As told by The Hunched Cornish, Part 1
The freaks at Kyiv Unedited refuse to delete The Half Guinea’s account of what The Hunched Cornish said and did with John Smith at Andrew’s Pub on Podil, putting The Hunched Cornish in the position of having his truthful account of the tri-nocturnal stopover adjudged a lie by readers comparing it to The Half Guinea’s fabrication and possibly believing that to be true.
First off – neither John Smith nor I spend, or rather, “waste”, our time concocting fables and fairy tales about some… Ferret, of all things, much less animating this thing, whatever the fuck it is, with adventures all over Kyiv ruining people’s lives sprung from our admittedly potent and fertile imaginations and then wondering out-loud to each other and with great concern while trying to enjoy our meals at a restaurant for The Checkout whether it, this thing, this… Ferret… has a soul. Although maybe that’s how The Half Guinea spends HIS time, in addition to parasitically eavesdropping on Smith and me, instead of doing his job and submitting HIS OWN restaurant reviews with this publication, which presumably pays him to presumably do just that.
And second of all – well… and second of all… thus…
Thus, raising myself up through the Poshtova Ploshcha metro stop yet again, the wee dram of conscience I’ve pinpointed myself as actually possessing dully ached as I finally understood what Smith ever meant by the site having just a single exit – that is, when you’re down there, you can only go in one direction up the stairs.
The Hunched Cornish realizes that this perhaps somewhat obsessive referencing of Poshtova Ploshcha’s single exit requires some explaining. Thus, harking back to this section’s very first Shangri-la review (the place that is no longer there because I burned it the fuck down), Smith launched the narrative mentioning the single exit, but you wouldn’t know that because, once again, some asshole at Kyiv Unedited decided to take the word “single” out at the last second, assuming it was a mistake in judgment. I know, because I’d read the original hard-copy proofs just before they were supposed to go to print on this website. So even if you DO go back to that very first Smith review, the single exit reference won’t be there – because it was baselessly elided… forever.
Not that any of this is related to China.
And that’s because this time I actually didn’t come out the single exit of Poshtova Ploshcha yet again, but up through the all but countless ones of Kontraktova Ploshcha (which, being interpreted, roughly means Contract Square – as in a one-time river port for trade, exchanges, and making deals), one metro stop north, also in Podil, and which The Hunched Cornish likes because it reminds him of a labyrinthine slice of Hell. The difference being that Hell’s exits get you nowhere. China comes in a close second.
Here, it was different, and me and Smith kept ordering the steaks – arguably among the best steaks in town – Smith’s well-done, mine rare, and titled something like Creole-style. The Hunched Cornish doesn’t know what cut of cow Andrew’s gives you or if it’s an Angus, but at precisely UAH 145, the thickness and texture mesmerizes the mouth. There’s a spicy sauce in a little glass cup that goes with it and adds another cascade of flavor to the meat. There’s Tabasco sauce in the sauce, but The Hunched Cornish forgets the rest the waiter rattled off. You get a small pile of home-style potatoes with the wooden dish. Whatever’s in the sauce, it will rise through your pores and out your mouth in a way that might make you off limits to the rest of humanity for a while. But that doesn’t matter, because you’ll feel good.
For the record, we drank uzvar by the pitcher (and need I remind our readers that this is a cold drink made from boiled dry fruit), with 200 ml costing UAH 12, or a liter at UAH 60, and when they ran out of that we switched to mors (a boiled-then-chilled cranberries-based drink, methinks. In any case, it’s very refreshing) for the same damn price – not bad, although the uzvar, at UAH 18 for a large pitcher-full at the no longer extant Shangri-la, is the standard against which all other uzvars must be measured, with no joint thus far having been able to come up with a price that isn’t triple what it used to cost among the hapless burned-down Uzbeks. And that’s too bad, because it would have been worth going back there just to drink multiple pitchers of our favorite restaurant drink.
At some point between steaks, The Hunched Cornish wanted ice cream, and though the five flavors they offer at Andrew’s, at UAH 15 a scoop, are delicious, I asked if they could top it with chocolate syrup, and was told sometime later (clearly after the waiter submitted the request with management) that it would cost me an additional UAH 17 for the topping, rather than being gratis with the dessert.
What is it with these fucking people, I asked, refusing the topping to settle for the bare ice cream.
And so John Smith does his high and mighty, saying, but The Hunched Cornish, that’s just the way they do things here, and for the next half hour, as The Hunched Cornish keeps his mouth open with a piece of blood-juiced meat stuck on the end of his fork to shove in, listening for a scintilla of sense in anything he had to say, Smith keeps trying to explain why that is. The steak at Andrew’s is so good, The Hunched Cornish was little surprised it was still hot when he finally got the chunk in masticate mode.
Okay, Smith, I’ll grant you that’s the way they do things around here. So maybe when they charge you over 60 hryvnias for two crumbly pieces of pita at, say, Shangri-la, which isn’t even on the menu and that you asked for and thought they were being nice for scraping some up for you from some nether corner in their greasy kitchen, and lo and behold they magically punch up almost 10 greenbacks for it on their electronic ticker, then maybe the way The Hunched Cornish does things is he burns a place like that down to the fucking ground.
Yeah, says Smith, maybe he does.
The Hunched Cornish, March 11, 2013