Broome For More: Dining @ The Plantation House

Here's something I've noticed: Most eateries in the Southern Tier bank everything on the entree. It's as if they're playing a weak hand of poker, betting the farm all along, and manage to catch a straight on the river. Yeah, they win the pot, but for any player with a hint of experience, you can't help but cock an eyebrow at the final result and say, "Alright, fine. But, REALLY?"

The atmosphere at The Plantation House in Vestal is homey enough, burgundy tablecloths with cloth napkins, appropriate extraneous silverware and a southern, wannabe New Orleans vibe. John Besh would cringe, but Emeril would feel completely comfortable.

And yet, when the server has no specials to present, no water to pour, and no suggestions as to what's good and what's not, I'm immediately suspicious. Apparently, The Plantation House is Louisiana post-Katrina. There's an attitude of "You get what you get. We're too close to Endicott to care."

The dozen steamed clams as an appetizer were barely sufficient, rubberband-y around the edges, with a creative and unusual addition of lemon and butter. (/snark) My lobster bisque was perfectly mediocre, a la Campbell's canned soup.

On a genuine note, my companion Erika's filet Renaissance was perfectly cooked, although the crab was less lump and more mush, and the asparagus atop it was upstaged by the side dish of... asparagus. You'd think a chef who cared two fluffs about his craft might look at the plate and think, "Hey, there's two instances of asparagus here. I ought to switch out the side!" Apparently, they've spent too much time in a formulaic Applebee's kitchen, or watched too many Iron Chef episodes. Asparagus is NOT the secret ingredient here, bro.

My blackened duck, while a bit closer to medium than medium-rare, was marvelously tender. Such fatty rendering was just shy of perfect, although the char taste overwhelmed, well, everything. There was almost no game left in the bird, but the texture was sublime.

Wine list is sparse but nicely chosen, everything in an affordable range (bottles between $21 and $48) and across the map. The cocktails are also expertly mixed.

Summary? Service: shoddy at best. (We had to ask for water. C'mon, water?) - Wine: decent. - Appetizers: skip 'em. - Entrees: attention has been paid, but perhaps not enough.

Final verdict? Not worth the $20+ per entree based on the rest of my experience. If you want to eat in a house that's pretending to be an upscale restaurant, go to the Copper Cricket. Then, at least, you'll get your money's worth.

Rating: Two rockstars, out of five.

Whirling dervishes

As I stood outside smoking the wilting remnant of a humidity-drenched Camel nonfilter, watching dust devils dance about the steaming asphalt of Route 81, suddenly a monstrous whirlwind of tiny white blossoms descended upon me like something out of a Miyazaki film. It was biblical, almost, the whipping tender caresses of snowflake flora finally settling in a nautilus spiral at my feet, reaching out in thirty-foot tendrils towards a highway, a docking bay, my still smoldering cigarette stub.
I stretched out my arms and looked silly for a time, relishing the fact that I have skin and that the wind still carries things.

I'm getting there.

Tucked under the unconditional love of rotten barley, I determined experimentation was in order to figure it all the hell out. The story isn't the hard part, the events are churchgirl easy, but it's the style that's effing hard. And here's my experiment. It ain't perfect by any taffypull of the psyche, but I discern some Lewis & Clark in there, not to mention rampant neologism.
********************************

"All sorts of things are unraveled," Wake Moses chuckles between slender blue smokewisps. His bent, ripped cigarette is a thin dry stick and a beacon to any thinking mind in a dark lot. There are probably few, he figures, fewer than creekbed fish swimming on gloaming asphalt to overpriced cars, ridding themselves of groceries and offspring. He swigs coolly from a bottle delicately swung from chopstick fingers. "In fact, actually," he slurs aloud, "I sincerely grasp the clarity of every subject left unconjured. I might very well be Jean Valjean, for all we know. Quantum physics has yet to prove otherwise."

Lennon laughs silently, his head nods vigorously in catechismal reverie. "Right on, Finny-Fin-Finnegan, you absolute dick. Red's the blood of angry men for sure. Pass the Jack, freak."

Wake swirls an amber revelation around for gesture and measure before tossing it over the hood to Lennon Pilate, the fargone measure of some other Eve's seed that happened into his yard one day and became blood. "I could've had epiphanies galore if it weren't for your incessant mosquito bitching, Lenny. Seriously."

Blank turns to viciousness, carousing on a steel hood and elbows clanking against the quiet black expanse of tempered glass. "Wakey, you goddamn short-dicked pansy, I saved you endless times around from meanderings that'd lead you nowhere but endless snowbanks and endless self-deprecation. Christ, you're a pretentious prick, and I love ya for it." Lennon tries to tackle him but there is an expanse of softly ticking, barely warm metal between and Wake evades him with a wary glance.

