Eating out

My wife and I have been avoiding eating in restaurants these days, and there’s a very good reason: she’s two months pregnant, and we’ve found that being in this condition gives her incredible new powers: specifically, she has a heightened sense of taste and smell. You’d think these new abilities – a gift of pregnancy – would make dining out even more enjoyable. But there are drawbacks.

Smoking, for instance. Since we’re both non-smokers and can’t risk second- or third-hand smoke, we find it difficult to find a location in any given restaurant that’s not within spitting distance of a smoker. Most Manila restaurants, as you know, provide the barest, bleakest of sanctuaries for non-smokers. And that’s merely as a polite joke: no one actually expects the non-smoking minority to actually pipe up once someone else in the vicinity lights up.

Ah, but when you have an unborn child to think about… I stood up recently in a restaurant and escorted my wife to a new table, away from the smoking couple who had decided to pollute their immediate environment and ruin our meal. We shifted over to the only available table – the furthest we could get from the human chimneys. And then, of course, another patron, cigarette already in hand, leapt into our abandoned seat. He was a crustaceous old geezer who looked as if a lit cigarette had been occupying his claw for the past 75 years, and no one was about to pry it out of his grip. Consoling ourselves that the geezer would no doubt croak soon under his own steam, we tried to forget about it and move on to our meal.

My wife’s sense of smell, as mentioned, picks up any unpleasant odors and magnifies them. The same with tastes. In fact, it’s sort of superhuman. It got me thinking: newspapers would do well to hire pregnant women as food critics. Their prenatal radar can pick up a hint of MSG, too much salt in the soup, or off-tasting salmon a mile away. The offensive item is then pushed away in disgust – usually in my direction. My wife’s tastes are particularly affected by overripe fruit: if it’s papaya or soft melon in front of her, she’s apt to feel immediately nauseated (or "urky," as she puts it). No substitute fruit will do after that.

Another strange phenomenon: for the first 5-6 weeks of my wife’s pregnancy, I experienced what the books call "sympathy pains." That’s when the husband begins to feel bloated and sick half the time, cranky and irritable the other half. My wife didn’t notice any increase in my crankiness or irritability, but she noticed that I was massaging my stomach in agony a lot, and I tried to convince her this had nothing to do with my eating all the junk food she’s not allowed to touch during pregnancy, and everything to do with sympathy.

Her own cravings are specific and completely unreasonable: tall root-beer floats, or pasta of a specific shape and texture, usually at two in the morning. I try to sell her some other option, but you can’t argue with a pregnant woman: the body wants what it wants.

Since my wife’s body is not always sure what it wants, picking a restaurant can be difficult. A friend of hers, who has been through pregnancy twice, tried to relieve my wife’s anxieties, advising her to spend the next seven months "in a state of muted ecstasy." Unfortunately, all my wife seems capable of feeling lately is "muted urk-stasy."

We skip over the usual specials on the menu and look for something exotic; different food experiences may be one way around this heightened taste phenomenon. Just then, a round of "Happy Birthday" starts up at a nearby table. As usual, most adjacent diners are forced to stop their meals and conversations until the tiresome round of singing and clapping ends. Then there is the awkward moment when the other patrons – total strangers who have been interrupted by a birthday celebrant – must decide whether to join in the clapping, or stiffly return to their lukewarm meals. I have my own views on this: I feel I shouldn’t be compelled to clap for a total stranger’s birthday celebration in a restaurant – unless that person is actually being born, right there in the restaurant. Yes, live childbirth in a restaurant: that would be something worth interrupting my veal scallopini for. Maybe even worth a round of applause.

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