Joe Danone's

I am sitting at my scarred, candlelit drum table. I have an eye on the door and an eye on Raul - a Spaniard among Italians - who hangs about by the coat rail wearing his hideous crushed-velvet jacket that doubtless reeks of cheap tobacco, tasked as ever with nothing more taxing than taking diners’ coats and sending them on to their waiter. Moving shapes appear in the frosted door and Raul huffs and grumbles, then lets a young couple in and frets about them, demanding their coats, making a meal of finding space on the coat rail for the young couple’s garments.

I can’t see so well any more, but these young people, they glow with a lightness and a vitality which has many of the evening’s diners looking their way. They stand still, embarrassed by the attention and by the wretched set-piece Raul has made of their entrance. They are careful to smile kindly at each other although they refrain from touching. With their shyness and tact I detect that they are on a first date.

With a frantic gesture Raul sends them towards me and I rise in preparation to greet the pair in the classic, over-the-top Joe Danone way, but a waiter I don’t recognise hurries across my line of vision and ushers them to another table, around the way from my drum table.

Raul looks around furtively and nips along the side of the restaurant, passing me, not sparing me a look. He will be going to the outside alley to roll and smoke his cheap tobacco. Old habits die hard. He came over from Seville to study English. Nearly three decades on, and after an enforced break he remains a Spanish restaurant greeter, now among a number of Britons and eastern Europeans who deign to serve Italian food. His English has improved, but barely.

I sit back down, weighed by another compelling reason that it would have been a bad idea to jump up and slap the young man’s back – this is no longer my restaurant. No longer Joe Danone’s. I cannot rise and sing the classics and standards from the old country; Scalinatella, ‘O Surdato; ‘nnammurato, Nessum Dorma (of course).

This is now Lazzi’s Italian. Part of a chain. There are Lazzi’s all across the country, but there are no Joe Danone’s. The drum table remains, and it seems to be permanently reserved for me.

*

Along with my name and the restaurant I inherited a full head of hair and its rapid decline from black to silver from my father. Our similarities were such that so long as I maintained my moustache and slicked back my hair there was no need to recommission a fresh, cartoonish caricature to replace the one of Joe Senior that hung from the restaurant’s signpost and had been emblazoned upon the menus when we moved over from Sorrento in ’84.

When he died and I took over the restaurant and the management of its paperwork and its staff and its place in its community. But I could never sing the old songs like my father. I could hit the notes and resonate my diluted Italian around the restaurant but I lacked the carefree spirit of Joe Senior. Maybe the knowledge that his affectation is wholly unoriginal contributes to a mimic paying a fraudster’s fee.

As the young couple pass me by on the way to their table I see glossy dark hair falling from her petite frame while he, a head taller, has tousled, dusty-coloured hair and an endearing serious expression set firm upon his face. I sip at a glass of Merlot - the grape of choice for both myself and Joe Senior before me - and ache to feel its rich stew trickle down my throat.

I come here every now and then, to my old restaurant, and am often peppered with flashbacks to the old days. The vitality glowing from the young couple who sweep past me tonight is so strong that the candle flickers, dimming its shadow upon the scarred drum table, which remains here somehow, before I’m pierced by a intense light that bores into my eyes and returns me to the last night in ’92 that I sat in here as the boss.

Another time, another young couple.

*

A young Raul sends a different young couple towards me. I pronounce the girl as beautiful and slap her young beau upon the back heartily. He seems unsure of how to act; diffident and gruff or jokey and light-hearted. He opts for somewhere between. They sit and I play waiter – usually one of my brothers, Luigi or Piero would be tasked with this role but I so enjoy the romance of first dates, which I can see that this clearly is. I ask for their drink order and the girl asks for a glass of Merlot. I grin, delighted by her choice, and broadcast her selection to everyone around us – la bella signora, she drinks like a queen; what a lucky young man! Celebrazioni! The young man lights up with a grin, tells me to bring the bottle. I laugh, he laughs, she laughs. The restaurant is aflame with cheer. I bring them the wine myself, uncorking it and laying a hand upon the previously serious young man’s shoulder, humming the opening bars to Scalinatella.

The evening progresses. Luigi and Piero grin over at me and my young couple as they serve up dishes of steaming spaghetti, of grilled sardines, of molten lasagne, of our foods served with capers, with pesto, with olive oil, with Sorrento lemon, to our diners before brandishing huge grinders packed with fresh black pepper at them; or wielding tall graters accompanied by hunks of fresh, old, parmesan that we had sent over from the old country each week.

Many of the other diners on the night of ’92 are already known to me. The elderly couple who always shared every part of every plate they ordered addressed me by name, though I struggle – still, and I guess forever – to recall theirs, though they must have told me, or at least presumed that they have. I think of them as Laura and Jim, but who knows. “Laura” gives me a glowing look when I came to their table directly from the first daters, while “Jim,” smiles knowingly.

“Young love, in the air,” Laura had said, just loudly enough for Jim to admonish her with a stern yet playful look.

A family of four is sat at the other side of the restaurant. Mum and Dad had attended the restaurant regularly since they were not so much older than the young first daters; and had added a child to their number every few years since. By the fact that Mum ordered apple juice instead of her usual white Pinot, I wonder if another was to be joining us in the coming months. The children take after the parents – the elder child, a chocolate brunette, had the same dark, piercing eyes as her father while the younger, their son, had straight, blonde hair and misty blue eyes taken from his mother’s genes.

As I made my way over to the final couple of ’92 – Paul and Anna, cheery and frequent visitors to the restaurant – there is a violently loud popping sound, which makes Laura gasp and Jim shout out, makes the young man send the bottle of Merlot crashing toward the young woman whom he would never kiss again, if ever he had to begin with.

I look to the door. Raul is not at his station. Raul had been, so I’m sure now, smoking in the alley that runs down to the kitchen. Where the chefs store their barrels of used cooking oil.

An incredible sense of heat rushes from the kitchen door, strangled Italian cries in its slipstream.

A white light, a red light. The absence of light, of sound.

I open my eyes from this reverie and look about the restaurant, now fully rebuilt with appropriate corporate imagination, courtesy of Lazzi's Italian.

Sitting along with the living, I see my eternal diners scraping at their charred foods, their blackened bones holding blackened bone china cutlery which they saw and stab into blackened dishes of pasta and pizza and veal. My brothers are black skeletal forms hunched over the tables. While the living have their phones at hand, with which they seem to do everything, many of my eternal diners have charred chequebooks set to the side of their cutlery.

Our eyes have long gone but our sockets, empty and black so they are, seem to pull out images from the light that streams inside them, allowing us to exchange nods and smiles every night since the restaurant reopened following a near decade of dereliction.

I sit at my scarred, candlelit drum table and sip at my Merlot and long to sing to a young couple again.