I’VE BEEN THINKING by James Napoli

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Una Volta

2525 Corruption Way

Gotham City

Entrees $16.95-$33.00

By The Dark Knight

I am shown to my table by a stern-looking maître d', and find it somewhat reassuring that they are not bubbly and effusive in their welcoming; this city is a cesspool and we all know it, so an eating establishment that refuses to let its first impression be that of a painted-on smile gives one the indication that the presentation of the food will be more important than being greeted by something resembling a freakish emissary of Bennigan’s.  Not to mention, I’ve had my fill of painted-on smiles, if you know what I mean.  The way I feel these days, if I were forced to endure a place wherein the wait staff took to gathering around anyone’s table singing “Happy Birthday,” I should feel only too obliged to do my duty as a crime fighter and bring them to justice.  Which, in my case, since I’m so damn conflicted about the role I play in this vast underbelly of ugliness, sadly means I have to resist the urge to rip out their throats and merely deliver them to Commissioner Gordon on a charge of bile-inducing inanity.

Similarly, the very dim lighting in Una Volta (an Italian phrase meaning “once more”) serves as a fitting backdrop to the constant pitch-blackness lurking in my tortured being.  The menu carries a varied selection of meat, fish and pasta dishes.  Since I will be forcing my meal into the small mouth opening in my cowl, I suspect I will lean more towards a simple protein and vegetable entrée, as the components of such a dinner can be popped easily onto my tongue, whereas pasta tends to get caught on the cowl and dangle.  This often goes undetected by me, and very few people would have the stones to point out something stuck to the mask of a crime fighter who is wound as tightly as I am.  Though it hurts me to realize it, somewhere inside they fear that I will be sorely tempted to disembowel them just for intruding on the sanctity of my dining experience, and I have to say I do not blame them for having such a suspicion.  The fact that I am capable of such irrational hatred is only another aspect of the twisted vigilantism that eats away at the blackened tuna of my soul.

As such, it is not surprising that my waitress seems to have a never-ending case of dry-mouth and can barely appropriate the function of speech necessary to ask me what I would like to order.  She neglects to list the evening’s specials, which, again, I will chalk up to a fear of being annihilated where she stands.  Still, this oversight has already taken some points off my review in my embittered mind.  I am given a glass of very good Papillon Bordeaux 2004, with a discreetly placed straw for my convenience.  Indeed, the aforementioned cowl-related logistics prevent me from ordering a very pleasant-sounding tomato bisque soup as an appetizer, however I indulge in bacon-wrapped scallop skewers.  They are tasty at first, but soon their salty, surf and turf bite takes me back to happier childhood days visiting the food vendors on Coney Island, before the violence that shattered the very foundations of who I am and left me an angry, embittered husk of something that may have, at one time, been human.  So, needless to say, I find the scallop skewers lacking in overall effect. 

My chosen entrée is veal medallions in a light mushroom sauce with asparagus spears on a bed of vermicelli. I am sickened to report that I could not take a single bite of it, for its presentation on the plate called to mind nothing less than a graying and diseased human heart, with the asparagus spears arranged in such a way as to resemble the clogged and brittle aortic valves through which blood no longer burdened with human feeling pumps inexorably on, awaiting the final release of the death that surely awaits me very soon.

Sending the main course back prompted the head chef (he refused to give me his name—again, perfectly understandable) to provide me with dessert on the house, a homemade, strawberry and custard chantilly millefoglie that truly was delicious, although the resulting sugar buzz made me clip a few fenders with the Batmobile on my way home, and although Alfred urged me to report these infractions to the DMV, I told him to mind his own business.  People take a risk just waking up in the morning in this hellhole of a city, I said, and if the least of their problems is a ding in their bodywork, they got off easy, the scum.

Can I recommend Una Volta?  Oh, why not?  Most days I can’t even recommend getting up in the morning. 

James Napoli’s new book The North Pole Employee Handbook will be released by Cider Mill Press in the fall of 2008.  He is an author and humorist who has also written and directed the award winning dramatic shorts “The Priests” and “Nobody Gets Hurt.” 

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