Panamanian Place
Regarding Panama I know only three rather pathetic bits of information: 1) Many rich New Yorkers are in the process of buying up vast chunks of Panama's coastline in the expectation that the country is going to become the new Costa Rica of upscale tourism.
2) Before they built the Panama Canal you couldn't go from the Atlantic to the Pacific down there by boat unless you went all the way around South America. I expect when it was being built it was a very big deal but now you would rarely go out and hear people talking about it the way you might, say, find people talking about the pyramids.
3) For a long time there was a sort of miniature U.S.A. of ranch houses occupied by U.S. citizens who were allowed to live there for a certain length of time after the canal was built, to supervise the canal, or guard it or something, and these people lived just as they would have back home, with televisions and tricycles and White Castle hamburgers in the freezer, for a certain number of years (maybe 70? 100?), until the canal reverted entirely to Panama, so these parallel universe citizens had to leave and go home to a real United States that was not as nice as the fake one they had created.
Except for 1) I'm not even sure that my facts are particularly accurate, but the other day, on my way back from the airport as the cab went down Franklin Ave. I saw out the window Kelso's Panamanian American restaurant, Free Delivery. The door was open and the place looked really crowded, which to me was an indication that the food might be good. A day or two later I thought I would call and have some food delivered, even though I didn't have a menu and had no idea what Panamanian food consisted of.
The phone kept ringing and ringing and then a fax machine made that hideous screaming noise, so I finally decided maybe I had to fax my order over. Bergen St. and Franklin Ave. is none too close to where we live in Brooklyn, maybe a half-mile away, but this area of Prospect Heights is pretty much barren in terms of local restaurants. I was hoping Kelso's would be delicious and then a few nights a week I could have dinner delivered.
The main facts or reasons I know about why to live in New York are 1) overheated apartment (I had just been to my mother's in upstate New York, where even though she turned up the heat for my benefit, the drafty place was freezing cold) and 2) food delivered to your apartment. In most parts of the U.S.A. all anyone might dream of is the delivery of a pizza, while in New York City you may not have a backyard but you will certainly have other advantages, such as not-cooking. So I was desperate to get hold of the delivery person from Kelso's. Finally I sent a series of bizarre faxes: "I DO NOT HAVE A MENU PLEASE CALL ME"; "I WOULD LIKE TO PLACE AN ORDER." There was no answer, so finally I gave up, at least temporarily, though I felt personally rejected.
A few days later I set out with my daughter, who agreed to the expedition provided I would push her in a stroller, though she's getting too big. Most of the blocks between Washington Ave. and Franklin Ave. are quite bleak, wastelands of industrial warehouses, boarded-up churches, a vast medical complex, and the restaurant was a lot farther away than I had remembered. I thought I would collect the menu and see if there was a correct number to call, later on, to get the food delivered, because it was only around 3:30 in the afternoon.
Even at this hour of the day, however, there were quite a few people sitting around. There were a bunch of round tables, with paper napkins in holders, and high stools around a long bar. I went toward the back; an old-fashioned sign like a 50s diner advertised the menu and the specials of the day.
"I wonder if you deliver as far as?" and I gave my address.
"What?" the waitress said.
"Do you have a menu, so that I could call in my order?"
"What?"
It didn't seem that I was asking anything so complicated, but she called over two other women and they talked for a long time in Spanish before one went to a box and after rummaging around for some time found me a paper menu.
"Can I get the food delivered?"
This led to another long Spanish conversation and finally they called forth a man who had been in the kitchen, who questioned me extensively about my address and apartment number and how near it was to another address and if my building had a doorman and I started to feel more and more nervous; the man was eyeing me up and down.
I said I had faxed over a message the other day, and one of the waitresses went to the back and came out holding my fax, which she handed to the man, who held it up to me, and they all studied it and held it up to me again.
"Yeah," the man said at last. "I remember when we got this. But we closed early that night. You sent it? Is this your address?" He launched into the same routine again.
