The Columnist Manifesto

I'm at Veselka, a Ukrainian restaurant in lower Manhattan, Second Ave. at Ninth Street, and the borscht is both sweet and savory with mushroom dumplings added as a Christmas season treat. The peirogi are mouth-watering. The trendy yet spare wall- and floor-boards look, if you squint only slightly and take in the hunched over close-packed diners, dipping thick slices of bread into thick, steaming soups, like you could be in Kiev in 1905 planning the overthrow of the Czar. What a place! I say this with some hesitancy to you, my huge readership, knowing that my glowing review could make it impossible to get a table there for months.

Apparently, it's quite normal here in the Big Apple for the small, lidded metal creamers to be filled with skim milk! You can ask for half-and-half, and they will bring it to you more or less good-naturedly. Is this New York firing a shot across the bows of obesity or heart disease? Was it perhaps included as an obscure rider to the pathbreaking city ordinance barring smoking in restaurants and bars?

Anyhow, I'm at a Seinfeldian Greek diner where I, once again forgetting about the skim milk, automatically pour the thin whitish-bluish wash into my coffee which stubbornly refuses to lighten into a potable creamy brown. I ask for both a fresh black cup of joe and some half and half. They return with a small juice glass filled brimwise with half-and-half. This, too, is apparently now traditional. That's a big money-saver, since I use only a small fraction and they'll have to throw the rest away.

The diner menu shows photographs of what I want to order. They have a photograph of bacon, sunnyside eggs and french toast that looks... well, strangely familiar. I've seen this photo before, and not in a greek diner. The breakfast, while actually quite delicious, looks nothing like the photo. The french toast, made from challah (try ordering that at Denny's!) is not sprinkled with powdered sugar, and the sausage, that fight for recognition from the salty and chewy fare normally offered up by diners with a juicy and subtly spicy flavor, are served on a separate plate, with the eggs, from the frnch toast. The frech toast is arrayed, not as pictured in triangles spread in a partially-overlapping cascade as though for some card trick, but in a geometrical pattern -- a square piece of toast bracketed by two triangular halves, apexes pointing outward. I wonder whether the Greek short order cook would defend this toast array by pointing out that the ancient Greeks invented geometry.

I show the waitress the photograph in the menu, and gesture to my plates. "They don't really look the same," I say.

She points to a sentence in small print at the bottom of the menu. "Actual presentation of meal may vary from photograph."