Hanmoto Izakaya Restaurant Review
I like to think of myself as the Anthony Fantano of culinary criticism (insufferable & suffering & making that everyone else’s problem)
Though we hadn’t asked, the hostess seating us explained that tapas is a style of dining where “plates are shared and therefore smaller.” Bad start.
“Did she just fucking call me fat…?”
It wasn’t just what she said, but the blithe candor with which she said it that triggered my defenses:
“...Or is she inferring that we’re some sort of… unsophisticated swine? That we’re some sort of food philistines? Does this bitch really think we’re the only Dundas West dwellers who haven’t yet caught wind of this 2016 bullshit ass dining trend?”
I know she doesn’t know that I’m neither ill-informed nor impartial. I know she was just doing her job. I know she doesn’t know that I'm a bonafide psychopath who is both familiar and furious with how tapas work and have decided to project that impreference into this poor host’s orbit, what with all my scowling and negative vibes.
It’s not that I don’t get it… I just don’t get it.
See, in her definition, the “therefore” implies an elucidation, it implies that the Plates Being Small clarifies the Sharing component, though I would personally contend that plates being shared should justify portions being larger. (See, this is why she called me fat.)
In the end, I bite my tongue and resist rebuttal because I know there’s no point in that rigamarole, it’d come with no satisfaction, it’d only come with an immediate sense of regret and embarrassment; it’d only be met with a vacant stare that would make me feel poor and ugly; it’d only be met with a look on her face that would say without saying, “if you don’t like it, you could try Jack Astors?”
The host disappears and I look up to God, asking him to help me accept tapas restaurants for what they are, asking him to provide me with the peace needed to enjoy this meal shared with friends. I stare at the menu from the discomfort of the wobbly plastic stool on which I’ve been seated and my renewed positivity is immediately undone by the realization that each small plate costs the same as a full plate at Jack Astors’. Now I feel fat, poor, ugly, and suddenly old, too: I’ve been sitting on this stool for all of a minute and my back already hurts.
I wonder who this restaurant is for. What is the demographic of people who can both afford multiple small plates as well as enjoy them without back support? I picture the smug face of a nondescript influencer and swat the image from my mind’s-eye like I learned once in a meditation app trial. I settle on one Full-Priced Small-Plate and try again to rev my enthusiasm, the positivity for which I am known (jkjkjk), and choose to think of this experience as some sort of avant-garde work out; like if I eat a toddler sized meal whilst engaging my core, by the time I walk out of here, I could look like… OhGodOhGodOhGod - the server who is beelining our small wooden crate table.
She is the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Her tiny ski slope nose is dotted with painted freckles and flanked by two massive Tim Burton-esque eyes. She has full cheeks and even fuller lips in a shape that I’ve only ever seen on cartoon characters. I know I sound like a pervert and I am but that’s not what this is about. This is about being something much worse: this is about being jealous of this girl, this girl who is both traditionally and distinctively beautiful; this girl who I can’t even bring myself to feel bisexual towards because that would involve wanting to see her parts next to mine which I don’t because then I’d be too sad to be horny (and not even the type of sad that makes me horny, which is more often than not, The Case). This girl has all of the aggregates of a supermodel but is an average height with a sartorial edge. If I was even more of a Pick Me I’d point to her Alice Cooper t-shirt and demand that she name three songs and would also know three songs myself but I don’t. So on top of it all, she’s cooler than me. She can’t be more than 25. I am seething.
She greets us with a perfect smile and when she asks me what I want to order I stumble and bumble and then hate myself for letting someone who I know nothing about other than the fact that she is beautiful disarm me. For all I know she could have nothing to her other than being young and beautiful, she could absolutely suck as a person, and that is what I have no choice but to imagine. It’s the only way I can cope, and still, in this state of coping, I have to hate myself for being this intimidated, this affected by a girl who is mean, stupid, and addicted to drugs (God willing) It doesn’t matter. She could be a completely empty vessel, but still, the vessel is shiny enough to have ruined my day.
I know that sounds like a joke, and please do feel free to laugh throughout these pieces, dear reader. My intention, after all, is to dot these pieces - these DSM case studies (as they may as well be) - with jokes, but I am also serious. She did ruin my day. And listen, I know that it is customary for servers to be hot, but this is simply a bridge too far, because at this point I’d actually lost my appetite. That can’t really be your goal, Hanmoto Izakaya. Even if I hadn’t lost my appetite, there’s no world in which I’d order a fuck ton of food from Little Miss Bella Hadid over here. Congratulations, Hanmoto Izakaya, you played yourself. I’m ordering a Diet Coke and I'm not tipping. I thought, closing the menu with bitter indignance. She has everything, she is everything, and now she also wants to be the beneficiary of my tapas tips? Ha ha ha and how about this: her vanity isn’t a cause I feel comfortable supporting. At this point I might as well donate the monetary equivalent of two small plates to the IDF (I am of course kidding and so sorry to joke about a topic as sensitive and controversial as not tipping).
