for all its charm and sophistication, seagull cafe is perfectly fine with serving half-assed food and billing you blind without a shred of fucking shame. there is no love, no respect for the art in the majority of the restaurant’s offerings.

and yet here i am. alone, upstairs. this could be a metaphor but it’s not. it’s just a guy in an expensive restaurant where an environmentally conscious architect had saved a tree from certain death, a tree that reaches right up from the ground to the upper deck, one whose branches disappear into what look like the puckers of gigantic assholes in the ceiling.
not metaphors.

the call for isha slices through the yellow-tinged dark. people streak towards the mosque across the marbled plaza, hungry for savaab.

i too am hungry, and for something seagull does remarkably well, remarkably.

let it be known then to one and all. it’s the tuna sandwich.

tonight, the server brings them to my table quickly, these four four-sided sandwiches. they are shapes that you might find in a sixth grade maths test whose length and angles are mysteries that require swift demystification by a twelve-year-old brain.

now, i prefer them untoasted – hard bread scratches my delicate palate.

these sandwiches have extremely generous fillings of superb tuna & mayo and are accompanied by sliced tomatoes. it’s best with a bowl of chips if you’re sharing. if not, the chips are expensive and there is far too many of them for one.

this sandwich is something i crave on occasion, especially on those days when, battered from a non-stop night and day of work, i sit and yearn for culinary comfort.

and even a place so removed from the desires of people such as i can hold within it a source of (i won’t say gastronomic) joy…that puzzles me but like almost anyone, i would rather be baffled than apalled.

i take my time with the sandwiches, and just as i’m done, the men dart out of the islamic centre, their brown faces aglow with that special light of believers.