Lunch in the Afternoon

Persimmon
7003 Wisconsin Avenue
Chevy Chase, MD 20815
301-654-9860

It seems a great pity that few people take the time for lunch any more; I myself have often been guilty of this trespass. Yet lunch is a meal too, which makes it one of only so many we get in a lifetime, and it is rather a waste to ignore it or not to give it its due. For – assuming quality as a given, naturally – the one thing I ask of my meals is that they be unhurried.

Simon was in town yesterday briefly before he headed back to Providence, and we caught up over lunch. He chose, at his mother’s suggestion, Persimmon – remarking as we sat down that this was an old favourite and that they served a lunch worthy of a proper meal. For my part, I was just glad to sit down to lunch, a lunch complete with water glasses and multiple forks and starched napkins.

Persimmon is in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area, an area that smacks somewhat of the new and artificial. I always think that there isn’t anything up there but hotels and chain retail and restaurants, but I am often pleasantly surprised. The restaurant is dubbed as a ‘New American bistro’ – which makes me wince a little, but I recover in time to appreciate the warm golden-orange walls – persimmon, from the name of the restaurant – with splashes of inviting yellows. The hostess, an older woman, had a light, pattering step and an eager manner, and her silvery tresses danced just atop her shoulders as she led us to our table.

I have known Simon for a long time now, and when I first met him he had that infectious, boyish brashness of youth, quite arresting in its warmth, its unguardedness and lack of pretense; capable of putting anyone at ease. His was a personality that reached out to you, singular in its eccentricities, and he possessed that uncommon inability to leave a room unmarked by his entry. He spoke with a wonderful turn of phrase, and was a lovely conversationalist. Later when I met his mother for the first of many times I understood where it all came from. Yet as the years had gone by he had mellowed somewhat, and had become more considered in his speech, more deliberate in his manner. At times during the meal he took on that absent air of one who has great responsibility. He was still Simon, but perhaps he had grown up a little.

I have a great affection for him though, and as the conversation fell into step I felt that relief that comes with eating at a familiar table. The calamari was superb, sautéd lightly and adorned with nicoise tomatoes and a pumpkin seed pesto, served atop a bed of rosemary polenta. The polenta was rich and creamy yet bore a lightness that betrayed the skill of the chef’s hand. Together they made for a wonderful combination of flavours. Simon and I also shared the duck confit appetiser with flageolet beans, a dish perhaps too heavy for lunch but nevertheless extremely tasty.

We owe the concept of a bistro to the French, whose country is littered with small cafés or restaurants that serve simple, modest and down-to-earth fare which warms the body as much as it does the soul. Persimmon had on its menu a nicoise salad and the classic steak frites – both nods to traditional bistro fare – as well as a bouillabaisse that hinted at the chef’s fascination with all things French. It was the latter that Simon made me get, recommending it with a raw enthusiasm I have learnt to distrust in people. Knowledge begets consideration; most often those who are overly animated are also overly ignorant. When the dish came it was a massive plate of mussels and shrimp and squid in a golden broth, daunting just to look at. It went quickly, though - I made a veritable fist of finishing it - and I was impressed by the freshness of the ingredients.

When I used to wait tables, I always had a soft spot for that bittersweet moment after dinner had been eaten and cleared. I probably did not wait enough tables to get jaded, and so I would always involuntarily share a little in the dining experience of those I waited on. There is something about that little window after the busboy cleared the plates away – and on slow nights I would always try to check myself and time my reappearance to allow for that extra beat, so that people could tie up loose ends, could find the last, definitive word on the night’s conversation. On busy nights however, as any waiter worth his salt can tell you, just getting to the table at all is an admirable feat. As a diner, I am more than familiar with the feeling: it is like having an unspeakable loss hit you, and realising that the loss had been, little by little, a long time coming. Whatever the case, I almost always felt like the absolute devil when I would return to a table, not because of the temptation I represented through the offering of the dessert menu, but because I was, in some sense, the one who drew the line at the end of their night.

