🌸 catfished by scampi

Friends,

The reception to my written album, buttahbasted has been insane. Last week, when

Substack Reads

highlighted my debut piece, “seduced in condesa”, I received floods of beautiful comments, and more new subscribers than could comfortably fit in a Concorde! A few of you became paid subscribers too. Welcome, welcome! I’m so glad you’re here.

Big numbers are nice, but I don’t measure success here by metrics. The quantum I care about is intensity of feeling. Can my words make strangers feel something visceral? Can I transport them to a different land, even for a single moment? In a world obsessed with AI AI AI and content moving fast-fast-fast, we need more cold brew and less instant coffee.

We live in a metrics-mad culture, but we lose so much when we forget the qualitative. When I’m filing my taxes next year, under which column do I file the riches and love from my comments section? You want to convince me

angielin

’s description of my words as “fresh perfume for weathered short-form senses” is not income??

In February, I didn’t know what this project would become, but I knew the energy I wanted to convey. The pieces had to sing and transport. So when

E.L. Zeitgeist

commented “You transmuted my 60-degree midwestern porch into a balmy stroll with a sultry angel guiding me through heaven on earth”, I knew I’d struck the right chord.

Earlier on, I considered pairing each post with a complementary song and an audio snippet, because of the musicality of the pieces. So

Jacquie Verbal

‘s note, “I can hear the words flowing so smoothly riding the beat”, felt like she was reading my vision board.

The wonderful thing about creating and following your intuition is seeing the power of emergence unfold in front of you. There are parts you can control, but serendipity and spirituality attend the same party. When

Aly

commented she visited the same little boutique store highlighted in my Condesa piece, I felt the art gods were on my side.

This outpouring of love is crazy because I worked on this project for months, spending too long re-reading and rewriting paragraphs. It was a gamble with an uncertain payoff. Would anyone even care? Do people want to read anymore? Aren't we all rotting with TikTok brain?

But you all have shown me otherwise. The groundswell of people feeling inspired by this work is wonderful to see. I'd love to see more people take time off the punishing weekly publishing grind to go into their own creative caves to make weirder, more human, more authentic expressions of art.

OK enough commentary! Today’s story is a sizzling account of catfishing scampi. This is the second post from the written album. A few of you suggested I release audio snippets from these pieces, I’m thinking about it. If you’re new to the series, please check out the launch post.

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🌸 catfished by scampi

Nothing hits like the first bite of a great meal. 

You feel lifted from the drudgery of daily life, from that damned dishwasher that never empties itself, and taken to a temporary nirvana. Crunch and crisp catapult you to cloud nine. You become giddy and woozy in a near-drunken appreciation of the physical sensations—the seductive wisps and whiffs of browned butter on your nose, the glee, the sheer sinful and unrepentant glee tattooed on your face, and the reverence of raw skill that made the things on your plate.

Or that's what it's supposed to feel like. 

On a crisp fall evening a few years ago, two friends and I trekked several miles across New York chasing this blissful first bite. We were guided by my friend, a local who received a glowing recommendation from a fellow New Yorker with strong food opinions. As wide-eyed tourists in a famed foodie town, how could we resist? Like three baby ducks in a pond, we scampered forth.

Scampi is a dish I'd usually never order even though I love the ingredients—garlic, butter, shrimp, white wine. What’s not to like? But when I go out to eat, I'm looking for something I can't cook myself. Something that only those men with charcoal palms, stubby fingers, receding hairlines, and gritty heat-resistant hands can craft, something that survived the barage of insults hurled their way by head chefs. I want to marvel at my meal. 

This restaurant had the audacity to name itself after a dish. So I had to try it. It felt rude not to. The pulpo dish looked interesting, but I learned a long time ago that the Spanish make the best octopus. Our guide ordered first. She got the scampi. My fellow foodie friend followed suit, and I completed the treble. Three scampis for the table, please. 

After ordering, I wondered what secret element the chef would add to make the dish pop. Maybe a forbidden dash of fish sauce or a glug of gochujang? Or some other umami bomb that would offend the traditionalists. There had to be something, right? Maybe the secret was the broth? I pictured shrimp heads simmering in tall stock pots and seafloor crustaceans sacrificing their skeletons for finger-licking flavor. 