Seeing her made me feel embarrassed that I had ever before had the audacity to feel confident. Seeing her made me feel angry that my boyfriend might ever see her. Seeing her gave me the dizzying realization that if she exists, others do too, so even if he never sees this particular girl he’ll inevitably see one just as pretty at some point and her youthful beauty will invariably affect him like it did me, though subbing jealousy for jubilance.
Seeing her was a horrifying harbinger that girls who look like her will continue to exist in this state as I age. All of this hit me at once and I stopped asking God for acceptance of this restaurant and instead for the destruction of it. Once that request was submitted I started praying for a genie, knowing already that my first wish would be for any guy I’ve ever dated or ever will date to only ever be able to see women my same age or older (and I would, of course, specify in my wish that the age of women he is allowed to perceive ages alongside me, so the bar of comparison is only ever other women my same age) and for our server to age hideously, horribly, and as soon as fucking possible (of course without the laws of time and space simultaneously affecting me)
and.. uh… ..world peace…
***
It’s strange to be on the other side of this dynamic. I remember being in my early twenties and having women in their thirties hate me for exactly that; I remember simultaneously enjoying their jealousy as well as feeling hurt by it. I remember promising that I’d never be the type of woman who doesn’t support and uplift women younger than I and have kept to this promise on an external, material level but that won’t (and literally can’t) stop the interior struggle.
As a woman who has been young and gotten a bit older I’ll tell you, every part of it has been hard to navigate and strange to reflect on. When I look to the past, when I look to the future, it all sort of hurts.
It’s strange that when you’re a young woman, you are one day - seemingly out of nowhere - appointed CEO of Beauty. You have no prior experience in the field let alone in a position of power and still you are expected to wield it magnanimously. You are expected to withstand ire from women like me, expected to endure all of the positive and negative attention you beckon. You are expected to know the scope of your power; how significant it is in your romantic relationships. You are expected to be acutely aware of it, because nothing is more annoying than a girl who says she’s ugly when she’s actually hot. You are expected to take advantage of it while not leaning on it too much, because soon it will go away and you are expected to be okay with that, even though right now it defines you.
It’s strange that this particular power fades as you become more of a self-sufficient woman. It’s strange to work on yourself and become so much better in every way but to be valued less on a surface level because the surface of your skin is now slightly looser. I know there are more worthwhile virtues that you accrue as you age and become more multifaceted. But being beautiful is still the zenith for women (just listen to any man speak) and it’s the one virtue you get further and further away from as you better yourself in every other way.
It’s strange.
I’m told to not care that much. Shamed, even, by men who I watch become putty in the hands of a girl who has done nothing in her life but graduate high school. I’m shamed by women too, shamed for getting botox and basically corroborating and lending credence to a system that we, by definition, benefit less and less from as the years go on. I resent the shaming (like I’m the one who set this standard?) but I understand it, because what I resent even more is my own superficiality; my own failing investment and its diminishing returns.
Sometimes I’ll lament about this to women and learn that a lot of them just don’t care that much. Pffffft, I’ll think, cooking up some dumb Hot Take, like women who say they aren’t afraid of aging are undiagnosed Pick Me’s: “I’m not like other girls, I love my crow’s feet and greying labia!!!!”
But the truth is I do believe them, because they emanate an unmistakable sort of peace and confidence; because these thoughts don’t monopolize their mind and their work, and for that I am even more jealous of them than the Hanmoto Izakaya server. They make me want to invest less in the impossible and more in my own peace and acceptance. They make me want to be more confident because… what’s that saying? Nothing is more beautiful than a woman who believes she is beautiful? I’m aware of the inherent paradox of wanting to get over my beauty complex so that I can be more beautiful but I’ll figure it out in my thirties. I have hope for my thirties. There’s probably some secret to overcoming all this that you get to discover in your thirties, should you want to, and I have hope that this decade will guide me toward that light. If not, the genie would be great too.
Either way, I’m never going back to Hanmoto Izakaya.
7/10 (the steak was pretty good)
You're really hot!! Funny too!!