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When I arrived at the restaurant, Marco the maitre d' was all welcoming suaveness. We had met before and he was very good at his job, but our last meeting had been at a different restaurant. “Is so nice to see madam, again.
“Thank you, this is a pretty setting.”
“You are too kind.” I appreciated the welcome and the restaurant’s ambiance; but there is no point in having the best food in town, if the rest of it is second-rate. Waiters scurried about, and the diners were a mix of wealthy matrons, businessmen, and the usual advertising types with their seemingly limitless expense accounts. He intended to display us unobtrusively and had a good memory for detail as my favourite bottled water materialized. Then he disappeared, presumably to inform the kitchen.
When the familiar mop of red