My kid was slumped over in her stroller, looking bored. By now I was so humiliated I decided to order the food and carry it home, myself, and reheat it at dinnertime. I didn't feel like having this man deliver the food and I felt extremely out of place. The menu was partly in Spanish and partly in English. There was liver, chicken, pepper steak, kingfish and bistec de palomilla, which sounded to me like something to do with a palomino pony. There was a Stew Beef Special, a Pig Feet Dinner (Wednesday Special), Meatball (Saturday Special) and also Mondongo.
There didn't seem to be any specials that day, so I said finally that I would get an order to go: one porkchop dinner and one chicken dinner. Again the waitress gave me that look of totally blank unresponsiveness and we had to go over it and over it about three more times, although when I said, "And an order of coleslaw," which was on the menu, she shook her head.
"Fourteen dollars," she said, in a tone that suggested I couldn't or wouldn't pay. I started to get out the money; the cash register was behind what appeared to be a small, bulletproof plexiglas window?but she disappeared. After I waited around five minutes my kid announced she was hungry and wanted pizza.
"How about an empanada?"
She shook her head.
"Um, what about some soup?"
Again a long series of negotiations ensued, that I wanted to get some soup, to stay in the restaurant, while we waited for the takeaway food. The soup of the day was oxtail. The name, oxtail soup, has always made me uneasy. Where do they get the oxen? And who would want to eat an ox's tail? But I didn't want to give my child my phobias, so I ordered.
I thought I managed to make myself understood, a small bowl, for her, but a minute later the waitress brought a gigantic bowl to the table, and then a small bowl for her, and it took a while to get her to take the big bowl away.
But the soup. It was fabulous. After all the difficulties of communicating, one whiff of the warm, rich broth, in the middle of which floated a big chunk of corn on the cob and I took the extra spoon and sipped...it was as if suddenly I had been given a Panamanian grandmother and was in her kitchen. My feelings of unease, at being in this place?where I appeared out of place and could not make myself understood, as if I really were in a foreign country?all instantly vanished. The oxtail soup, rich and meaty with bits of potato, and carrot, spicy without being fiery, green herbs and dark leaves?I could not have told you what the seasoning consisted of, only that it was delicious.
And apart from giving me a few tastes, my child ate every bit of it up. So we set out for home with the two foam takeaway containers dangling from a bag on the back of the stroller. And it really was a long hike, more than a half-mile, with the two containers smashing this way and that. And then the food sat around for a while before dinner. So when I finally opened them, the various parts had kind of...merged. The rice-and-peas with beans had blended with the shredded lettuce salad-and-dressing and the fried plantains. But the porkchop dinner had only one porkchop and the chicken dinner (true, I had gotten the small chicken dinner, a mistake) had only one thin chicken leg and another part. These were not large meals, though the porkchop was eight dollars and the chicken six. It did not seem cheap to me, an eight-dollar porkchop. And if it tasted as good as the soup had tasted, I wanted more.
I was planning to split these two meals and try half and give half to my husband. But my daughter announced she did not want the meal I had planned for her (the ubiquitous diet of the five-year-old, Kraft macaroni and cheese and frozen Bird's Eye peas), but the Kelso's food. I gave her a sample, of the rice and beans and the plantain and the chicken and the porkchop. What she liked was the porkchop, which I cut up for her, leaving a bite for me and for my husband.
And she was right. It was a divine porkchop. Crunchy and tender and spicy and nicely charred on the outside. The chicken was good; not as good as the porkchop, but it tasted like a real chicken, not one of those things masquerading as a chicken in the supermarket that, no matter how it is cooked at home, tastes flavorless apart from whatever spice is on it. This chicken was full of flavor, like a chicken that spent his or her life rummaging for grubs beneath a rainforest canopy?I mean the meat in and of itself had flavor. Even hours later, the food, after reheating in the microwave, still tasted genuine.
I still felt I had a Panamanian grandmother, stout in her apron, her hair in a bun, her muscular arms stirring the mysterious contents of a big pot. Maybe the restaurant isn't authentically Panamanian; what difference did it make to me? I could file my newfound knowledge about the cuisine with my other three facts about the country. And I had one more place in the neighborhood from which to order?that is, if I could ever communicate or make myself understood.