Diplomatic dining and other near disasters

For most people, to speak about “a diplomatic dinner” is to summon images from a film classic like Royal Wedding, a scene from the novel and film The Remains of the Day, or an episode from the television series, Downton Abbey. But the truth is that often it is something very different. A real diplomatic dinner represents roughly equal parts of ingenuity, horror, and incipient chaos. Occasionally, there are some fascinating foods – and even some real insights into other cultures and peoples and the chance to generate a human connection.

When I first became a diplomat, I had joined the US Information Agency, USIA. The Washington headquarters of USIA (called the USIS – using the S for Service internationally because of some half-forgotten bureaucratic history) was located just one city block from the White House, at 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue. This location was unbeatable geographically, even if the agency’s real connections to power were never quite as impressive as that street address hinted at. 

USIA was the administrative home for what we now call the government’s “soft power”, long before that term had been coined by Harvard professor Joseph Nye. At home and abroad, the agency’s officers managed official international educational exchanges at the country’s embassies, supervised American international radio broadcasts by the Voice of America in Washington, and overseas also organised concerts, ran book and film libraries and reference services, set up conferences and seminars on all manner of topics, and carried out the full range of media relations for America’s embassies.

Despite their beliefs about their primary role in foreign affairs, most State Department officers would (reluctantly) admit USIS officers usually had the best sense about circumstances and events within their respective countries of assignment. Much of that feel for a country came from meeting acquaintances and professional contacts over dinner, for a drink or coffee, or just sitting around casually in a cafe, a pub, or in a garden for a braai, discussing what was going on in the world. All of this, of course, took place long before social media, the internet, or even email had ever come along. 

Back in those days of the early 1970s when I was still a new, young officer, people like me would sometimes be guided for lunch to a small restaurant located on the street behind the USIA headquarters building. Eating at Jenny’s Oriental Kitchen, a place now just a ghost from history, was a kind of rite of passage. This was where the old East Asia hands would go for a meal or a drink or two, back when people often had a drink or two or three over lunch. Jenny’s advertised itself as a unique pan-Asian restaurant, and you could get passable versions of Thai, Burmese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean food there. Like so many cubby hole dining spots in Southeast Asia, the decor there was strictly utilitarian – right down to its linoleum-covered table tops and nondescript chairs – and you certainly didn’t want to wander into the kitchen and look around too carefully. 

Of course, in much of Southeast Asia, in a local place like Jenny’s, there might well have been a cat or two to keep control over any wildlife that ventured in unawares to see what might be scavenged, but Jenny’s was in Washington, not in Vientiane or in the hills outside Malang, so that particular part of restaurant furnishings was not part of its ambience. But Jenny’s did have the clamour and the shouting by the staff at each other (and at the occasional diner as well), and if they didn’t look too carefully, it could have left visitors with the sense they had wandered into somewhere definitely not in Washington, DC – or Kansas for that matter. (People who have lived in Johannesburg for decades may have had similar feelings about the now-shuttered Kapitan’s and its famous crab curry.)

That memory of Jenny’s also reminds me of another old favourite Washington dining spot, the North China, located in the suburbs north of Washington. The North China liked to claim it had been the first Chinese restaurant in the Washington area to serve Peking duck with all the trimmings, on demand, rather than requiring a full day’s advance notice.

There was one memorable evening when my wife and I were eating there, quietly enjoying our Peking duck. We looked up just as one of the restaurant’s cooks was chasing the head waiter throughout the dining room, waving one of those wicked-looking, rectangular meat cleavers in the air and screaming at the top of his voice at the waiter. Our first response? Don’t catch the cook’s eye; he’s definitely really unhappy about something. We never did figure what the dispute was about, although ultimately there was no actual bloodshed – at least in front of the diners.

(Image of Pad Thai by Sharon Ang from Pixabay)

(Image of roast turkey by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay)