We’re not done yet

Maybe the most miserable experience my consort and I ever had in a ridiculously expensive restaurant that was not Le Cirque was the night at Jean-Louis at the Watergate when a couple at a nearby table brought their human larva and let it fuss if not shriek through every course. Their obliviousness still stuns me. I had a flashback at Joe’s Shanghai in Flushing when five of us sat down and instantly realized we were trapped next to a howler monkey in a high chair. These parents, too, were determinedly focusing on their food and avoiding eye contact no matter how many pained-to-pissed looks were shot their way. But the screaming just kept getting more deafening. Then a little Chinese boy across the crowded room decided to join in, and then a third kid shrieked in. It was a symphony of misery to choruses of laughter. But the Chinese parents swooped up their tear-soaked kids and headed for the street to quiet them down. The yup couple stayed put, only picking up the kid to swat his/her butt a few times, fannying the fury. Only when a young Chinese couple just seated nearby stood up and walked out in disgust did they take their cacophony somewhere else, leaving me with one question: Why has the CIA been blasting bad music rather than using the children of the self-indulgent for “enhanced interrogation”? That kid could have smoked out Bin Laden. And he/she will grow up to be eating at a table with spawn near you. . . .