Hotelys

Contrasting my male coworkers who have wives attending to their three squares, I fend for myself. Cooking from scratch every day can be a monumental task. Rather than sacrifice all of my potential fecundity to become my own domestic slave, I have expounded several methods of satisfying my notoriously ravenous appetite.
I mentioned before that I pay my neighbors to eat with their family for dinner each evening. This experience continues to yield mixed results, especially as boiled intestines have established themselves as a family favorite. Irregardless, my late afternoon laziness continues to prevail over satisfying my increasingly numb pallet. So dinner is taken care of at least for the near future.
Breakfast has also been sub-contracted out to the local villagers. There is a lady down the road who pounds cassava root into balls and fries it into crunchy tasteless pellets. Although they acquire the consistency of rubber if allowed to cool, catch them fresh and douse with a generous amount of imported catsup and you can be full for just under 10 cents.
That leaves lunch, far and away the most challenging meal of the day. Often when out on orchard visits with Mano or working in the nursery with Rodrigue we do not finish before 11:30 of 12:00. The prep time for any meal that I would consider discussing publicly is at least an hour and a half, an unacceptable state of affairs when I have been working all morning. Sometimes I will take a few hours and prepare a mountain of food that I leave un-refrigerated in a pot for upwards of three days while I chip away at it. More likely, however, is that I will cave and bike into town to eat at a traditional Malagasy “hotely”. I can speak about these peculiar Malagasy dining institutions (restaurants is too euphemistic a word) in general terms because all Malagasy hotelys are exactly the same. Unlike American businesses which thrive on differentiating their products to gain a competitive edge and increase market share, these places seem to thrive on their ability to be exactly the same and defy basic business sense.
From the roadside, a Hotely does not look very endearing. If such structures existed stateside they would be used to store the lawnmowers or to manufacture methamphetamines. The walls are plastered with posters alternating between scantily clad late-90’s American pop-stars and digitally enhanced pictures of fruit. The menu is always uniform. Chicken, pork, or beef, stewed in beans, cassava leaves, or its own juices. Everything comes with the obligatory mountain of white rice. Chicken is always hit or miss. Hit being leg or breast and miss involving butt, neck, or other things considered inedible in America. ‘Pork’ is actually a misnomer; the menu should read ‘pork fat attached to skin and bits of meat.’ I stick with the beef generally. All the food is cooked and served in enough oil to power one of those modified car engines for a week. It also precludes the need for chap stick or laxatives.
The service at a hotely is uniformly horrid. The proprietress behind the counter is always taciturn and rotund (rare for Malagasy) and the underage girls who wait the tables appear to be hired based on their ability to be rude, unapproachable, and completely mute. I have on more than one occasion arrived at a hotely to find the waitress sprawled out asleep on a table. When not unconscious on the furniture, the staff is hypnotically glued to the 19 inch television behind the counter. Politely ask for salt and be prepared to receive dazed stares followed by lackadaisical shuffling and about the room before a container of damp congealed salt is apathetically placed in front of you. Heartfelt expressions of gratitude for this onus service are never met with so much as a ‘your welcome’ a phrase which has apparently been surgically removed from their vocabulary as a prerequisite to employment.
To use the facilities at a hotely is to bear witness to a voluminous quantity of flagrant health code violations. The pit toilet is never far from the cooking area and when passing through the kitchen, prepare to avert your gaze less you lay eyes on the unsanitary squalor from whence the meals emanate. Not only is the bright placard reminding employees to wash their hand before returning to work conspicuously absent, but also all the materials and facilities required therein. Also disconcerting is the pride of ratty housecats that often swarm unattended tables to plunder leftover bones and lick the grease off the plates so never leave a table unguarded.
Some hotelys do try and break from the nauseating homogeny that envelops these eateries by offering oily pasta, fried rice, and French fries to appeal to the occasional white person. Caution is however advised as these dishes are not pre-made in the kitchen like the others so you are liable to sit and wait for up to 35 minutes for your meal whilst you watch your friends satisfy their hunger on traditional Malagasy fare. Also catsup in this country is treated like a precious metal and is doled out only when requested and in the most minute of quantities. Eating with some friends, we ordered five servings of fries and “lots of catsup” but we were the recipients of only two platters graced with modest red dollops the size of York Peppermint Patties to divide between the five of us. The Great Catsup Shortage is however a myth because bottles of the stuff sell for less than a dollar.
With the unsanitary atmosphere, pathetic food, foul service, and downright criminal catsup stinginess, I sometimes wonder why I still frequent these establishments, but when I consider that I can get a full meal for less than a dollar and not have to dishes, my righteous indignation cracks, I get my bike, and I head into town for another meal at the hotelys.