MEDIUM RARE

We arrived for lunch and saw a long table all set and ready for us. What I was not prepared for was the sight of two extremely beautiful, extremely expensive cars, an Audi and a Porsche (model Taycan, spelled almost like Toycar) parked daintily in the dining area, like they were waiting to be claimed. From a restaurant?
Lunch inside one or both of those cars for the seven of us? With a Porsche pork chop for the main course and an Audi apple pie for dessert? Maybe this was Ruby’s idea of a treat, that two of us lucky ones would win a raffle and drive away with the two cars, each priced at ₱10.9 million or thereabouts. After all, Ruby has expensive tastes; she was wearing Parisian painted stockings and LV platforms.
The PGA showroom was sleek and elegant, but if this was also Antonio’s restaurant, why didn’t it smell like a kitchen and a dining hall? Chef Cyrille Soenen sat in one corner, not caring what we were going to order, without suggesting or giving a hint of what the day’s specials were, as if he wanted us to discover/uncover the mystique behind eating a meal stuck between two cars for sale. Someone took a picture of me sitting behind the wheel as if pretending to crash the Taycan through the concrete doors and glass walls, but this was after three people who seemed like they were serious buyers had given the car a more than perfunctory ocular.
You’ve scored again, Antonio (Tony Boy) Escalante, setting up an exclusive restaurant inside an auto display room right on non-exclusive EDSA, the longest democratic space in town. On the menu, food to match the expansive mood: a pretty salad of fancy vegetables unfamiliar to my pedestrian taste, bouillabaisse, and, for the meat eaters, beef Wellington and baked bone marrow.
For dessert, Leo ordered a sophisticated-looking apple pie with a chocolate side dish whose complete name escapes me. As my tablemates dug into their pastry, I made conversation with someone who looked like he knew the car business. Nonchalantly, I asked how many of those pricey Audis and Porsches had been sold since they first arrived. “Ninety, in the last two years,” he replied.