He's just a kid, maybe ten years old, with very new white sneakers that don't quite reach the floor and martinet parents like something out of Dickens or the grayer volumes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Society types with ramrod postures and delicate, picky little hands. They're older, but definitely not grandparents. Just people who waited to breed until their careers were stable, their portfolios strong, perhaps until their CPA told them that what they really needed was a two-legged tax writeoff.
Sean O'Keefe
Bland ambition: Little Ollie's plays to its Cherry Creek
location.
Location Info
Details
2364 East Third Avenue,
303-316-8888. Hours: 11 a.m.-3
p.m., 4:30 p.m.-close daily
Spring roll: $1.50
Chinese
dumplings: $4.95
Crab
rangoons: $4.95
Shrimp
tempura: $7.95
Barbecue
spare ribs: $7.95
Chicken corn
egg drop soup:
$2
Salt-and-pepper shrimp:
$14.95
Crispy sea bass:
$19.95
Yushan chicken:
$10.95
Singapore rice
noodles: $10.95
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The kid's kicking his chair. Banging it softly with his heels until the parents -- who haven't otherwise said a word -- tell him to knock it off, sit still, quit fussing. They're sitting two tables away from me at Little Ollie's Asian Cafe, in the section that's a wraparound patio on brighter, warmer days.
I hadn't noticed the kid at first because I was watching the bar, and a bartender brutalizing a martini. He'd shoveled ice into a warm shaker when he should have given the can a twist in the ice bin first to cool it, shot his liquor and then racked the steel shaker back and forth in his big hands like he was mad at it, the ice crashing, splintering, melting faster for all the abuse and thinning out the booze. Then, rather than pouring immediately, he'd set the shaker aside, gone and found a glass, assembled a two-olive garnish and put it in the glass before adding the hard stuff. But the olives added volume, so he had to short-pour, and there was liquor left in the shaker. This he dumped in the sink.
When a customer at the bar asked if he'd put in any vermouth, the bartender gave a big, dumb smile and said no. "Best martini in town, ladies," he announced, full of blossoming, dim-witted and totally misplaced arrogance. "Just gin and vodka, nothing else."
I wanted to trip him as he went past me. I wanted to knock that abomination out of his hands, because he hadn't made a martini. He'd made a short gin and a short vodka, watered down and mixed up in one glass, then called it a martini. But at this point -- my final working meal at Little Ollie's and probably my last here for a good, long time -- I thought that drink was fairly indicative of Ollie's as a whole: lots of bluff and bluster that fail to disguise its blandness. My eyes followed the bartender as he headed for a table carrying that bastard's brew high like a champ, and that's when I saw the kid. His parents. I saw him, and I...
...I'm nine, back in Rochester, New York, at Ng's Chinese Restaurant with my own parents. Ng's is not fancy, maybe two steps up from middle-American strip-mall Asian, but we're all dressed up anyway. My dad is in a jacket. My mom smells like the perfume she always wears when we go out -- like roses and vanilla. My little brother is six years old, with a giant Pac-Man face and a smile so wide it looks like it opens on a hinge and the top of his head could fall back any second. Me, I'm wearing my favorite button-down shirt: bright blue, with an over-large collar and black buttons. (It's the early '80s, so cut me some slack.)
The menus are big, covered with red leather and full of words I've never seen, foods I've never heard of. Everything is so weird, so alien, so exotic. When the waiter comes, I order egg drop soup because I've seen someone ask for it in a movie, and shrimp with lobster sauce because it sounds so elegant when I say it. My mom looks at my dad, raises an eyebrow and says to me, "Are you sure that's what you want? Are you going to be able to eat that?"
Back at Little Ollie's, I keep watching the kid. When the waiter comes, the parents order first, then the kid asks for crab rangoons and something I can't hear. The mother shakes her head. "Are you sure that's what you want?" his father asks. "Are you really going to eat that?" The kid nods, bobbing up and down in his chair.
The father looks up at the waiter with an expression on his face like he doesn't feel comfortable ever looking up at anybody. "Bring him the crab things and sesame chicken. He'll eat that."
The kid slumps but doesn't argue. The father checks his watch. The family descends back into silence.
No one gets to tell me what to eat anymore, so when my waiter comes, I order spring rolls, barbecued spare ribs and crispy sea bass. The waiter nods, scratches at his pad. "That fish comes whole," he says. "With the head and tail. Is that all right?" The subtext -- Are you sure that's what you want? -- is in my mother's voice.
"Yes," I say. "That's fine."
At Ng's, the plates came under silver domes that puffed steam when they were lifted up. I didn't like the egg drop soup -- it tasted like cream of chicken with worms of poached egg white -- but I drank every drop, because I figured not liking it meant there was something wrong with me, not the kitchen. I thought I would learn to love this very strange stuff, and I was right. I did learn to love egg drop soup. But not Ollie's egg drop soup with corn and chicken, which tasted like nothing so much as textured water. And these days, I'm smart enough to know who to blame.
