The Brussels Steak

The steak arrives looking like it has already given up.

It is grey in the way that suggests it was cooked some time earlier, possibly for someone else, and has since been sitting somewhere warm and thinking about its choices. The menu called it "grilled sirloin." The menu was being generous. What arrives is a piece of beef that has had a brief and unhappy encounter with heat, and is now sitting in a small pool of its own reluctance.

I have been awake since four in the morning. It is nine in the evening and I am in Brussels, in a hotel bar, because somewhere around six o'clock the plan for the evening, which had involved finding a restaurant and maybe a walk, quietly gave up and went to bed without me.

The steak is the easiest thing on the menu. Not the best thing. The easiest. I order it because reading further down the page feels like effort I do not have.

It is objectively one of the worst things I have ever eaten. The texture is the rubber sole of a shoe after a long walk, specifically the walk from London Bridge to Victoria, which I did once in the summer and which I would not recommend to anyone. Each bite is a small negotiation. The sauce is a reduction of something that did not benefit from being reduced.

(The only steak that comes close is one that an ex cooked, who believed that cooking through and cooking well were the same thing. But that is a different post.)

I eat about a third of it. I pay for all of it, because that seems right.

Back in the room I open the minibar. There is a bag of Haribo Goudberen in there, the Dutch gold bears, which are better than the German ones for reasons I could explain but probably won't. I eat the whole bag sitting on the end of the bed, watching a French news channel with the sound off.

That is dinner, then.

There is a specific point in a long day, somewhere between tired and completely past it, where the Haribo in the minibar stops being a snack and becomes the meal, and you feel nothing about this. Not guilt. Not anything. You are too far gone to have opinions about dinner. This is, it turns out, the correct state in which to eat an entire bag of Haribo. They taste better without judgment.

The morning meeting is at nine. That means leaving at eight-thirty. The alarm is set for seven-thirty. I turn off the news channel I have not been watching. I put the empty Haribo bag on the bedside table. I do not think about the steak.