Page 7 of Breakaway
"The ceviche," I say.
"Here we go." He rolls his eyes, but he settles back into the couch ready for the argument.
"The ceviche was a six-point-eight."
"The ceviche was a seven-one, and you are wrong, and I will explain why you are wrong if you give me thirty seconds."
"Explain away."
"The acid was right." He counts points off on his fingers. "The fish was right. The red onion was cut thin enough. You are grading the texture of the plantain chip on the side. The chip is a garnish and should not be weighted equally."
"The plantain chip is structural,” I say. “You eat it with the ceviche. It is part of the experience."
"It’s a garnish." Wes says, ready to argue about the plantain as much as I am.
"A garnish is parsley. A garnish is a lemon wedge nobody squeezes. That chip is infrastructure. If the chip crumbles when you scoop, the whole dish falls apart."
Wes stares at me, his spoon of gelato paused halfway to his mouth. "You just called a plantain chip infrastructure for ceviche."
"And I stand by it." I'm already building the next point in my head when I catch his eye and whatever I was about to say dies on arrival. He bursts out laughing first and I'm half a second behind him.
"We should track this," Wes says after catching his breath. He puts his gelato on the coffee table and reaches for his laptop on the side chair. The screen glows in the dim living room as he opens it up.
"Track what?"
"All of it. The restaurants. The dishes. We both have opinions on the few places we’ve been and we are just saying them into the air. You just gave a plantain chip a full thesis argument. That's data, Berger. Data deserves a home."
I shake my head and laugh. He is sitting on his couch with his laptop open building a spreadsheet for restaurant ratings at eleven at night. And I am not sure I want to be anywhere else right now.
"What scale should we use?" He asks while typing.
"One to ten."
"Any decimals?"
"One decimal place. Anything past that is false precision."
"So seven-point-four is a valid number but seven-point-four-three is too much?" He looks over at me, eyebrow raised.
"Seven-point-four-three is a person lying to themselves about how much attention they were paying to the food. One decimal." He types a note in a cell off to the side. SCALE: 1-10, ONE DECIMAL.
The columns go up fast. Restaurant, date, dishes ordered, individual ratings. Separate scores per dish, because a restaurant that serves a perfect appetizer and a mediocre main should answer for both performances. He adds separate rating columns and renames them RATING (M) and RATING (B). Dessert, bread service, and coffee each get their own sub-index. Ambiance gets fifteen percent of the weighted average, because a great room is allowed to help but not allowed to carry.
"Sixty-five percent for food overall," he says. "Fifteen ambiance. Ten service. That's ninety."
"The remaining ten is the bread basket."
I stare at him. "You're giving the bread basket ten percent of the weighted score."
"You just called a plantain chip infrastructure. The bread basket is the first thing a restaurant gives you. It's the restaurant saying: this is who we are, this is the standard we're operating at, welcome. That's worth ten percent."
He is not wrong. I don't tell him he's not wrong because we have known each other for three weeks and I am not ready to concede a point this early in whatever this is. "Fine. Ten percent for the bread basket. But if the bread is store-bought, the ten becomes a penalty."
"That's not how percentages work."
"It's how bread works."
"And a binary at the end," I say. "Would we go back, yes or no."
