Leaving do

Someone leaving the company can be a fraught experience. The best kind of leaving party is one where the person going isn’t well liked. It’s a pleasure to see them go, a good excuse for beers and gossip and as a bonus you don’t have to see their ugly mug around the office again. This was not one of those occasions.

M hired me to my current job and in the few months we’re been friendly he’s been encouraging and a great help in getting used to a new publication with a radically different house style. He’s got a dry wit, writes wickedly good headlines, thinks before he speaks and we’re all going to miss him in the office.

If M has one fault (at least to a British journalist) it’s that he doesn’t really drink that much. This is in many ways a blessing – drink is the curse of the journalist and we’re one of the highest rates of alcoholism of any profession. However, our quest for the night was to get him drunk (something I’ve never seen) and a couple of guys from the UK office had come over to see him off and get him lathered.

So we clocked off early and went to the House of Shields for cocktails before dinner – three hours before dinner to be exact. I do like a dry martini (gin not vodka, stirred not shaken) but since it was only 3pm I went a little easy on them. So too did M. After a couple we switched to beer and then headed off of an excellent dinner that I’d been looking forward to for culinary reasons.

For certain types of food SF has few equals. You can get sumptuous sushi, very good Vietnamese and there’s even a school of cooking dubbed California cuisine. In the latter case no-one’s really nailed what this is but the best I can see is that it’s like French provincial cooking but without the heavy, butter-laden sauces.

But this place had something I really wanted to try, and haven’t had for over three years – the Scotch egg. For those unfamiliar with this culinary delight it’s a hard-boiled egg encased in slightly spicy sausage meat, rolled in breadcrumbs and then deep fried. Many a post-booze up stomach has been settled by the application of these little balls of joy, and the restaurant is the first place I’ve seen in SF that actually serves them.

What came out of the kitchen wasn’t anything like the fat-laden creations I was used to. Instead the outer shell was made up of barbequed pork scraps, shaped around the egg before frying and there was nary a breadcrumb to be seen. Still and all it was delicious.

But M was still refusing to get drunk. By the end of the meal we’d sunk two bottle of wine between five of us, with a couple of hardy souls skipping desert in favour of a brandy. M, while noticeably more relaxed and ebullient, wasn’t exhibiting any of the behavior we’d been hoping for, but was having a whale of a time judging from his grin. We admitted defeat and headed home, but it was a great send-off.