Kevin Huang | Christmas Eve, and the Most Expensive Lunch I'd Ever Eaten (Zhongshan, Taipei)

There is a specific age at which the price of a meal is still a fact you remember about it. I was at that age on 24 December 2022.

Dianna — Dulce's closest friend — and her boyfriend booked a Western restaurant in Taipei for Christmas and invited us. It was comfortably the most expensive lunch I had eaten at that point in my life, and I am not going to pretend I was relaxed about that. What I remember is a slightly heightened attention to everything: the pacing of the courses, the fact that nobody was rushing us, how different a meal feels when the room is designed around the assumption that you will sit in it for three hours.

The four of us had not been in the same place for close to a year. That is the part that actually mattered, and it is why the meal is still filed in my head under something other than food. Conversation moved the way it does when people who used to see each other constantly have been apart long enough to have news: work first, because it is the easy opening, then gradually the real material — what everyone was actually doing, and whether it was what they had meant to be doing.

I have eaten better meals since and paid more for worse ones. What holds is the specific combination of a long table, an unhurried afternoon, and four people catching up after a gap. The expense was what made us treat the time as an occasion rather than a lunch, and that turned out to be the whole value of it.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co