The Sandwich Shoppee

Upon opening the Styrofoam clamshell container handed over by the waitron with the milky pearlescent acrylics what became immediately clear in taking in with the eyes the token piece of culinary engineering ubiquitously referred to as garden wrap, is that we would be feeding on a prototype, an intention reified, a reification calibrated just to the limit of what was then possible, a nod made incarnate in this nascent, very nascent supremely nascent gesture toward a mollification of the vegetarian pallet. We realize and sympathize with the over weaning necessity to cater to that which has historically made financial sense and that not all restauranteurs Fondle satisfying the taste of gastronomic marginalia. Business is business and most businesses need to sell putrefying flesh in order to get by. We can see, however, that this fossilized hank of lip service offered to nibblers of rabbit food as a kind of relic, a museum piece preserved in varnish like a medieval torture device from eras when such devices were truly employed during a time when the spelling of shop as shoppe was not merely a quaint ribbing of a bygone aesthetic but was actually a legally mandated orthography to be abided by under pain of dismemberment. And that brings us to the atmosphere, a four star affair, that is remote from the feculent days of our stricken European ancestors and so well it is. Quiet and pleasantly dim, the baritone of George Gray filling the space mildly like a distant carnival barker whose exhortations have been mediated by ocean breezes and empty blue air, the ceilings were low and tavernous, the floor tiles as firm as the feet required of them. We imagined ourselves wiling away the hours on the plentiful but not over crowded array of hardwood slabs, staring out the window, striking off at an endless descriptive catalog dissolving reality’s banter into a luminous ticking of epistemology. That would have been nice. Adieu, the Sandwich Shoppe, may your prototype achieve glorious apotheosis or else may you circumvent contemporaneity altogether.