Certainly that was how Simon and I viewed our waitress, who had been pleasantly anonymous until she came back and uttered those immortal words. She was, unwittingly, a cruel reminder that there was work to be done, and still a large part of the day to get through. That is, then, perhaps the only drawback to enjoying a good meal at lunchtime. Simon and I were stuffed, leaning back in our seats and making ungodly noises under our breath – but it always seems almost criminal not to at least take a look at the dessert menu. The rum-raisin bread pudding sounded divine, and Simon had wonderful things to say about the pumpkin cheesecake. I had no doubt about the quality of the offerings, but it was the middle of the day, and I had a girlish figure to maintain.

It was a good meal, with a good friend – and the restaurant is more than conducive to that. As we left we kept up the chatter, which in turn was prime evidence that the food, the surroundings, the service – the meal, essentially – had lightened our spirits. It had allowed us to connect in the most meaningful of ways, and to do that which only true friends do: make fun of one another. It was a charming place, and served good, hearty food. Who was it that once wrote that he liked his meals heavy and his women light? At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I concur fully.

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig

As a child in Singapore, Sunday mornings were always pleasant. My parents would rise before us, and make their weekly trip to the market for the week’s groceries. They would come back with all manner of foodstuff, raw and cooked, including a mini-feast which we would then have for breakfast. I remember lying in my bed, long wide awake but not yet ready to climb out; listening intently for the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. After breakfast we would all crawl guiltily back into our parents’ massive bed and laze together as a family, a tangle of arms and legs and full bellies as we half-slept, half-listened to the radio – or read our favourite section of the paper – equally comfortable in silence as in banter.

Sometimes my parents would bring me or us along on these trips to the market, which I now remember to be loud and crowded and boisterous – a veritable assault on all the senses – as well as being very, very wet. They would divvy up the tasks between them and then split up, reconvening later for a spot of breakfast or a drink. I remember my father always being extremely focused, going about his tasks with great efficiency and minimal pause. When I went along on these trips to the market, I would always tag along with him; he was a big man with an easy gait, but he walked in large strides which as a child I struggled to keep up with. He would try to always finish his tasks before my mother finished hers and then sit down to wait for her; hiding his irritation whenever I held him up. I used to think this was perhaps because he was the sort of person always so dedicated in his dealings that he did not like to spend any more time on anything than absolutely necessary; or perhaps he was a fiercely private person who cherished his time with himself in the few moments he had – alone with his thoughts – while waiting. These may all be true to some degree. But I realise now that he did this because he loved my mother very much, and had made it his prerogative in his life with her never to make her wait for him. I suppose it must have brought him joy each time, as he sat there enjoying his coffee, to see her striding towards him – as if he had let her go and she had come back to him.

The wet market is a worldwide phenomenon, but distinctly different everywhere. In Asia at least, these markets are a collection of stalls and booths – earthy and noisy, throbbing with a communal gaiety. Through narrow and crowded alleys that are either dimly lit or flooded with fluorescent light – never in between – one may find all manner of comestibles for sale, from fresh produce to live poultry. Periodically the floors and surroundings are sprayed and washed with water – sometimes to the extent of flooding – all in the name of keeping the premises clean and sanitary and thus giving the wet markets their name and defining characteristic. There are stalls upon stalls of cabbages and cauliflower, the occasional cage of squawking chickens or tank of live fish; pushcarts of produce appearing out of nowhere with drivers both raucous and reckless. Transactions are carried out at top voice, as if shouting were the only way of getting things done.

Wet markets in Singapore are typically laid out into separate and distinct areas – method in the madness, perhaps. The heart of the wet market – stalls arranged in grids with vendors selling fruits, vegetables, meat and fish and dairy and live animals – is where the madness is at its most intense. This is where the ballet of human traffic, and the cacophony of human interaction, is at its fiercest and most relentless. Beyond this section is usually a buffer zone of vendors selling dried goods and sundry items. Here, it is usually calmer and quieter, and one may find anything from herbal medicine to household supplies. Beyond that even are the cooked food vendors – each hawking a different dish or delicacy as is their specialty. There are tables to sit at, and the sounds of chatter and conversation are always in the air; for it is as much a meeting place as it is an eating place. It is a curious phenomenon, however, in Singapore that in areas with al fresco dining – as is often the case in these areas of the wet market – the tables, chairs and stools are invariably affixed to the ground. I suppose one cannot trust Singaporeans to leave well enough alone and not make off with these items.

