Antonio C. Abaya - Send in the Clowns

As far as I can tell, the controversial bill at New Yorkâ€™s Le Cirque restaurant, purportedly the tab for a dinner for 25+ people headed by the First Couple, is not really a bill but only a sample menu.

A restaurant bill would normally have the establishmentâ€™s name, address, telephone number(s), perhaps its email address and/or website, the tables(s) occupied by the diners, the code number (s) of the waiter(s) serving them, and the signature of whoever paid for the dinner (since the alleged amount due - $19,866.00 â€“ is obviously too large to pay with cash, unless he is an oil sheik or a cocaine smuggler).

The controversial document does not contain any of the above details, only an itemized breakdown of food and drink items covered by the menu.

How can this be a bill for a dinner for 25+ persons when the main courses listed consisted of Pauplette of Black Cod (for $98.00); Halibut Poached in Coconut Milk (for $80.00); Dover Sole (for $150.00); Saddle of Lamb (for $104.00); Prime Dry Aged Strip Steak (for $120.00)?

If there were indeed 25 diners, then the per diner cost of the Dover Sole was only $6; the Saddle of Lamb only $4.16, the Prime Dry Aged Strip Steak only $4.80; and the Halibut Poached in Coconut Milk only $3.20.

Cheaper than at Dennyâ€™s, or at Red Lobster, or at my favorite greasy spoon restaurant in San Francisco, Tadâ€™s.

So this was not a bill, only a sample menu.

Now Malacanang could have deflected much of the criticism if it had photocopied the actual bills and the actual credit card debits, and distributed them to all media persons during a press conference.

But the problem is that the bill may actually be bigger than $19,866. The Prime Dry Aged Strip Steak alone for 25 persons would cost $3,000. The Dover Sole another $3,750. And the eleven bottles of Krug Champagne $5,610.

And releasing photocopies of the credit card debits would reveal who actually paid for the dinner, and my dirty mind tells me it was not Leyte Rep. Martin Romualdez.

So it would get Malacanang tangled up in two additional lies. Better to take it on the chin and hope that people will forget it long before 2010.

Manolo Quezon sent me an article written in September 2006 by a New York restaurant reviewer named Adam Roberts:

â€œDear Readers, I am writing you, on behalf of the human race, to inform you that a famous restaurant, a restaurant that still carries great cache (he means â€˜cachetâ€™ ACA) is a danger to humanity. Never have I been more outraged by a restaurant than I was on Friday night when my parents, who came to town, took me â€“ unwillingly, I might add - to that bastion of flash and dazzle, Le Cirque, on the Upper East Sideâ€¦..â€

Roberts then describes what seems to be the corporate policy of Le Cirque. â€œYou will be judged (at the door) and how you are judged will affect how you are treated. If you are judged poorly, you will dine poorly. If you are judged well, you will dine wellâ€¦.â€

Roberts and his nondescript parents from out of town were led past the main dining room, past the fashionable and beautiful people with their â€œUpper East Side mink coats and poofy hair and glittery diamondsâ€¦..into a back room, the room of shame, and we were given the very worst tableâ€¦..â€

My peripatetic companion, who has an apartment on Park Avenue and has dined at Le Cirque several times, each time escorted by a well-known Manhattan personality â€“ which guaranteed a good table and good service - confirms that Le Cirque does indeed have this back room where the social-climbing hoi polloi with no visible credentials to be judged â€˜beautiful peopleâ€™ are dumped with haughty disdain, as Roberts and his hapless parents from out of town apparently were.

That is why Roberts angrily titled his article â€œOnly a Jerk Would Eat at Le Cirque.â€

Well, on August 7 or whenever, some 25 jerks from the Philippines, led by its president and her husband, descended on Le Cirque and consumed a royal repast worth all the cakes in Paris when the Bastille was stormed by hungry mobs scavenging for bread, who wouldnâ€™t get past the door of Le Cirque even if its restaurateur-owner were guillotined for serving pedestrian food.

â€˜Le Cirque,â€™ by the way, is French for â€˜The Circusâ€™. And what a circus it has been since that fateful dinner.

Press secretary Cerge Remonde said it was only a simple â€“ did you hear that, Le Cirque? - late night dinner and that their group occupied only two tables. Cong. Danilo Suarez of Quezon City contradicted him, saying they were a party of more than 50, who obviously could not have comfortably occupied only two tables.

At any rate, Suarez argued, everything was more expensive in New York than in Manila, and he would have gladly picked up the million-peso tab if Cong. Romualdez had not beaten him to it.

Sen. Lito Lapid was reportedly upset by the service at Le Cirque: it took time to serve the food because the waiters kept on changing the plates and the silverware after every course.

How does that song by Frank Sinatra go?

Where are the clowns?

Send in the clowns.

Donâ€™t bother. Theyâ€™re here.

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