The Cold Embrace of Cowardice

Yes, gentle readers, you are reading the words of a coward. These meager sentences are the fruit of a delicate mind that, when faced with the opportunity to feast on such traditional Munich/Bavarian fare as ox diaphragm, could barely suppress the desire to run and hide. Calf diaphragm? No, thanks again, though. Pork diaphragm? Still not doing it. When I noticed that one single dish promised a range of beef delicacies including heart, liver, kidneys, tongue, and I think stomach, I merely smiled weakly and turned to the sausages with the same sort of heavy heart that I can imagine weighted down Napoleon on Waterloo. The message was all too clear: You are not man enough for Bavaria. And it is true. Even the whimsical section titles of the English menu I received at the restaurant made me blanch and titter like a schoolgirl at a wrestling match: "The Best Part is the Offal," for instance, advertised about ten different dishes involving calf's head and the same number for calf hoof-based cuisine. I say "different" dishes, but really they all seemed to be calf head/hoof boiled in vinegar and onion "soup" and served with potatoes. I'm not quite sure that the addition or subtraction of something like parsely should really make it a new dish, but obviously the Weisses Brauhaus in Munich has other ideas.

Normally such food exotica would have exercised a powerful attraction, but frankly the two-fold fact of it being my last night in Munich and the fact that I was eating with an audience of one (being the Naipaul book I was reading, and therefore not very responsive) left me with the singular experience of being unwilling to put something that any random joker called food and charged money for into my mouth. I can't say I think this is a positive development.

At the same time, seeing what was actually on the menu made me feel a little better about my ability to decipher German. At every other restaurant, it had been easy enough to fumble my way through a variety of wursts, potato dishes, and the like, but after about ten minutes' hard staring at the menu last night, I was no more the wiser to its contents. When the waitress brought an English version and I saw that every item on the menu involved some complex interaction with bits of the alimentary canal and various internal organs of animals like the trusty ox, I felt somehow vindicated. This way I could be outraged - how on earth did my foolish professors think to omit crucial words from German 101/102 like "ox diaphragm"? Obviously it is an everyday word that even the simplest fool should be expected to know. I blame the Communists.