Medium Raw

If you’re looking for bellwethers, a big fat canary in a coal mine, you might look hard at what happens in Miami—with the multimillion-dollar renovation of the Fontainebleau Hotel and its associated businesses (including the very fine Scarpetta restaurant). Bar and “lounge” business—which has also been a stolid underwriter of restaurant bottom lines—will probably be seeing some major changes. This is a town that has traditionally thrived on bottle service: the selling of a twenty-dollar bottle of vodka for five hundred dollars (with accompanying rights to a chair). How long that sort of douche-oriented economy survives is questionable. While there will always be douchebags, how long there will be enough rich douchebags willing to spend that kind of money for, basically, nothing is something I’d be worried about down there—and at any restaurants that double as “lounges.”

For that kind of money, one can afford to do a lot of drinking at home.

I’m just hoping that, in the future, a night out doesn’t mean you curl up with a gallon jug of Wolfschmitz or a box of wine, turn on the TV, and watch people cooking things on screen that you, yourself, won’t be cooking anytime soon.

On the other hand, this would mean that whatever happens, there will always be work in food porn.

8 Lust

Heavenly wine and roses sing to me when you smile

—LOU REED, “SWEET JANE”

(THE SLOW, BEST VERSION)

 It’s Christmastime in Hanoi again and the Metropole Hotel is lit up like an amusement park. In the courtyard, a monstrous white tree with bright red ornamental balls towers over the swimming pool. The decorative palms shine blindingly bright with a million tiny bulbs. I’m on my second gin and tonic and planning on having a third, settled back in a heavy rattan chair and feeling the kind of sorry for myself that most people would be very content with. There’s incense in the air, buffeted about by the slowly moving overhead fans: a sickly-sweet odor that mirrors perfectly my mixed feelings of dull heartache and exquisite pleasure.

I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.

Today, this feeling will disappear the second I’m out the door. Once I’m away from the sight of the other lone Western travelers, each, I imagine, with their own weltschmerz-loaded back story, their own unfulfilled longings, sitting there with their Gerald Seymours and their Ken Follets next to unringing cell phones. After strolling ever so slightly tipsy yet confident through the lobby, the service staff in ao dais and traditional Annanite headgear address me (as they do all the guests) in French: “Bon soir, Monsieur…Ça va?” I’m through the doors, and suddenly the air fills with the roar of a thousand motorbikes and those feelings are gone, replaced by a giddiness, a familiar rush of overwhelming glee at being back in the country I’m crazy in love with.

The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter. To ride in a car would be madness—limiting your mobility to a crawl, preventing you from even venturing down half the narrow streets and alleys where the good stuff is to be found. To be separated from what’s around you by a pane of glass would be to miss—everything. Here, the joy of riding on the back of a scooter or motorbike is to be part of the throng, just one more tiny element in an organic thing, a constantly moving, ever-changing process rushing, mixing, swirling, and diverting through the city’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. Admittedly, it’s also slightly dangerous. Traffic lights, one-way signs, intersections, and the like—the rough outlines of organized society—are more suggestions than regulations observed by anyone in actual practice. One has, though, the advantage of the right of way. Here? The scooter and the motorbike are kings. The automobile may rule the thoroughfares of America, but in Hanoi it’s cumbersome and unwieldy, the last one to the party, a woolly mammoth of the road—to be waited on, begrudgingly accommodated—even pitied—like the fat man at a sack race.