We moved homes a few years ago. From our five-bedroom where my husband and I raised and launched (kinda-sorta) four sons, to our current two-bedroom, where we live, without them. For now. (We’ve all read the stats.)
The two-bedroom has no garage. Very little storage at all, really. Clearly no room, said I, for his 18 Rubbermaid containers of CBC beta-cam tapes from journalism days. Right then, said he, no room for my out of control menu collection. (What? You can’t be serious. My menus were of critical importance. Stolen, all.)
They dated back to 1990 and were organized alphabetically by style of cuisine. The French section was by far the largest. (Today, there would need to be a section called “Anything Goes”, aka, “Modern Canadian.”) And there were errors in the system: Le Verlan found in the V section; Le Tartuffe in the Ls. But mostly, whenever I needed to look up the past history of a restaurant I was re-examining — its bill of fare, its prices — I had the info at my fingertips.
These must go, he said, waving his arms over my stack of blue Rubbermaids. Then these must also go, I countered, waving my arms over his black ones. It wasn’t our finest hour.
A storage locker saved the day in the end. And eventually, an evening date locked in that container with a good bottle of wine and a pizza, and my dusty menu collection and his ridiculous tapes were whittled down to a precious few.
My plan was to do a dead-restaurant-menu coffee table podge thing one day. But I never will. So I thought I’d share a few. See if they jog a memory…
Clair de Lune, menu from February, 1996. Chef Martin Clary. Owner, Adel Ayad. Closed its doors Christmas, 2005.
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