"Reeee-suckmydickulous," Wake mutters, swiping futilely at the quickly diminishing carafe of straw-coloured bravery. "You love me because I'm not you, and that's the blessed be-all end-all of the situation" (and now he's shouting), "or by the prose of my betters I'm in a Russian poem! I'm goddamn Onegin waiting for my blessed Tanya to shoot me back! Musketball through the sternum, thank ya ma'am, and I'm on a combustion-powered handbasket to the Fields!"

"You know what your scenario is, brother?" Lennon asks. There is a pause, a deft martial silence of the parking slots where no crashing carts interrupted, no offspring, no soaped-up couples. "You, friend, are Too. Fucking. Curious."
Wake waits, watching for sudsy offspring and champagne footsteps, but all is dark. Lights go off. Trees stop whining. He knows, knows Lenny to an unstruck tee, knows there will be something and feels marrow churning like rivers around crayfish.
"I could say it would proverbially kill you," Lennon continues while Wake waits with held breath to match whispering concrete, "but I know it will ironically... karmically, even... let you live beyond the dreams of monks and scientists."

The sky screams dimly and spreads tentacles of pastel-ridden foam across an otherwise bleak and Taggartesque silhouette. Wake Moses's skinny glowing stick dies without screaming and he drops it into a puddle beneath a wheel, an American landscape, a memory for archaeologists. Most everything is gleaming in an unwet fashion. Dry fish in an overpriced lot. Lennon is practically giving birth to a hysterical epiphany, something gut-wrenching enough that he stands on the hood and howls at constellations.

Wake forgets everything immediately. "You know why, Lenny, my brother from a different hyphenated slit?"

Lennon ceases his simian ritual and cocks an eye downward, offended. "And so? What of it?"

"Because," - and for a second Lennon thinks this will be Wake's only answer because it's so fucking him, except you can hear the pause, the ellipsis of unresolved chords and blackholes waiting to be connected - "because I'm included in all sorts of things."

The wind barely whistles around lamps and the groves between off-ramps. No headlights are out; no neon welcomes either. Lennon winds up, a great American landscape, and airmails the slickridden fifth exactly where an offspring-laden couple once hated the fact of groceries. Punctuation, Wake thinks.
"But is it a question mark or an exclamation?" And he realizes only afterwards, when the glass has been cleaned and the car is elsewhere and footsteps have been assumed by different-but-same shoppers, that the question continued aloud days too late. He'd already left riding on the back of crayfish sounds and whiskey, and Lennon is the kind of brother who will listen and let his tilted head and furrowed brow be the answers.

Why it rains.

My son informs me, pointing to a dark horizon, that "the cloud over there is going to cry."
I ask him why, and he tells me, "Because of the oil and the water and the wheels in it."
I tell him there's a distinct possibility that he may be right, because at this point I'd rather put my faith in a 3-year-old's wisdom than Schrodinger's cat.

What does science know for sure anyway?

A second conversation with myself.

"Christ, I forgot how this book is going to end. I'm either famous or in an asylum, or quite possibly both. Words are dangerous mothers, being just symbols, all crammed up inside your head until there's no room for anything practical and you can't learn how to fix a busted car. Next thing you know you're writing letters to yourself just to record it all, except your arms are straitjacketed and the dialogue doesn't exist, you're just staring at the insides of your eyeballs and chewing your tongue off, hoping that the blood you're probably drowning in will somehow mysteriously permit you to read Sanskrit before you whisper away."

A conversation with myself.

"Words are parted by letters, sentences by words, and stories then by sentences - the sum is greater than its parts because they're all symbols, just lines and sweet mother hooks waiting for recognition. It all means something because we know what it means! That's the beauty of language, brother - we all have one. It's partly, majorly, the structure of it, the architecture of lines like beams, rafters... lying in a pile, it's just rubbish but nail it together in a sensical form and then dammit you've got something. Clean lines, Roark-lines, decorated doe-eyed poetic rambling curve lines, fucking Euclidean geometry of the words to say something not just in definition but in form. Where do they lie? What order? Draw 'em up, sketch the sweet mother symbols like glyphs to decode... unravel the people you know because everyone's got a language, everyone's got their symbols and we just need each other's books as invisible keys. 'Stone dogs of metallic night sat dipping legs into ponds, they were snakes through mirrors with enamelled teeth, snapping at microbes to eat the roots of far-gotten paragraphs. America is destined to be a flatland, a cold autumn of stone dogs dripping with words, cattail roots, silverfish, going to heavenly gaping jaws.' What does it mean?"

"cicada savior"

In the miniscule, viola strums of fair-weather reaching,
the insect orchestra holds tight to the thrumming
timpani heartsounds of humanity.