YOU’LL NEVER COOK LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN

I’ve been a journo all my life but when you hit the slippery slope in my profession, there’s no way back.  In my pomp I had it all, interviews with emperors, dinners with senators and an open ticket to any Bacchanal that was going.  But my fondness for the grape was eventually my downfall and I became unemployable in Rome and its neighbouring provinces.  A change was needed and I used up my balance of ‘Chariot Miles’ to make a clean getaway.  I landed a job as a restaurant reviewer with the ‘Jerusalem Journal’.  No Pulitzer for me there, but the pay was OK and the cost of living a fraction of what it was in Rome.

It was Passover.  Things were quiet and my editor invited me to run my palate over a new home-delivery restaurant that had recently opened.  It was called ‘Judas’s Carry-out’ and while their focus would be on home deliveries, they were holding a special ‘eat-in’ launch that night and I had a ticket.   To provide some visual interest I was took along our artist, Lennie Davinci.

We got there at about 7 and were confronted by a very strange scene indeed.   It was an odd assembly, a group of 13, all men. Lennie thought they were a football team as he heard someone mention the word ‘Corinthians’, which reminded him of a Brazilian team with that name.

The seating plan was weird, everyone sitting side-by-side as if posing for a team photograph.  We thought they may have been a pub team because of their varying ages, from the skipper in his early 30s to some much older men.    One of them, Judas, was the restaurant’s owner.  A sneaky looking guy he kept moving amongst them pouring drinks, I assume to juice up his bar takings.

The evening kicked off with a guy who seemed to be the skipper, they called him ‘JC’ and, wait for it, he washed everyone’s feet.  Maybe this was some kind of club ritual.  (I remember the club I played for had fines for various errant behaviours, so perhaps it was something like that. But it was a strange thing to do inside a restaurant.)

The room was incredibly noisy.  The table was about 30 feet wide and guys had to shout to talk to their mates at the other end of the table.  Judas would have been far better advised to have had three tables of four, but he had clearly never run a ‘sit-down’ restaurant.  Lennie wasn’t complaining either as he was able to paint the entire team without having to move his materials around the room at all.

My brief from the editor was to concentrate on the food.  There hadn’t been a new restaurant launched in Jerusalem for quite a while and Tiberius (Levinson) fancied himself as a bit of a foodie.  He was expecting great things from ‘Judas’s Carry-out’.

As I said earlier, this Judas was pretty clueless when it came to seating arrangements.  But the cuisine – the main reason for our being there – was even worse, a disaster.   I was expecting some excellent Phoenician wines but the Corinthians seemed to concentrate on ‘House Red’, and not a particularly good one at that.  But nobody seemed to mind.  And the food was hardly a triumph either with the only fare we saw being served up being dry white bread. Sports teams can be pretty voracious when it comes to food, so maybe all the good stuff had gone before we got there. Given that we were on the threshold of Passover some matzos with chopped liver would not have gone amiss. Maybe a nice chicken soup with matzo balls?  But nothing doing.  I suppose the terms ‘gourmet’ and ‘footballer’ don’t go too well together and perhaps their end of season do was a budget affair.  You would have thought they might at least have had a starter.

Given the limited menu, Lennie and I finished early and repaired to our local pub before filing copy.  My review was none too complimentary but Levinson was happy to receive it well before the press deadline.

Talking to fellow reporters next day at the office, it seemed that things didn’t turn out too well after the dinner.  Judas sneaked out early having delivered up this travesty of a meal and reported JC to the Roman authorities for something or other. Money had obviously changed hands.  I’m not sure how things ended up.

My review appeared in the paper under the heading ‘The Last Supper’.   It summed up my opinion of Judas’s cooking. He would never cook lunch in Jerusalem again.  But I gathered later that Lennie’s picture went down well. Very well indeed.