The incredibly difficult logistics of an octopus salad

After swimming I went for a late lunch to my favourite joint, “Paradise Exiles”, or simply “Exiles” (not to be confused with “The Exiles”, the recently opened much larger and posher adjacent place). This is a very simple beach cafe on a rock surrounded 270° by the sea, so you really have a quite good view. In addition it is nearly always exposed to the breeze, which comes quite handy at typical Sliema summer temperatures of between 30 and 40° C. Exiles simply serves the best cappuccino in the world. It fully tastes like coffee but has a slightly sweet flavor, although no sugar is added. The waitresses don't need any sugar either. But more about them in a separate post.

Exiles is like many Maltese cafes where they are unwilling to run tabs. So you have to go to the bar, order and pay. Whatever is ready or can be made right away, like drinks, even cappuccino, you have to carry yourself to your table. Only if it is prepared in the kitchen will it be served.

So I went to the bar and ordered an octopus salad with lots of lemon and a Cisk on ice. Cisk is the local light beer, a good choice at 36 ° C. For cooler days I'd recommend the Belgian Duvel, a strongly flavoured beer with 8.4 ° alcohol content, which they carry, too. The guy behind the bar wrote the order on a small slip of paper and then waved the slip several times through the air. This is a typical Exiles reaction. First of all avoid talking to strangers (I am a stranger to him, as he only knows me for two years). What he meant was: “Where are you sitting?” This needs to be written on the slip, too, so the waitress knows where to carry the octopus. Second typical about this reaction is: “Do everything with the least amount of effort”. To explain this, I'll have to say a bit more about Exiles.

Exiles is a relatively small place, a square of about 10 times 10 meters. All of the maybe twenty tables can be easily seen from the bar. At the time when I ordered, less than ten tables were occupied. So it wasn't too difficult to find me. In addition I was the only one sitting alone at a table and the only one with grey hair. So he could have written loner or grey hair on the slip. But that would have required some thinking, which he wanted to avoid at all cost. So he waved the slip through the air.

I dutifully responded where I was sitting: “Near the juke box, about 3 meters from it”. He nodded and passed me the beer.

Thus, although I did not supply a postal code and Exiles has no table numbers (most waitresses don't know English well enough to handle numbers), one would think that delivery was assured. But it wasn't.

The octopus salad was prepared in about two minutes. I really don't quite understand, how they can do it so quickly, although it is quite simple, just tomatoes, olives, anchovies, butter beans and black beans, parsley and some greens. And the octopus which is marinated in a mixture of Balsamic refined with lots of garlic, the latter would make sure that I would stay alone at the table. Not even a vampire after a four week vegan cleansing would be able to approach me. They also had not forgotten about my special request “lots of lemon”. They had cut the thick slice of lemon, that they normally serve with it, into three ultra thin slices, so it did have “lots of lemon”.

The waitress was standing with the octopus salad in her hand with no idea where to carry it. Actually, that was the only order she had in the last ten minutes and for the next quarter hour. But the task was too daunting for her. There were just two tables at a distance of three meters from the jukebox. So how to find out, which one? Obviously she did not want to risk the reputation of Exiles by serving the wrong table. Her predicament was complicated by the fact, that one of the two possible tables was empty (I was sitting at the other one). She looked at one of the two bartenders for help, the one, with whom I had not placed the order.

He pointed at me.

That is, how Exiles ingeniously solves even the most complicated octopus logistics.

© GG 2012                                                                 

  All content purely fictional, any similarities to real persons, places, firms, etc. are purely coincidental.