suzette’s kitch-en window

I walked up to Suzette’s, a bus trailer turned restaurant, whose makeshift kitchen window serves as the only evidence of its operation.

Off the alberta street’s beaten path, I politely asked the beats poet reading, green peace supporting, Portland loving, aspiring cook in her aspiring late twenties, for one of my favorite’s, the quiche loraine avec sa salade verte. This loraine, however, had guyere, quite foreign to my quiche-loving palette.
I made lavender lemonade at chelsey’s birthday, just days after returning from paris. I had never tried anyone else’s. Suzzette’s had it on the menu.

The décor inside the tiny building, just adjacent to the kitchen, warrants a story itself. It is as perfectly kitch as one would find in the days of the movement’s renaissance, circa berlin 1860. My mood of excitement was seemingly caught in the crossfire between the dueling avant gardes and kitches of clement greenberg’s theorizing.
Wooden tables (of course, no two the same) and eclectic groupings of ‘thrift store find’ seating, furnished the floors and cushioned the bums of the hungry brunchers. Local art, typewriters and kids books, like the ones I was once happy to receive from my scholastic magazine order, pillowed the hollows of any undecorated space. Matching was definitely not on the menu.

Mason jars filled with day-old gerberas added a colored perfume to the air. My lorraine was a bit luke-warm, however, but good conversation with a close friend more than made up for its lack of steam. And the lemonade did quite the dirty trick on my susceptible somber wits, too.