"Give it a name and it costs nine euros," says Ro Daventry
At the far end of the Long Pier, the last bowl of the night is four euros, has no name, and Ro Daventry intends to keep it that way.
The chairs are already upside down on two of the tables when you come in. Ro Daventry doesn't look up. He says there is one thing left, and it is the four.
The four is a bowl. Rye bread fried in fish fat, a ladle of dark stock poured over it, a soft egg, onion pickled and cut so thin you can read the lamp through it. The pepper comes from a mill that lost its handle years ago. Ro turns it with a pair of pliers.
You eat. Out past the window the pier makes its small wooden noises, and somewhere a ferry rope pulls tight and lets go. The bowl is chipped at the rim, and you find the chip with your lip, and it feels like being known.
Then you ask what it's called. You always ask. It's late and the body wants a word for what it just received.
Ro wipes the counter in one slow circle. "It hasn't got one."
He says a man with a notebook came in four autumns ago and wanted to write it up. The man needed a name for the top of the page. Ro offered soup. The man said soup was a category. Ro said so was most of life, and the man left a good tip and no article.
"Give it a name and it goes on a board," he says. "On a board it gets a price that suits the name. By spring there's a sauce on it. By summer it's nine euros and someone is photographing it from above."
The people who come at this hour have already settled it among themselves. The ferry cleaners ask for Tuesday, whatever the day is. The men who light the pier lamps ask for the warm one. A woman who sells umbrellas from a cart says only "my usual" and Ro knows she means the four. He answers to all of it.
A name would make the bowl something you could order correctly, he says, and then also incorrectly. Right now nobody can get it wrong. They just come in cold and leave a little less so.
You pay with a five. He pushes one coin back across the zinc, slowly, the way you'd return a small animal to the wild.
At the door you try it out in your head. The four. Then out loud to the gulls on the rail. Neither of them objects.