Also in this number, The Cornish taunts Face with his evil act
The food looks good, but… it’s not very tasty. And if, say, a meal runs you 60 hryvnias, or something like $8, at Zdorovenki Buly, which The Hunched Cornish described in an earlier Checkout review, interrupted by the saw-toothed Foul Guinea, an analogous meal at Olivie will cost, say, UAH 90.
At Zdorovenki Buly, not only is the food overall tasty, as well as cheap, but they don’t weigh most of the portions they give you, heaping on as much as the gluttonous you asks for, plus, they have a commendable assortment of ice creams, which goes for UAH 3.25 a scoop!!!
The Hunched Cornish doesn’t think Olivie has ice cream, and should he find out it does, he’s not going to write another review adding the information, and he’ll make sure no one at Kyiv Unedited, including the Editorial Board, does it for him. An invisible and secret Editorial Board might scare most people, particularly the editors and writers at Kyiv Unedited, but The Hunched Cornish is a slightly different matter.
But The Hunched Cornish will deal with them later.
Olivie at peak hours is a madhouse. The Hunched Cornish crashed the place – the one located along the right-hand side of Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street as you walk up from Teatralna metro in Kyiv’s downtown toward the Opera House – at a quieter hour, when there was more room to be had and people could more easily adjust to my presence without breaking into a panic, trampling their little children, etc. There’s another Olivie The Hunched Cornish saw outside one of the exits of the Kontraktova metro at Kontraktova Square, suggesting there may be even more of them in the city, but The Hunched Cornish is not about to bother finding out.
As has become popular with fastish-foodish type places, as well as with places where the food isn’t so fast, and Italian and Mediterranean-themed restaurants, the framework is a shade of light, olive green, which is probably supposed to be soothing, non-threatening and inviting, like a lulling zephyr breezing in from the sea onto a shore shimmering with lambent sunlight as you tilt your head back and close your eyes against the fading day.
The servers bid you ‘Bon appétit’ as they slap the food you’ve pointed at off the assembly line onto a plate that you plop on your tray and move along, but having been there twice, The Hunched Cornish has yet to discern anything resembling French cooking in the offing, although in some essentials the kitchen does differ somewhat from Zdorovenki Buly. But none of it’s as good. In the cheap cafeteria sector of Kyiv, Zdorovenki Buly rules.
The Hunched Cornish is on a four-meal program with Olivie, and that happened thusly:
When I first got there, I kept asking them if they had anything to do with the Podil restaurant Monsieur Olivier, which The Hunched Cornish reviewed earlier – at great length – for The Checkout (just look for the word “cockroach” in the headline and that’s the one), since the two establishments’ names and logos are very similar, wanting to use my 10% discount card for the Kozyrna Karta restaurant network, to which M. Olivier belongs. But Olivie kept telling me they had nothing to do with M. Olivier, and instead, with trembling hands, offered me a four-meal ticket, whereby after the first three meals are stamped, you get the fourth one at a discount of 50 percent.
The Hunched Cornish did the calculating, and the math brings Olivie about even with Zdorovenki Buly money-wise after four meals. But as far as taste goes, their respective foods come out of two different worlds.
The Hunched Cornish will go to this Olivie place his third time just to give it one more chance, and if the results are the same, I’ll probably go the fourth, and last, time, to simply cash in on the discount and get it over with, never to bother again.
***
In other news, The Hunched Cornish finds amusing that big bad Jack Step, tough guy, the hero of Kyiv Commix, who fears no evil, and who, if he didn’t have the job there, would be an unemployed alcoholic playing a detective playing a writer, is raising his army of one against The Hunched Cornish because I had a little harmless fun with his friend Manny Face’s Tango Baby.
I wonder, what’s Step going to do? Punch me below the belt? HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!!
It’s people like Face, they’re given things, like good looks in Face’s case, from which other things come easily, like chicks, and he takes it for granted. He abuses his privilege. He thinks that’s how it’s all supposed to be, and it never crosses his mind that some force – a force that doesn’t like him – can change it all. And because he never suffered, but was always adept at making others suffer, suddenly, he doesn’t know what to do. Stitch by stitch his vanity garb starts to unravel. He holds the last thread but it snaps and he falls – and falls and falls and falls.
Goodbye, Manny Face. I think Tango Baby looks better with that gray hair. She’s no use to you now. And you’re no use to her. Not after what I’d done. Now she’s mine.
You should appreciate what you have when you’re given it, Face. Instead, you leave it tied up to your bed as if it was yours, as if she belonged to you, as if she were your inalienable possession, and go running off to see a flick, expecting her to conform to your fantasies when you return.
But it didn’t work that way; did it?
One would think you wouldn’t do something like that anymore, after I took her out of your misery and brought her into mine; into a far, far greater misery; into my Hell; but people don’t change. Especially people like you. Maybe you’ll restrain yourself, for a while, but you’ll be back to your selfish, spoiled, irresponsible behavior, thinking the people who sometimes give you the time of day should arrange their lives around your wishes. Thinking they owe you more than they’ve already given. Thinking yourself the center and they should revolve around you.
But for people like you, Face, it’s never enough; you always want more. Others accommodate you and accommodate you and accommodate you, and you take it for granted, because that’s the way it should be, and how could it be otherwise, and then you raise the bar, and you set the hoop on fire, and you command them to jump, and you blow up when they turn and walk away.
This, to you, is incomprehensible; isn’t it Face.
But is what I’ve done to Tango Baby comprehensible? Will it change anything?
Now you jump, Face. HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!! Now you jump…
The Hunched Cornish, April 19, 2013