Page 101 of The Grumpy Billionaire

“Must not be very popular,” she says. “If you got instant ressies.”

“It’s not. A lot of people hate it and it’s overpriced. I doubt it will be in business for much longer. It doesn’t deserve to be.”

“You’ve been there?”

I shake my head. I read a review of it in the paper when it opened. She hadn’t moved here yet, but I saw the headline and imagined her liking it.

“But it would be my favorite?”

“Are you going to change? Or just go in my T-shirt?”

ChapterForty-Three

Hugo

She can’t resist,and that’s how we’re pulling up in front of a restaurant called The Melting Table on an early Saturday evening.

It’s in the bottom of a decrepit office building on a busy street in Queens. We get out of the town car and suddenly she’s clutching my arm, standing stock-still on the sidewalk.

“What’s up?” I ask innocently.

She’s staring at the sign—“The Melting Table.” It has an image of a melting table done up like the famous melting clock by her favorite artist in the world, Dali.

“What is this place?” she whispers loudly.

“I bet you can guess.”

She looks at me. “Is this a Dali restaurant? Is there Dali art all over the walls or something?”

“Baby, it’s much worse than that.”

She squeezes my arm. “How much worse?”

“So much worse.”

We head in. The place is every bit the horror show the review I read suggested it would be. There is indeed Dali art all over the walls in addition to obnoxious lighting—think floor lamps with twisted poles and weirdly formed shades, like they were 3D-printed by a drunken clown.

The host—complete with a stringy black moustache glued partly to his cheek—leads us to a corner table with one normal chair and one chair that is so twisted and malformed, you couldn’t sit on it if you tried.

“This is…amazing,” she says.

“That’soneword for it.” I take the good chair, which is, in this case, the chivalrous thing to do, being that she’s all in for the Dali experience.

She examines the bizarre chair and then turns to the host. “Awesome as this is, I might need another chair.”

“What’s wrong with this one?” he asks.

“Well, it’s kind of…a melted chair stump thing?”

He acts like he doesn’t understand. Other diners look on, amused. How many times does this scene get played out every day? I shudder to think. The host finally storms off to trade the stupid chair for a normal one, placing the stupid chair at an open table, ready for the next unsuspecting victim.

Stella couldn’t be more delighted.

We order drinks and food. Stella’s “surreal sangria” has exotic fruits and a plastic doll arm floating in it. My “galactic gin and tonic” contains colorful curls of ice, but luckily no arm.

Stella has a lot to say about the chair. She’s telling me how Dali was fascinated with distorted imagery.

“Dali’s work is the polar opposite of mine, in a way,” I observe. “He’s distorting reality and I’m trying to organize it.”

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