I was home recently for a holiday, and made up my mind to follow my mother on one of her excursions to the wet market. There had been transformations aplenty in the Singaporean landscape since I was last back, and I felt as one would coming back to a friend, maybe a lover, after one has been away from a long time. In this as in so much else I was discovering that less and less was to be taken for granted. I was curious to see what changes had been wrought on the wet market – seemingly a relic of the past, struggling to remain relevant as the demographic grew younger and more inclined towards the pre-packaged convenience that supermarkets offer. Besides, my mother and I were going to make a feast that night, and there was much to be done in the way of preparation.

The market that my mother got her fish from – she has different favourites for different things – was temporarily closed for renovation, and the vendors had been relocated en masse to an interim structure. It was a large shelter-type construct spanning about three city blocks, with a corrugated zinc roof – the kind that amplifies the sound of raindrops whenever it rains. The ceilings were high, and spotted with fans that spun lazily and not at all in any sort of tandem. There were no walls to speak of, and one could wander into the market through any number of entrances, and exit through any number of others. It had been neatly broken into sections to accommodate the different vendors, and from the volume of the chatter and the dampness of the ground in each, one could easily tell where one was.

We started, then, by looking for fish. Seafood played a large part in my diet growing up; they do weird and wonderful things to it where I am from. Sometimes they do nothing at all to it, and it is enough. There were stalls lined up next to each other with their cleaned, gutted and filleted wares laid out, with tanks of murky water on the ground containing more fish. I was taught to look at the eyes of the fish to tell how fresh it is, and as I handled those available for sale, thumbing the area behind the gills, even I could tell that all the fish for sale had been caught not too long ago, and killed the day of. In markets like these you can request that the vendor kill and prepare a fresh fish for you; and then go away and do the rest of your shopping to come back later to fillets that are washed, scaled, cut and wrapped in newspaper for you.

Or you can stay and watch the carnage. I saw an old woman of nearly sixty engrossed in her task of preparing a fish, to the point of being oblivious to all that was going around her – which was in itself quite a feat. She had that hunch that people develop after years of intense concentration on something, her shoulders arching forward and upward ever slightly and contorting her wide frame. She held a large meat cleaver with a blade about the size of my face, and that was all she really needed. As I watched, she did not switch knives as she moved from task to task, but rather wielded her cleaver expertly – now a series of short, swift flicks and thrusts, now long graceful arcs up and down with the weight of habit, later sliding neatly through the meat in quick successive wrist motions – adjusting to the delicacy of the cut required. She moved with great economy and it was a pleasure to watch. There was a familiarity in the manner of her work that betrayed a comfort in her natural environment. I stood by, mesmerised in the audience of one as the usual market clamouring went on about the two of us. I felt a great happiness for her as I realised that she was in her element every day that she was at work.

Walking on through the market I was struck by how bright and inviting the colours seemed to be. The juicy greens of vegetables, brilliant purples of eggplants; even the beige shells of the eggs on sale seemed to be more vivid than I recalled of specimens elsewhere. The woman next to us at the egg stall spent an eternity picking and choosing a dozen eggs from the many cartons laid out in front of us – feeling each egg in the small of her hand, running her thumb lightly across its surface, with a troubled look on her face as she contemplated the worthiness of each contender. She was only going to buy a dozen eggs, but by golly they were going to be the best 12 eggs that were available.

The woman’s simple, insistent dedication to freshness and ingredient quality was heart-warming, and reaffirmed, for me, the relevance of wet markets such as these in the modern age. As long as there are restaurateurs and home cooks who would rather select and prepare some of – if not all – their own ingredients rather than use items store-bought and prepackaged; as long as people resist compromising quality for convenience – the wet market will survive. As long as cooking, and eating, retains its soul – and remains more a salve to the human spirit than just a means of survival – there will always be the wet market.