FAR FROM WASTED

 

The first time I had a margarita I thought somebody was having a laugh, either that or they were trying to poison me.  It was in a bar in New York, and I was with people I didn’t know very well, and I couldn’t believe that any sane person would put salt around the rim of their glass.  

 

Well the years go by, our taste buds change, and these days I think the salt is the best reason for drinking a margarita.  I mean I like the tequila, I like the lime juice; I could totally live without the sweet sticky Cointreau or Triple Sec, but I absolutely couldn’t live without the salt.

 

Psycho-pic by Caroline Gannon

So finding oneself in Macayo’s in Scottsdale, Arizona, and attempting to go very slightly native, what could be better than a coupla margaritas and a giant bowl of nachos?  Very little. Macayo’s looks like this.

 

And then a couple of weeks later, in the bar of the Leopold Hotel in Sheffield, England a margarita was again to be had. It looked like this:

smaller and perhaps a little more intense than it’s American cousin and far more expensive ounce for ounce, but still very definitely with the salt.

 

The Leopold Hotel looks like this:

THE FOOD TRIAL

The inamorata and I have been on the road in California (briefly) and in Arizona (mostly).  We didn’t expect it to be a foodie trip (which was just as well) but of course we did a fair amount of eating and drinking, not least these salt and vinegar flavoured crickets, bought in the gift shop of the Phoenix Botanical Garden.  

 

They were fine, because most things in this world taste fine when seasoned with salt and vinegar, but I don’t believe I’ve yet experienced the authentic taste of a cricket.

 

We had, perhaps surprisingly, a pretty good Reuben sandwich at the Space Age Restaurant in Gila Bend.  The sandwich looked like this:

The restaurant sign looked like this:

That's  a lot to live up to, but they just about managed it, Reuben-wise.

 

But the golden food moment came at Applebee’s in Yucca Valley.  The food was much as you’d expect.  I had the Texas Shrimp Bowl which was OK, 

but what made the meal special was the name of the waiter.  The bill told us he was ‘Joseph K.’

 

as in ‘Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K,’ the opening line of Kafka’s The Trial.  If somebody was telling lies about our waiter, it wasn’t me.  Our Joseph K was big, bearded, attentive, and he did everything right, even if he looked nothing at all like Anthony Perkins who played Joseph K in the Orson Welles movie of The Trial.  

Still, you can’t have everything.