Reginald Voss was the most feared restaurant critic in the city, and he was having the worst meal of his life.
The restaurant — Lumière — had opened to universal acclaim three weeks earlier. The chef, a flamboyant Spaniard named Diego who wore his hair in a topknot and insisted on describing every dish in verse, had been called a genius by seven publications and a madman by three. Reginald intended to determine which assessment was correct.
The first course was a deconstructed Caesar salad served inside a hollowed-out dictionary. The crouton was balanced on a tiny easel. The dressing arrived in a perfume atomizer. Reginald sprayed it, missed the salad entirely, and misted the woman at the next table, who was wearing white.
"The romaine," Diego explained from tableside, "represents the architecture of memory."
It was, Reginald thought, genuinely absurd.
The second course caught fire. Not in the dramatic, intentional way of a well-executed flambé, but in the quiet, panicked way of a kitchen towel too close to a gas burner. A waiter extinguished it with a bottle of Sancerre. A different waiter brought a replacement dish, which turned out to be someone else's order.
By the time dessert arrived — a chocolate sphere that was supposed to melt under warm sauce but instead rolled off the plate, across the table, and into Reginald's lap — the meal had become a fiasco of such spectacular proportions that Reginald found himself smiling.
He wrote a five-star review.
"Lumière is the most honest restaurant I have visited," he wrote. "It promises chaos, and it delivers."