Diary

Wednesday, 8th July 2009

I think the difference between me and, say, a koala is that I will eat almost anything.

I think the difference between me and, say, a koala is that I will eat almost anything. How else to explain the fact that I ended up at an outer-suburban all-you-can-eat restaurant the other night, and did not have to be drugged and carried there in a sack?

It was set in one of those ‘toy garden cities’ that Joan Didion wrote about, ‘in which no one lives but everyone consumes’. When we drove past earlier, a local teenager told me about the restaurant’s erupting volcano, and when I snorted, she offered a strict booking policy as proof of the restaurant’s quality. She made it sound like a dreadful thing to miss out on, this restaurant and its volcano. I stared at the strange shape of the building out of the window, and when I caught a glimpse of palm trees, I actually thrilled.

Inside, the mildly racist ‘Polynesian décor’ says something different to each group of diners. To the white families who go about in tracksuits, the place is more like a surrogate home kitchen, a zone where mum does not have to cook and one need not get dressed up. To many of the others — pinstriped, tie-wearing Lebanese immigrants, and Indians with discreet moustaches — it imparts another message entirely, something about making it in a foreign land, and the anxieties of assimilation. The staff, too, are immersed in meaning. Indeed, while the restaurant is undoubtedly part of a dining tradition epitomised by Homer Simpson gorging on shrimp and toddlers running sticky hands up table legs, it also owes something to the ethos gently tweaked in television’s Kath & Kim. It wants to be something more, and you can tell it is so. It is that neologism from the Howard years. It is properly aspirational.

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