Hazardous Dining

Saturday night we went to a local restaurant, one of those places where neither the décor nor the menu have changed in 20 or 30 years. This place is all built on an open floor plan with balconies and stairwells creating multiple levels of seating within the same large space. There are lots of mirrors and exposed brick and the whole thing was set off by four gigantic paintings of food. I don’t mean still lifes—these were each of one particular food item painted in close-up on a gigantic scale: blueberries the size of basketballs and five-foot long pea pods.

I ordered chicken soup with matzo and it was good and hot when they brought it to the table. I sipped the broth for a while and took a few small bites of matzo. Then I cut a spoonful of the matzo to eat and when I put it on my tongue, it was nuclear reactor HOT and I tried to chew it, but my mouth was having no part of it and my brain was confused about what to do, so it tried to swallow, but my throat was equally unwilling to accept a piece of the burning hot matzo meteor that it was being asked to rescue the mouth from, but by then it was too late because the lump of molten matzo was already part of the way down the throat, which was starting to spasm in an attempt to eject the chunk of incandescent matzo, or else to shove it on down, making it the stomach’s problem. Somehow, I choked it down and proceeded to chug most of my glass of ice water in a futile attempt to soothe the burn and stop the excruciating pain—thereby compounding the problem with a fierce brain freeze (a.k.a. “Ice Cream Headache”).

My throat still hurts today.