Evan Kleiman - Caution: Eating

 

First, I'm going to take you back to the Wayback Machine. We're going to go back to the early 1980s, when I was spending a couple of years asking anybody I had ever met for money for my unopened restaurant, and going through the process of raising the money, doing the legal stuff, finding an architect, getting it designed, and going through the building process. It took 18 months or so. 

 

So, during this period of time, I met and got to be very acquainted with the project architect, who we'll call Joe. Joe and I had this courtship that happened over blueprints and the building department. And our fog of romance was so sweet that many people fell into it. Just to give you an idea, if you've ever gone down to the building department and tried to get plans passed, we managed to get plans for a restaurant passed over the counter. I don't know how we did that. I can tell nobody's here ever built anything in Los Angeles. [audience laughter] That was like akin to the resurrection. Seriously, amazing. 

 

So, he thought he had met this really cool Los Angelena chick from Silver Lake, kind of hippie who cooked all the time at home and had a great sense of humor, who was really relaxed. [audience laughter] And then, that period of time of raising money and building came to an end. There was one day where actually it was done. It was all done. There was nothing else to do. My partner and I looked at each other, and we’re like, “Well, I guess the only thing we can do is open the door.” So, then I became this other person. I became this insane person. But I understand how people become like that. 

 

I was working 100 plus hours a week in the kitchen. I was coming home every night progressively more pissed off. The more weeks went by. I would come home really, really late, stinking a fish with a new constellation of burns. It would get to the point where he would have to tell me to go park my truck, and he wasn't talking about my car out in the street. It was like, “If you want me to talk to you, you really have to park your attitudinal truck,” [audience chuckles] which also became progressively harder to do. 

 

So, time went on the same where you just fall into this rhythm where you wake up late, you go into work, you work really hard. It was really a very successful restaurant. It had tiny number of seats. It was a huge amount of pressure. After you finally finish working the line, then you have to clean up, you have to order all your goods, you have to massage everybody's ego, make sure all the equipment is working for the next day. You have to think about what you need to do for long range planning, like, you need to train the staff, you need to teach them about wine varietals and pasta varieties. You have to call the Red Cross and have them come and teach everybody how to do the Heimlich maneuver and CPR. 

 

I realized that the romance was starting to slip away from me, that this other person that I had become was not very nice to live with. We were getting to be like ships passing in the night. He would get up early in the morning, he'd go to his really amazing architecture job, and I would come home really late at night, and then I would stay up even later, because it took so long to come down from that adrenaline high of working the line. So, I knew we needed to have a date. 

 

So, after refusing to be pinned down forever, I finally said, “Okay, okay, we'll go out. We'll go out. I promise, we'll go out. We'll go to an actual restaurant, we'll make a reservation, we'll go out.” I mean, the thought of going to a restaurant, can I tell you, like, ugh, [audience laughter] horrible. But I got ready. It was the 1980s. I had big hair, bigger than this. [audience laughter] Big earrings, big shoulder pads. I was ready. We had a reservation at a lovely restaurant that we really liked in the neighborhood on Third Street called Sofi, S-O-F-I, a Greek restaurant owned by a very lovely couple who seemed to host a lot of chefs. We would go there after work or on nights off. They were great. 

 

It was an interesting restaurant, because the way you approached it was very non-Los Angeles. Like, you parked your car, you were on the sidewalk. But to get into the restaurant, you had to go through this concrete corridor that dumped out into a beautiful little brick patio, and then the door to the restaurant. So, we go, we sit down, we're seated, we're drinking wine, we're having a really, really good time. I order one of my favorite dishes, Greek salad called horiatiki. We're going to pause here for a recipe. [audience laughter] Horiatiki is made of-- [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

What can I do? [chuckles] Horiatiki is made of really good fresh tomatoes, which in the 1980s were in very short supply. Usually, cut into one and a half inch chunks or into wedges. [audience chuckles] You have thinly sliced red onion, you have some sliced cucumber, bell peppers, of course, really good feta cheese, which then probably wasn't that good, and covered with olive oil, and maybe a little hint of red wine vinegar and a copious amount of dried oregano. Just perfect for me. So happy. 

 

We're sitting making goo-goo eyes at each other, laughing, talking, drinking, eating. The recipe I have since learned for choking. So, I felt it. I felt this piece of tomato go into my windpipe. Now, you know all the times that you've thought you were choking, but you really just coughed a little bit and moved from your windpipe to your esophagus, and then you chewed on it, and you swallowed it. [audience laughter] Or, you're coughing a little bit, and somebody comes up to you, gives you a couple hard thwacks on the back, and you're like, “[coughs] Thank you. Thank you. I needed that.” That isn't really what choking is. [audience laughter] Choking is when on the inside of your body, you hear a sound that's like a cork being put into a bottle. And you know that the minute that happens, that you are the walking dead. 

 

So, this was before there was the international symbol for choking. [audience laughter] And so, what did I do? Did I turn to any of the lovely tables around me and gesticulate wildly? Did I turn to Joe and say, because I couldn't talk, because there was no breath? No, what I did was run out of the restaurant, run down that concrete corridor, out onto the sidewalk, where I was completely alone. [audience laughter] My heart was racing, like it had never raced before. I was much thinner, so I didn't have that reason. [audience laughter] So, my heart is racing. I'm sweating like a pig. I'm thinking to myself, I'm actually going to die from a piece of tomato that was cut in a very unfortunate size, [audience laughter] which has-- I mean, to this day become an obsession with me now. 

 

But then, Joe comes running down the corridor. I see him arrive. My savior. But he has no idea what to do. He is very quietly hysterical. [audience chuckles] He's trying to hold it together, but I could see his face. He knows I'm choking. He doesn't know what to do. But because we had taken that Red Cross class, I knew what to do. This was like at the beginning of the Heimlich maneuver miracle. Now, oh, my God, we've saved hundreds of people in Angele. 

 

So, I positioned him behind me, and I molded his hands to do the abdominal thrusts, which compresses your diaphragm and causes the propulsive wind to expel the foreign object. [audience laughter] And the first time he does it, nothing happens. I think to myself, oh, this is just not good. And then, he says to me, “Your lips are blue.” And so, my legs, I just remember like, “Oh.” But then, he did it again. And this time, just as I heard that sound of it entering my windpipe, it sounded like Dom Perignon had just been corked. [audience laughter] 

 

The piece of tomato flew, I mean, flew in this beautiful arc, [audience laughter] like 15 feet or 20 feet and hit a parked car. [audience laughter] And then, I puked delicately. [audience laughter] I looked at Joe. He was trembling, I was trembling, we both had flop sweat all over us. And then, we held hands, we walked back down that concrete corridor, went into the restaurant, we sat down, and we finished our meal.