Pescatore Sans Bib

Despite the holiday on Monday, it's been a long week for all of us, not the least of which is due to the fact that if was the first week of kindergarten. For dinner tonight we stayed close to home, which in this case was Pescatore on 2nd Avenue. We had been here once before and liked it, so we were pretty sure it would be a safe bet again.

We had no problem walking in and getting a table at 7:00 on a Friday night. It seems to me that peak traffic in this neighborhood is on Thursday nights, and the rest of the weekend including Friday through Sunday is less crowded. This seems counter-intuitive to me, but that's been our experience so far. Apparently after Thursday everyone gets out of the city (or at least this particular neighborhood; it still seems plenty crowded in Times Square).

Like many of the restaurants here, during the warm weather months there is an outdoor seating area that affords the opportunity to peruse the board of fare while walking past, and previously I had spotted an appetizing combination seafood linguine. On a prior visit here we had tried other things, but tonight I was interested in finally giving that combination a try.

To start with they bring out out a little dish of assorted olives marinating in oil with Italian herbs. This is accompanied by Italian bread, which instead of being served family style in a basket for the table is distributed individually to each diner, providing a choice of white or whole-grain. I actually prefer this approach; not only does it obviate contemplating the fate of uneaten bread left in baskets at the table (which inescapably introduces a compelling temptation to the restaurant to correct for a significant margin of error between portion served versus eaten), it also provides the opportunity for a bit of additional elegance to the meal as the servers come around periodically to offer more. Surely this duty is preferable to being limited just to refilling the water glasses. As if all this weren't enough, it tends to throttle the rate of gratuitous carbohydrate consumption, serving the mutual interests of the diners caloric intake and the restaurant's bottom line. In short, I am on board with individual bread servings. But I digress.

Like many Manhattan restaurants we have tried there is no explicit kids' menu here, but the waiter was very accomodating in allowing us to choose a favorite pasta shape (linguine in this case) and combining it with a sauce in a half-order size for little J.

When the Linguine Pescatore for Two arrived, it was much larger than I remember seeing from passing by on the sidewalk; an enormous vat filled to the top with linguine (obviously), a light tomato sauce, and also a variety of seafood including half a lobster, clams, mussels, calamari rings, and small scallops. With it the waiter brought out a bowl for the shells, a shellfish cracker, and also two plastic bibs.

Now, I have to admit that the practice of issuing bibs is a sensitive point with me at restaurants. To begin with, I am sure the root problem lies with my insecurity and the fact that I am uncomfortable with the mental picture of myself sitting down to a huge vat of seafood wearing a conspicuous plastic bib with a bright red lobster on the front. After all, didn't Emily Post say that the first rule of etiquette is not to draw undue attention to onesself? In turn this feeds the feelings I have about how it seems the waiters are always just a bit too pushy in encouraging me to put on the bib. I always feel a bit insulted, as if they are suggesting that after decades of feeding myself I still haven't mastered the art of getting food from plate to mouth without splattering it all over myself. I always try to decline with just the right combination of light humor braced with underlying edge so that it is clear that it's not a big deal, but that they shouldn't pursue the subject unless they want to risk an unpleasant confrontation.

That was my approach tonight, and the waiter was content to leave the bibs at the table with us. The relevance of all this is that the Linguine Pescatore was the messiest meal I have ever eaten, even taking into account a long history that includes Cincinnati Chili, Lobster bakes, and chicken wings. By the end of the meal after wrangling sauce-covered mussels, lobster, and clams from their shells, my shirt was covered with orange spatters and I was feeling a bit silly about the bib sitting unused on the table next to the shell-bowl. I'm sure the waiter got quite a chuckle out of that as he brought out the check.

Of course, I wouldn't do anything differently the next time. It's still a lot easier to buy or clean my shirts than to undertake analysis of deep-seated self-confidence issues.