Roadside refreshment
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 147
FOOD AND DRINK DEP'T.
Tea Time at the Gyro Hut, Lake George Village
WE WERE COMING down the Northway from Montreal in a rented minivan and it was time to make a lunch stop. Past time, really, but there'd been a conference call, clipping out and in as the phone service bars dwindled and recovered among the folds of the Adirondacks, and that had been an excuse on the driver's side to keep pushing. Fast and light though the traffic was, there was no way to get down off the Northway and onto the New York State Thruway, with its orthodox and predictable gas-and-food stops, at any defensible hour for lunch.
The situation called for a gamble, or at least an educated guess. On the way up, in blinding rain, I'd kept reading the "Lake George Vil" signs as "Lake George the Seventh," and the residual amusement from that, combined with the implications of the actual name—"Lake George," a tourist attraction; "Village," some sort of town, possibly quaint and compact, serving those tourists—made Lake George Village the choice. The glyphs on the highway signs said there'd be both gas and food. I'd logged a lot of miles through the summer, most of them along the rest-stop desert of the Taconic Parkway, and I'd certainly made worse bets.
There was no gas-and-convenience transition zone on the way into town from the exit, just a road directly to the heart of the village, dropping us unsettlingly into someone else's leisure vacation. Pedestrians drifted along and across the main drag with the vagueness of people who'd been off the clock for days. We rolled past busy restaurants, obnoxious t-shirt displays, more busy restaurants, more obnoxious t-shirt displays, more restaurants. The hunch that Lake George Village would have lunch options had been, if anything, too correct. None of the restaurants looked obviously better or worse than the others; none of them had a parking space available, either.
Then we saw the sign for Gyro Hut. Gyro Hut had two advantages over all the other eateries: we hadn't had gyros in a while, and it was far enough along the street that I could see an empty space to put the minivan in, up ahead. The rest of the family went to start ordering while I dealt with the parking meter.
On the walk back to Gyro Hut, I noticed that the minimart next door to it was selling kulfi alongside the Häagen-Dazs. Gyro Hut had signs promoting kulfi, too. The other family members had already ordered a lamb gyro, a chicken gyro, and a lamb salad. Also vegetable samosas, sugar cane juice, and a mango lassi. I looked up at the menu on the wall. After the gyros and the pizzas, there was a selection of halal platters over rice, and at the very end of that list—after the usual chicken/lamb/fish/falafel options—came a chapli kebab. They'd posted a photo of it, a grilled strip of meat on its bed of rice.
Long ago, through trial and error, I worked out a guiding principle for life: when dealing with an unfamiliar restaurant, look for the unexpected items. Everyone is going to offer things like chicken tikka masala or beef with broccoli or spaghetti and meatballs, out of obligation. But nobody puts lamb nihari or prawns with salted egg yolk or malloreddus with sausage on the menu unless they mean it—unless that's what the people who run the restaurant want to be cooking. Someone in Lake George Village had gone out of their way to put the chapli kebab up there with the pizza and burgers and chicken and lamb. Gyro Hut was trying to tell me something. I ordered the chapli kebab.
I sat down at our table outside to wait for it while the kids tore into their gyros. A carousel across the street played its carousel music. I looked around at the dining area, the frozen-treats shop attached to the main restaurant, the lights and signage. My eye kept returning to a small, plain paper printout down in the corner of a window, a few feet from the big full-color poster for "Fresh MANGO Lassi" and "Fresh Squeezed LEMONADE." On the upper right of the printout was a black-and-white clip-art drawing of a steaming cup on a saucer, with a tag dangling from the rim of the cup. The text below said:
TEA
AVAILABLE
Something about the understatement—the studied diffidence—of "AVAILABLE" caught at me. Plenty of places make tea available: a teabag grudgingly oozing into not-hot-enough water with a stale odor of the coffee machine that dispensed it. Those places just put "tea" on the menu. Gyro Hut, I realized, had something else it was trying to tell me.
It was after 2 p.m. I never start a new caffeinated drink after 1:30, or I'll be staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at midnight. Still, I'd only had a small cup of hotel coffee that morning, plus a sip of another cup. And there were hours of driving ahead—but I wasn't really making a practical argument to myself, I was trying to invent reasons for what I had already decided. I went inside and ordered a cup of tea.
