Lemongrass

Ask Rihanna Gaga what her favourite food is, and she'll answer 'pasta!' It's been so for a very long time. So today, I thought it would be nice to go to the Pasta Company, a restaurant overlooking the Scheveningen harbour, in the same cluster of eateries as the Dagvisser where we ate earlier this winter. According to its website, it's open from 11 o'clock onwards, but when we arrive we are greeted by a sign saying: 'From today onwards: "CLOSED" on Mondays'. I'm intrigued by the quotation marks around the word "CLOSED". Am I to understand it's closed, but not really? That its closedness on Mondays is somehow meant in a slightly ironic way? That it's only closed according to whomever is being quoted here and that it only depends on that person's authority whether we will be granted access or not? However, it does look quite closed, so I decide to not try our luck.

Rihanna Gaga takes the disappointment quite well, especially because I tell her they might have noodles next door, at a place called Lemongrass. I assume this because I confuse it with the Thai restaurant on top of it, Phuket (and considering the importance of lemongrass in the Thai kitchen). When we walk in, however, I realise that this probably is a European restaurant. It's 11:30 by now and the friendly waiter tells me we can drink something, but the kitchen only opens in half an hour. I discuss matters with Rihanna Gaga: can she accept fish instead of noodles and is she willing to wait? She prefers to stay here, so we sit down and order a chocolate milk for her and a latte macchiato for me.

It's a truism that kids grow up so fast - I really don't know if they do, because it certainly feels like time has slowed down since Rihanna Gaga was born. It has somehow reverted to the way it was when I was a child myself and a year was an incredibly long amount of time. Looking back a year or so, feels like looking back at a distant past, when the little girl in front of me was still a toddler, hardly able to talk, hopping along rather than going her own way. Now, I have a real table partner, with whom I can have long chats. It's no longer me having lunch with Rihanna Gaga in tow, but really us having lunch together. We talk about her new rabbit, which is an old toy of mine. I gave it to her yesterday, when - after a visit to the petting farm - she told me that rabbits were her favourite animal ('favourite' has its own meaning for her, since sheep are also her favourite animal). So I went to the attic and gave her this one. My own grandmother made it a long time ago for me. It must have been sometime in the early eighties, when she was in a rehabilitation centre after a car accident. My grandmother, who suffered from MS, had been disabled as long as I can remember, was now in an even worse shape and one of the activities she employed while in the rehabilitation centre was making toy animals. There's this rabbit, and a labrador dog as well. I used to have an elephant, made by her, too, but that one has disappeared. She died a long time ago, but the toys are still there and it's actually quite special to see Rihanna Gaga play with it.

When we arrived in the restaurant, there was loud rock music playing, but the waiter turned down the volume and now there's lounge music playing of the type that beach clubs tend to favour too. Rihanna Gaga loves it. When she's done drawing in a colouring book that I brought along, she starts dancing to the music. She still has the arab style moves that she learned in Tunisia and the waiter is quite impressed. She loves dancing and a few days ago my girlfriend took her to a toddler dance group, but then she didn't want to dance along with the other kids. Maybe she was timid about it, but I actually think that the music - K3 and the like - wasn't to her taste. She much prefers good electronic dance music. Rihanna Gaga keeps herself occupied with dancing, colouring and playing with the rabbit and a doll and before we know it the half an hour wait is over and our order is brought: a salad with three types of fish, gambas and shrimps. It's preceded by a great amuse: creamy soup in small cups served with bread, olive oil and vinegar salt. Rihanna Gaga loves the soup - so much so that she eats her own and demands a bit of mine as well - and enjoys dipping the bread in the olive oil. She ignores the salt. The salad tastes great: fresh, with the fish and gambas crisply baked on the outside and smooth on the inside.  Rihanna Gaga continues to eat the bread with olive oil and has bits of shrimp, gambas and fish.

Lemongrass presents itself as a wine restaurant, and seems to take great pride in the fact that it has won the 'Best Award of Excellence" from the USA based Wine Spectator forteen years in a row. It  has wine tips alongside all of their dishes on the menu, so I feel that I should have some wine with the salad. I take the menu's advice and order a voignier, which indeed goes well with the food. I toast with Rihanna Gaga. Rihanna Gaga asks me where the wine comes from. This is a new question that she pursues for almost everything. In the morning, when I put chicken on her bread, she'll ask where it comes from and I have to tell her again and again how chickens are killed to make the meat that she puts on her bread (I've decided to be completely honest about this kind of thing, but she's not disturbed one bit by the fact that what's she's eating used to be the same thing as the lively animals she loves to watch at the petting farm). The wine, I tell her, is made from grapes. And where do the grapes come from, she asks. I tell her they're from France, where her grandfather - my father - lives. We should go and visit them again, we agree and we discuss where we want to go the coming year. With family spread out around the world, there's so many places we could visit!

I finish the salad while Rihanna Gaga lies down a bit because, as she says, she's tired. Soon, however, she's very active again and jumping and walking around on the couch. I warn her that only the bit of the couch that belongs to her table is for her to play on. For a little while she tries to expand this border, but I sternly tell her to stay on her bit. The great thing about eating in restaurants with her is that she lets herself be corrected quite easily. She tries to push the boundaries a bit, but when I sternly say that she has to stop it 'now!' she wil do so quite quickly. It's the same with making too much noise and running around too much, which would be fine in a different type of restaurant, where there's a toy corner for kids and more parents with children. Here, however, the atmosphere is quite exclusive and the fellow patrons are mostly middle aged or elderly couples on a day off or on a short holiday in Scheveningen. With Rihanna Gaga, however, it's quite easy to find a good balance between allowing her the freedom that a child of her age needs when staying at a table for more than one hour and not disturbing our fellow eaters (and she and other children are certainly welcome, too, with the waiter bringing her a can full of colouring pencils, and making sure she's taken care of too, pouring a bit of lemonade in her water here, offering her some more bread there). I also realise, however, that's she's tired and that I shouldn't push it too much. After finishing the salad, I'm ready to go, but Rihanna Gaga has now calmed down again and she's eager to toast a few more times, so that I can also finish the wine more leisurely. The service throughout our lunch has been very friendly and neat, with the waiter and a waitress offering smiles, a little chat here and there and on the whole great care.

Then it's time to leave, more so since Rihanna Gaga has discovered I find her saying 'poop!' loudly a bit embarassing (although that is solved easily when I tell her that if she continues, she can go outside while I pay. She's quiet again). I ask for the bill and Rihanna Gaga gets dressed. The waitress helps her out with her boots, much to Rihanna Gaga's surprise (and I wonder if she'd done so as well had I been a mommy, rather than a daddy). But she's far more willing to interact with strangers than she was a few months ago, so the help is happily accepted. Food and drinks together cost €25 with, considering the great location, friendly service and quality of the food is a very reasonable price.