Fed up

next diner, but there is no need to overwhelm a guest with what amounts to piles of shrubbery... The service? Worse than what one would expect at a fast-food joint... The trio of beef was enough to convince this reviewer that I would rather stick kabob skewers in my eyes than return to this restaurant.
     
    Good God! What a horrible review! And, unfortunately for Marlee and Alloy, it was all the more horrible for being accurate—-or at least consistent with my own experience. Perhaps the Mystery Diner’s reviews—Francie’s reviews— had, after all, been fair, just as Leo had claimed. Mean and nasty, yes, but on target. Still, it would have been possible to critique Alloy honestly yet tactfully, whereas Francie had clearly prided herself on snarky, savage reviews that titillated readers and sold newspapers.
    But the piece on Alloy might be an aberration. Consequently, I looked up Francie’s review of Digger’s restaurant. After tearing apart the whole notion of small servings and declaring tapas to be a lame excuse to overcharge patrons for the supposed novelty of minuscule plates, the review went on to blast the quality of the food. It was one thing for a chef to hear that the service was poor or that restaurant was un-acceptably noisy, but to attack the taste of the food was to hit a chef where it hurt. In contrast to the review of Alloy, this one didn’t ring true. Although I’d never been to the tapas restaurant where Digger worked, all the meals that he had ever cooked for me had been delicious. The Mystery Diner had made some direct assaults on Digger. For example:
     
Whoever cooked the smoked sausage with olives and tomatoes should throw in his knives and not even bother returning to culinary school. In the opinion of this reviewer, the dish was a pure insult.
     
    Ouch! Digger had given me the impression that the review was a harsh critique of the restaurant as a whole and not a personal attack on his skill as a chef. In reality, Francie had slung insult after personal insult at Digger. She’d called him, among other things, an “untalented fool” and an “ordinary hack.” My close reading made me question Digger’s apparently mellow attitude about the review. Maybe Digger had simply been saving face. Still, at La Morra, Digger had repeatedly referred to the Mystery Diner as “he” and had given no indication that he knew the reviewer’s true identity. Plus, Digger had seemed genuinely clueless about gardening.
    Stinging with empathy for chefs who’d been Francie’s victims, I struggled to be unbiased. Digger was Josh’s friend and therefore my friend. Marlee was not. Even when I took my bias into account, it remained true that Marlee was the one who’d shown outward hostility to the Mystery Diner. Hard though I tried, I couldn’t shake the image of that knife in the corkboard.
     

 
    AFTER reading those beastly reviews, cooking was the last thing I felt like doing. For all I knew, Francie’s spirit might appear in my kitchen and criticize my efforts! But Adrianna and Owen were coming for dinner to go over the wedding ceremony. They were writing their own vows—at least they were supposed to be writing them—and I’d put together some ideas for the rest of the ceremony. All of a sudden, I felt a sense of urgency: unless I finalized my part, I’d find myself standing in front of an expectant crowd and babbling incoherently about the joys of marriage.
    I ran out to the store and returned with everything I needed to make a simple pasta salad. My recipe had two big advantages: it was easy, and it produced one of the few pasta dishes I’d ever made that tasted even better the next day than it did when it had just been cooked. It consisted of fettuccine tossed with shrimp, avocado, red onion, tomatoes, Calamata olives, fresh basil, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese. Francie’s ghost failed to materialize while I cooked, so I felt confident that I hadn’t offended the dead. I set aside the shrimp and the pasta, which would be cooked just before the dish was served, and I mixed the other ingredients.
    When Ade and Owen showed up at seven, one look at Adrianna told me that she was seriously annoyed with her husband-to-be.
    “What’s up? Why are you making that face?” I asked.
    “You won’t believe what Owen has done!” Ade turned to her fiancé. “If you think there’s any chance that we’re using those vows—”
    “She’s really overreacting,” Owen