love sushi. Except I love tempura more. I love all those little maki rolls with slivers of salmon and cucumber and avocado in them. I love spicy aubergine and chicken teriyaki and miso soup. Mmm - I couldn't wait. I've known the Ambassador since he set fire to my kitchen ceiling making cheese fondue in Oxford in 1980 and the nicest thing about going out with old friends who knew you before you had taste and standards is that you don't have to uphold either of them when you're together.
After a week's diet where my entire carbohydrate intake has come from alcohol, and everything else has been strictly South Beach - no fat, all fruit and modest amounts of protein, I was looking forward, frankly, to pigging out. I was going to have everything fried, twice, and eat huge bowls of rice lashed with soya sauce.
Except I wasn't.
Ambassador turned up with his wife and her girlfriend - another strandee who can't get a flight back to Paris. When I saw the diminutive size of the wife and the friend, alarm bells should have started ringing but in fact, it wasn't until I opened the menu that the fire truck turned up outside. Indeed it was a sushi restaurant. Indeed it was one of the finest sushi restaurants where they do everything properly and cut the fish in ritual fashion after it has been blessed by a samurai or a shinto priest or something and charge $6 per piece for the privilege. And indeed, it had no tempura, no teriyaki and no ...
'Ah we have no miso, sorry,' said the waiter, bowing.
My last hope was gone. How the Frick Collection can they have no miso? It comes in a Fricking Collection mix that you add water and tofu to - can't they go out and pick some up?
'Ah no - we have only clear soup - with clams...'
I looked back over the six pages of offerings. Hand rolls. Sashimi. Sushi. Fish, fish and just for a change, fish with rice. Frick and double Frick.
Girlfriend ordered three pieces of tuna and three sea urchin hand rolls. Madame Ambassador ordered the same, but two pieces of each. I gave up the notion of black cod as an appetizer and ordered the sashimi selection.
'That is eight pieces. Is ah that okay for you ma'am?'
'Wonderful.'
And yes, it was. Really fresh, sweet, delicious tuna, scallops, mackerel and salmon. But it was only eight slivers of raw fish. For dinner. With a bottle and a half of champagne thrown in it probably cost as much as a weekend in Palm Springs with a spa treatment and a mani-pedicure. I remembered with fondness the Oxford days when he ordered house wine which we drank Browns spaghetti, garlic bread and a salad followed by chocolate fudge cake. And cream.
I was drunk before I finished the first glass of fizz.
This probably helped since the girlfriend was French and I don't speak it, well nothing more than schoolgirl, not really paying attention at the back of the class, French. She also didn't speak English. This led to a weird three way conversation with each statement being translated for one of us, with occasional smatterings of Arabic thrown in which, beyond kitchen and cursing, I don't understand either.
Nevertheless we managed.
Ambassador walked me home.
I should have been on a plane over the Atlantic asleep.
B*****d volcano.