Milk and sugar? the man at the counter asked. I suspected the right answer would be yes, so I said yes.
I went out and ate my chapli kebab while the man went off to make the tea. The kebab was ground chicken, juicy and well spiced. The shredded lettuce was fresh; the rice was flavorful. It was wonderful. The lamb salad was wonderful. The samosas, once the audible sizzling of the fryer oil in their creases had quieted down, were fine. The children ate their gyros and some of everything else with gusto.
As I ate, I kept checking through the window. At last, the man set a cup on the counter, where I could see it, and I ducked in to retrieve it. It was an extremely ordinary paper takeout cup with a lid, not a cup and saucer like the clip art. Also unlike the clip art, it had no teabag dangling from it. In one scenario, it still might have, but it didn't.
Long ago, through trial and error, I also learned to be careful with hot drinks in little takeout cups. I waited. I didn't want to wait but this is what being middle-aged and wise is about, popping the little plastic tab and letting the opaque medium-brown liquid give off steam. Besides, I still had the kebab to keep me busy.
When I judged I'd waited long enough, I took a sip. I had not let my hopes get too high but even if I had, the Gyro Hut tea would have rocketed past them. It was the best cup of tea I'd had all year, better than the Singaporean tea I went down to Midtown for. It wasn't a masala chai, just a plain thick-brewed black tea, pushed to its fullest fragrance, its tannic power held in harmony by the abundant, but not over-abundant, milk and sugar. It was strong, but restorative, not skull-pounding. My wife had some and her eyes got wide. I'd taken a picture of the kebab but it never occurred to me to take a picture of the cup. The only thing on my mind was drinking the tea.
Back in Manhattan, hours later, I went to bed and slept a deep and peaceful sleep.
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
Tom Scocca
FOR DEFECTOR, I wrote about the ignominious end of the ignominious Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign:
Can ultimate responsibility reside with someone barely capable of responsibility? The question was built into the whole RFK2 project. He was never so much a candidate as a set of candidate-like gestures. When there seemed to be room for a non-establishment Democratic Party champion to challenge Joe Biden, he aimed for that space. When that failed, he veered toward trying to be a none-of-the above option for voters sick of Biden and Donald Trump alike, or into the autodidactically conformist conspiracism of Silicon Valley. As reactionary money concluded that the Kennedy name might make him a useful spoiler on Trump's behalf, he steered even further Trumpwards, until on Friday he was standing next to the Republican candidate onstage, his unbuttoned suit jacket gaping open over his testosterone-therapy-thickened torso as he waved stiffly at the roaring crowd.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, August 25, 2024
★★★★ The dimness of the morning was not caused by any clouds, but by the fact that the alarm clock had overtaken the sunrise. The early streets were cool and empty. A patch of high cirrus scattered the light once over Queens, and the filthy windows of the LIRR train scattered it a second time. A giant sunflower reared more than a story above the street. A dusty-looking half moon stood over the tennis center, while about half the flags on the plaza stirred and the other half hung limp. Even the mild morning sun took on a pounding power on the pavement full of people waiting for the gates. Haze gave the passing jet planes an aura. The sun was stronger on the hardcourt where the Nos. 11 and 97 men's players were practicing; the higher-ranked one's white shirt was glued to his back with sweat. In Arthur Ashe Stadium, folding fans fluttered throughout the stands. The shadow of the overhead camera moved along the court. Trees provided enough shade for a comfortable lunch, with some clouds showing up to augment it. The side courts, though, were scorching again. The phone got so hot that it refused to keep taking a charge from the complimentary portable phone charger. The knowing fans deployed parasols and sun hats.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE, RETURNING FROM the logistical hiatus of August travel season, is today's Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The Swedish, French, American Cook Book, by Mrs. Maria Mathilda Ericsson Hammond, published in 1918, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Lettuce Sandwiches with Spanish Pepper
Sandwiches à la Laitue, au Piment
Cut the bread very thin so that it will roll; cover with mayonnaise or butter; press a lettuce leaf on the bread with a piece of pimento and roll about two and one-half inches long and three inches around. Decorate with three bands of Spanish pepper. Arrange on a paper doily.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
LESS THAN 5 COPIES LEFT: HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and is available for purchase at SHOPULA.
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