He said:
Actually, I really, really like Dante’s kitchen. A lot.
I almost went with En fuego: Dante’s Kitchen, which would have been perhaps a more accurate post title, and I seriously considered The Magic of Dante, referencing a local magician, because it’s not easy to come up with any Dante line that doesn’t reference everybody’s favorite Italian poet. In the end, I decided to stick with the catchy branding Dante stuck on a big sign just outside the gates of hell near the beginning of the Inferno, the only part of his trilogy anyone ever even thinks about reading. Atonement and Grace as delivered in the Purgatorio and Paradiso? Boring. Testimony, as if we needed it, that badness is more interesting than goodness any time.
Dante was not shy, placing numerous contemporaries with whom he had a beef in whatever circle of hell he felt most appropriate, naming names, and subjecting them to various hideous and eternal torments. Were I a million times more talented than I actually am, I might try a NOLA version. Between Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, I think the circles of damnation might have a wait-list.
Wait a second: Isn’t there supposed to be a restaurant review here? Ok then: My mother’s birthday was this past Monday, so we took she and my father to the wonderful Dante’s Kitchen for brunch Sunday morning. In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain rails against brunch as amateur hour, the service for which no chef wants to be present, and generally an opportunity for the restaurant to get rid of whatever didn’t sell during the week by repackaging it as a special, as in specially designed to offload this crap. I’m sure Bourdain knows what he’s talking about. He is, like, famous and everything. But brunch is not that way at every restaurant, and certainly not at Dante’s. First, brunch is big business. Dante’s opens at 10:30, and that’s when you want to be there. Unless you want to stand around and drink for awhile as you wait for a table, which come to think of it is not such a bad thing. Ok, so maybe abandon all hope is a little strong, but I couldn’t find be prepared to wait for a table in my Dante concordance. Maybe I missed it.
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