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From Your Restaurant Critic: A Fashion Tip for Dining Out (or appearing anywhere else in public unless it is to stalk wild game in a Scottish shopping mall)
Each month in the pages of St. Louis Magazine, as part of the service we provide—and will continue to do so in spite of the constraints of sequestration that are devastating so many corners of the restaurant criticism business—we distribute hints on how one ought dress at those eateries we review.
Our best description on dressing for dinner, which, surprisingly, was deleted faster than Charlie Sheen’s nomination for Pope, was when we suggested that the proper attire for dining at 1111 Mississippi was:
“Like Jack and Jennifer did on Days of Our Lives, but not the way they did when Jack was trying to make Jennifer jealous by carrying on with the Princess Greta Von Amberg, but more like they did when Jennifer started dating that Irish guy Colin, when she was in Africa and then slept with him because he was threatening Jack.”
It isn’t always easy to describe the way to dress for a place, offering a succinct hint so you won’t commit the sort of couture faux pas like that one where you arrived at the Crips debutante ball wearing a red t-shirt under your dinner jacket. That said, we wish to use this opportunity to elucidate in a way that leaves no confusion whatsoever:
At no place we have ever reviewed, at no place where you will ever eat, would it be appropriate, under any circumstances short of a nuclear misfortune that has left your wardrobe otherwise completely denuded, to wear a camouflaged cardigan. Even if it is from Ralph Lauren. And shawl collared.
In fact, let’s go a bit further and suggest that, if ever you have even considered buying, let alone wearing a shawl collared Ralph Lauren camouflage cardigan, you not share this consideration with anyone. Ever.
So we’re clear on that, right?