Speaking of flavor, my mother routinely interrupted my laziness as a child to drag me to the kitchen. "OK, so and so just called, they'll be here in thirty minutes. What do we have? What can we cook for them?" In Lagos, close friends and family don't care for your calendar, they arrive at your house expecting hospitality. So she'd take me to the kitchen and we'd run through our options. Did we have enough time to defrost the fish? Could we make a quick peppersoup as an appetizer to stall for more time? Her pantry stored several spice factories—smoky, prickly Cameroon pepper, enough dried herbs to make an immigration officer squeal, emergency MSG bombs like maggi and oyster sauce, and a deep freezer that revealed more secrets the further you inside you reached.

Her "ka sa ma se rere" attitude, loosely translated to "let us continue to do good" meant she secretly enjoyed those cooking sprints, and I, as little apprentice, loved learning how she turned thirty minutes into fulfilling feasts. She never used a recipe, so that's how I learned to cook. Trial by error, creating without rules and dogma. Her only instruction "taste taste taste!" reverberates in my brain till this day. Because nothing is more insulting to a Yoruba person, than saying their food is bland.

I guess my body language gave it away, that I was daydreaming back to my childhood. My friends had gone to the bathroom, and the waiter returning to refill our waters, offered this solace: 

"The scampi is our signature dish for a reason. You're going to love it." Uhh, was my face that transparent?

A few minutes later, he brought three steaming plates to our table. Visually, I was impressed. Squiggly sheets of mafaldine pasta housed uneven ridges and little crevices for the sauce to coat. Jagged brown bits confirmed the shrimp was seared not boiled. Hurray. Chilli flakes and torn shreds of parsley lay pillow-like on the resting noodles. The visual canvas stood on ten toes—creamy white pasta, brown breadcrumbs, flecks of orange from the shrimp, and glimmers of green from the fresh herbs.

I took my first bite and felt…nothing. But the nothingness was loud. It was so distinct it felt intentional. Like the way a filmmaker hides light from a scene to make a point. I wasn't sure what point this chef was trying to make though. I didn't let that stop me. First bites like first dates often mislead. Maybe I got an unseasoned square inch. I grabbed my fork determined to find the flavour I was promised. 

Sometimes, noodles are crushed by the dense weight of the sauce or the chef's anxiety, and you're left with a mushy disaster. But these noodles were textured, firm to touch, and sported beautiful irregular shapes. 

"Stop being so judgemental, Tobi", I told myself. Maybe this was an intended palette cleanser. My typical diet has a lot of salty, spicy food, so maybe this was nature's idea of a stop sign, begging me to slow down to appreciate the lighter flavours in life. But lightness doesn't mean absence.

I tossed my fork around like a detective in this twisted game of hide and seek. Maybe I'd find a pulse in an unexpected place. Was it the garlic? Was this some special earthy Italian variant that perfumed the sauce with wafts of the Mediterranean Sea? Maybe my search radar was mis-calibrated. I was too busy scanning for bolder flavors at high frequencies, and missed the subtle ones in front of my nose.

Wait a minute, was I mistaken? Judging a humble weeknight staple with the wrong lens. Was I doing that predictable human thing of placing heavy expectatations on something that never asked for such status? Maybe Seńor Scampi never wanted the big stage.

Alain, my foodie friend broke my internal monologue, "What do you think bro?"

"Eeeeeeh, it's not so bad" I babbled in a barely believable tone and we burst out laughing. He knew me too well to believe that nonsense. 

But my other friend, the New Yorker, loved the dish. What I found flat and uninspiring, she found simple and unpretentious. I was looking for a little life, a jolt, some bounce or bass to tickle my senses. But she enjoyed the story of a few household ingredients coming together to make a decent dish. 

In a culinary world of backflipping TikTok chefs trying too hard to be sexy, sandwiches too tall for human mouths, edible gold flakes, and overpowering truffle aiolis, maybe there's something romantic about the simple scampi. It doesn't pretend to be something it's not–no bells and whistles, yes, but it's honesty on a plate. It's a sheathed dagger to the heart of the gastronomy cult where meals are served with instructions that teach you how to eat them.

That being said, the dish lacked flavor. Even with reduced expectations, it flattered to deceive. I wanted the scampi to win, to scramble my senses and teach me that less is indeed more. But the pixels of that pretty canvas, the medley of creamy-white pasta, browned bits, floating specks of orange and green, the whole thing failed to deliver.

Turns out, we were catfished. We scurried to scampi in vain.