Dancing Girl challenges Hunched Cornish’s belief system at Podil’s Monsieur Olivier
Yeah, and so The Hunched Cornish once again made his epic journey from the Poshtova Ploshcha metro station in the bohemian but quickly gentrifying Podil district of Kyiv down Sahaydachnoho Street to Monsieur Olivier.
Lest you’ve forgotten, it was at the end of this very same Sahaydachnoho Street that the last time around The Hunched Cornish deemed it fair and justifiable to burn Shangri-La down to the ground.
As for Monsieur Olivier, it’s really nice, clean and well-lighted inside the joint, and all the seating, whether divan or chair-table, is comfortable and spatially well-arranged.
It’s not too expensive an eats, probably around mid-range, notwithstanding some stinginess on their side, still endemic to too many places around town, and I’d say the food is generally good to very good.
The colors are light, beige, olive pastels and soft and they give the place a whimsical dreamlike Mediterranean look.
A guy who walks back and forth with a smile ripped across his mug will take your coat – even The Hunched Cornish’s – and hang it up for you, and in all his sittings, The Hunched Cornish was never made to suffer bad service, meaning these kids are all right.
Waiting for The Dancing Girl to show up, The Hunched Cornish ate two three-course meals, at the end of the second of which he was awarded a 100-hryvnia certificate (currently, UAH 8 is just a little less than USD 1).
According to the certificate, if you buy at least UAH 200-worth of fill at M. Olivier, they will give you a 100-hryvnia discount.
The certificate came in handy for The Hunched Cornish’s third meal, when The Dancing Girl finally turned up.
But before The Hunched Cornish gets to that, here’s what he ate in his first two meals, the damned prices, and what he thought they tasted like (good, not so good, etc.), plus any other commentary The Hunched Cornish deems appropriate, and the question goes out, especially to Jack Step, lolling around in the fantasy land of Kyiv Commix, what the hell is he going to do about it?
Also, in the midst of Meal Number 2, Manny Face’s Argentine Tango instructor waltzes in with his favorite tango dame and sits toward the back, and so this guy’s French, and so The Hunched Cornish thought it wouldn’t hurt to go up and ask the Frog dancer to write out how you spell Monsieur Olivier in English letters on the back of one of The Hunched Cornish’s bills, but it seems it was somewhat of a Sacre Bleu shocker for the floppy-haired Frenchman to behold The Hunched Cornish in all his terrifying glory and it paralyzed his hand into a barely legible scrawl, causing him to also spill his big unfiltered beer in the process. But with her disbelieving eyes goggling out all over The Hunched Cornish, we know Frenchy’s tango broad liked what she saw.
Who’s Manny Face? Let him show up in Kyiv Unedited’s Checkout section of his own volition first, after a movie or some other cheap showbiz glam jam, and then maybe The Hunched Cornish will condescend to comment on that two-bit Hollywood-yearning hack.
Here’s the rundown of Meals Number 1 and 2:
[Lost footage, which we cannot therefore sadly find. Sincerely, Secret Editorial Board]
Meal Number 3:
So The Dancing Girl finally shows up with all the parts The Hunched Cornish likes to touch and squeeze.
He orders two way over-fucking-priced 500 ml bottles of Borjomi supposedly Georgian-based sparkling mineral waters. Water brands are universally overpriced in restaurants across town.
She orders some kind of so-called Alpine tea (tea almost always comes in pots now, everywhere (oh, so generous with the boiled water!!!)), to which she ordered 50 g. of honey at UAH 11, and some mint leaves (supposedly weighing in at 5 g.) to float in the tea – also for some idiotic reason separately priced at UAH 5.
You’d think that after 20 years, they’d stop playing these games, but a lot of places here still charge you separate, even for bread, which in all civilized countries is gratis. They’ll charge you for it, even if it’s an inconsequential sum – as though doing so affords them a sigh of relief; makes them feel better.
Here, another great example of this, worth recalling, is the UAH 64 that Shangri-La, formerly down the road from here, tried charging John Smith and me for two stinking pieces of pita – for which they were then duly burned down – by me.
And so they both order a vegetable salad with feta cheese, which is M. Olivier’s version of a Greek Salad, for UAH 49, which, amazingly, was well-priced in proportion to its size, which wasn’t that small, and tasted very good.
And so The Dancing Girl also orders a main course of pike perch (sudak) filet in some kind of cream sauce, which came with three or four dollops of smashed potatoes, at UAH 86; not a bad price, The Hunched Cornish thought, in terms of taste and value per hryvnia currency unit, as The Dancing Girl said it was very good.
I, meaning The Hunched Cornish, order a pot of zharkoye (which is the Russian word for the Ukrainian pechenya), which is only helpful if The Hunched Cornish informs you that that’s boiled beef chunks in a cream sauce topped inside the very pot with deruny, or potato pancakes – an excellent choice for 69.
And then we each have a creme brulee, which is hard to fuck up, at UAH 43 a piece, costing a little too much for what we got, but still, it was pretty good.
And during the meal, somewhere out of the wainscoting, this cockroach starts crawling up the wall closer to The Dancing Girl and I tell her to kill it, myself being further away, and she says:
“No, I never kill any living thing,” and meanwhile the cockroach keeps crawling up and then retires, now unreachable, behind a painting above our table.
How’s that, The Hunched Cornish thought – never to have killed any living thing, ever? Impossible.
“First of all, The Hunched Cornish doesn’t believe you, The Dancing Girl, and second, it’s a fucking disgusting thing. How could you not want to kill it?”
“And maybe it was looking down at us thinking we’re fucking disgusting.”
“Yeah, The Dancing Girl, but in this life on Earth, you got to show who’s in charge.”
“And what do you mean, The Hunched Cornish, by in charge? We, all of us, are made by God.”
“God? What do you mean by God?” The Hunched Cornish has always had a soft spot in his four-chambered timepiece for The Dancing Girl – maybe because she’s nevertheless just so basically and naively evil. Otherwise, the night would have ended with black duct tape over her mouth and The Hunched Cornish finishing his meal in blissful peace with an erection.
“Oh, don’t you know, now? The Supreme Being, The One, Without Whom Everything That’s Made Would Not Have Been Made, The Great Nameless Power, The Highest of the High, The Insurmountable Host, The Singular Attraction From Which All Emanates and to Which All Returns, The…”
But now welled up in The Hunched Cornish feelings of yesteryear, bad feelings, reminiscences of the other things about The Dancing Girl that had made him harden his heart against her, like the time she laughed at him for crying at “Madame Butterfly”, saying real Hunched Cornishes never cry, and now she says she was only joking – wicked, wicked girl…
“That’s nonsense! I can’t remember a time I never was!”
“No – THAT’S nonsense! No one can remember that time. If you were self-made, the first thing you’d have is the memory of the very moment you willed yourself into being. What are you trying to say, Cornish?” – Ooo, I just hated when she didn’t call me by my full title – “that you made yourself? Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaaa…!!!”
The grand total for this 12-course meal was something like UAH 1,000 – that’s with minus a 10 percent discount (my restaurant network card), plus a 10 percent tip (custom), minus the UAH 100 certificate (gifted to The Hunched Cornish by the restaurant itself, as mentioned somewhere closer to the top of this story) – or something like $125 USD – all told!
And so that’s how it went.
The Hunched Cornish, February 19, 2013