Dinner in Ricci’s

We ate our dinner in a restaurant in the Dean Clough Mill complex in Halifax, a restaurant called Ricci’s Tapas and Cicchetti. Tapas is Spanish, as many people know, and cicchetti are somewhat equivalent, it’s a Venetian word, cicchetti exist in Italy only in Venice and are somewhat similar to Tapas. So a fusion restaurant.

We were at least fifteen years older than anyone else in the restaurant and it was full, it was only by arriving very early that we managed to get a table. This was on a Tuesday evening in February – obviously scope for development in Halifax.

The waitress, a young woman named Lizzie, was happy to chat to us a bit after I was friendly to her, I think she was a bit puzzled by who we were; she had given a big kiss to a young woman who had come in to eat, a friend of hers presumably, and shortly after she told us what flavours of ice cream there were, one of which was bacio. Bacio is a type of Italian ice cream with hazelnuts but it is also the Italian word for a kiss, which I mentioned to Lizzie and she didn't know that and was rather intrigued that I did so we got onto the topic of languages. She said she had got grade 1 German at GCSE but did not get much opportunity to do much with it.

‘Ich langweilig’, she said, which caused me to correct her grammar when what I should have done was to ask her what she was bored with, was it talking to me or life in general? Whatever it was I thought it was a great shame – unless it was just me that was making her bored, though I don't think it was that. 

A great shame, that Lizzie is bored, when there is so much of interest to do and see in Halifax. Though I suppose you do need a bit of time and money. And it is potentially dangerous too, if there are too many bright people in Halifax like Lizzie, who are bored.