Dinner to dress for?

Resturant review
Dinner to dress for?
What is the matter with Marco Polo? Injy El-Kashef wonders
There is definitely a particular joy in dressing up to a meal. When you are sitting in your n'importe quoi clothes and your dining-partner-to-be says to you "and what are you wearing to dinner?" you sense a certain muffled worry in his voice, one that actually expresses "you don't think you're going out to dinner like that, do you?". And when you disappear and show up again 20 minutes later in all your glory and you see him sighing in relief and admiration, that definitely gives you a nice ego boost, come on. And when he is wearing a killer suit and a scarf and you both walk like your are the marquis and the marchioness, it is inevitable that you will be heading to an elegant and expensive restaurant, that also goes without saying.
But, and a big but that is, when you get to a place like Marco Polo at the Meridien Heliopolis and you see the prices on the menu, you almost wish you had stayed in the play clothes your governess had sown out of the drapes in her bedroom and ordered some fast food, or even skipped dinner altogether and munched on some crisps or something while you were hanging off a tree.
God almighty, what is the matter with this place? After we sat down with our self-confident, narcissistic grins, I asked the maitre d's recommendation for meat and fish, ordered the wine list and did the whole sophisticated diners' thing. My friend was much more silent and hardly exchanged a word with anybody. It was a mystery to me why he remained so reserved until I discovered something: his menu included the prices, mine did not.
When we entered that restaurant we felt rich, but that menu is obscenely expensive. Penne a la provencale for LE32? Spaghetti with garlic, olive oil and parsley for LE36? Veal for LE60? There was not one dish on the main course list that was below LE46. There is a limit to everything: the joy of having money to spend turns into cold resentment when you feel you are being taken for a fool.
So no main courses, a primo was more than enough given the circumstances and I had been dying for some pasta all day anyway. My friend took the Penne a la Provencale while I ordered the Tagliatelli with Seafood Sauce (LE42).
While we waited the bread and butter arrived. True, there was a large selection of choice bread, and true, the service was rather good, but we had been forced to swallow our pride with every lump of butter after ordering only pasta, and that we did not appreciate at all. Anyway, the pasta was here and there was plenty of it. Although I must admit that the sauce was not bad with fresh tomatoes and all, the penne were unexpectedly rather piccante and quite dry -- certainly not the penne of the century. As for the tagliatelli, they seemed to have been reheated in a microwave oven, judging from the dry layer at the top. The seafood sauce was pretty good with chunks of fresh salmon and scallops, but it also could have used some moisture like the rest. As for the presence of bits of spaghetti in both our plates, that is a culinary phenomenon I dare not analyse for fear of embarrassing anybody.
These two pasta dishes, a bottle of water and a fresh strawberry juice came to LE107; go figure.
Marco Polo, Le Meridien Heliopolis, Al-Orouba St, Heliopolis
Tel 290 5055/1819
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