Great Eastern Hotel
Liverpool Street
EC2M 7QN
Tel: 020 7618 7100
Date of Last Visit: Wednesday, February 21, 2007
The Victims: Eugene, Kim, Brian, Jeff, Karen, Bernard
The Damage: £27 each
The Background: I am having a moment. I am teary-eyed. I love my friends. They make me laugh. It’s good to be with them.
Kim is in from NY. Eugene in from HK. Brian is never in town and we’ve caught him at a rare moment. Bernard is a new dad. Bart is on the speakerphone. Seriously. We are in a Japanese restaurant by Liverpool Street. We call Tyson, And we try to find Matt.
The Drink: It’s green tea and I love it. It is the best green tea I have ever had. It’s not from a bag. The bottom of my cup is green sediment, in a good way.
The Food: We order and we order and we order some more. Our server is very sweet and very patient. Her eyeglasses are from Prada. Bernard cuts through our indecisiveness.
The food arrives and we are flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of it. (Eugene.) It is all so lovely and fresh and everyone laughs as I try–and fail–to get the pictures just right. We make life-changing pronouncements, and I commit to a novel. And then the tea is gone and the restaurant is quiet and so, for a moment, are we. It is time to say goodbye.
We exit, back to the darkness and to the street and the black cab, they to their hotels and I to my flat. And we know but do not say that it may be years before we are all in the same place again at the same time. And we will be older and hopefully wiser but we will never lose this.
Verdict: Go.
