Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Unknown (books to read for 13 year olds .txt) 📖

For that matter, it bends double when I try to cut the carrots.

The chicken is juicy, meaty, and sweet. I wonder if it was raised in accordance with the principles of Elijah Muhammad, who decreed the superiority of penned-in chickens that eat what you give them to barnyard chickens that eat bugs and worms. Say what you will about Elijah Muhammad, he was Frank Perdue before Frank Perdue.

Elijah Muhammad’s writings on food, published in the late sixties and early seventies, are inspired by eminently sensible Muslim customs and beliefs and then veer off into the oddball. He recommends fresh F O R K I T O V E R

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fruit, cooked vegetables, and the food of Orthodox Jews. He also advises against sweets, fats, tobacco, pork, alcohol, and processed, canned, or fried foods. He also recommends butter over margarine, putting him decades before his time.

His less coherent moments come when he finds fault with freshly baked bread and explicitly endorses small fish over those weighing fifty pounds or more. He warns his followers against eating too much or too quickly, because then the food will not be digested and they will become “small and skinny.”

I am reminded of one of his more eccentric culinary tenets—“There is no such thing as stale bread”—at the start of my second fine-dining experience: the waiter presents us with a dried-out half-loaf. My guest is reminded of something else—lip gloss—when she tastes the Salaam special butter, which is whipped up with honey, orange, and lemon.

I decide to make this dinner a true international feast, leaving virtually no cuisine unexplored. After two satisfactory nonalcoholic fruit drinks, greasy vegetarian spring rolls, an order of vegetarian somosas that contain meat, heavy-duty quesadillas good enough to entice Tex-ans to join the Nation of Islam, tandoori chicken topped with that vile Burgundy sauce, a chopped Cobb salad that arrives unchopped, first-rate broccoli with hollandaise, and a couple of fabulous nonalcoholic blender drinks made with Häagen-Dazs ice cream, we decide it is time for dessert.

“You’re kidding,” exclaims William, our waiter. I like him as much as I liked Noel, maybe more. That’s because he isn’t as good-looking as Noel and doesn’t distract my date.

William walks away looking over his shoulder, waiting in vain for us to confess that our dessert order is a gag. The bean pie is excellent, as always.

“I know you’re finished now,” says William.

We concede that we are.

“I’m tired,” he says. “I’ve been on my feet since ten o’clock this morning.”

He tells us he has a long train ride home to Evanston ahead of 1 8 6

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him, but he is thinking of stopping on the way for a beer. That answers one of my questions. You don’t have to be Muslim to work at Salaam.

It’s Sunday afternoon, a beautiful day. I return to the cafeteria, eager to try the $5.99 seafood combo plate. Again I carry my tray into Elijah’s Garden, which I’m beginning to think of as my private place. Nobody seems to eat here except me. The BellSouth Senior Classic is on both overhead TV sets. I wonder if anybody is going to believe me when I tell them that I sat at Louis Farrakhan’s restaurant watching old white guys in green pants hit golf balls.

The broiled perch is frightening. It smells old and spoiled and is the single worst item of the entire Salaam dining complex except perhaps the Burgundy sauce. After lunch I head for the two p.m. meeting at Mosque Maryam, located about four miles from the restaurant. I’ve got on my best blue suit. My shoes are shined. I’ve eaten so many meals at Salaam in the past week I feel like a member of the Nation of Islam, or at least like somebody who deserves to get into services on a guest pass. I’m wondering what will happen when I try to walk in.

The mosque is not an inviting building. Located across a wide avenue from a strip mall, it’s all stone slabs and sharp angles, an intimidating fundamentalist façade. Electronically operated sliding gates block the entrance to the parking lot, so I leave my car on a side street and approach on foot. It’s 1:55 p.m.

I walk up the steps behind three women wearing traditional loose Muslim garb. At the front entrance, a young Fruit of Islam stands guard.

He opens a door for the women. I ask if I can go in.

“No, sir,” he says courteously.

I ask why not.

He says I should go around to the side door. He explains that the front doors are for women only.

I turn back down the stairs. A black man in a lemon-yellow suit passes me. I look over my shoulder. He’s walking in the front doors.

I don’t know what’s in store for me at the side doors. I’m not expecting ecumenism.

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When I get there, I’m stopped. The person doing the stopping is a small girl, maybe five years old. She’s adorable, and she’s selling The Final Call. I tell her I’ve already got it.

The second person guarding the door is her mother. She says to the girl, “Tell him thank you, honey.” The girl says, “Thank you.” The Nation of Islam isn’t so tough after all.

I walk through the door, into an anteroom where about a half-dozen security men stand watch. The guy in the lemon-yellow suit is being frisked. Much to my surprise, I’m not escorted out. I’m told to empty my pockets, lean against the wall, spread ’em. What is this—a house of worship or an episode of Cops?

I hold out my keys, my wallet, a couple of pens, and a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook.

Whoops.

I await cries of “Get the scribe!” Nobody says a thing. I’m patted down, asked to register. A kindly gentleman at the sign-in desk asks me how I heard about the services. I tell