The menu had little black-and-white ads across the bottom, little rectangles with old-fashioned borders and highly stylized logos for things like Nehi chocolate drink and Captain Henry's Canned Herring Roe and Cafe du Monde Dark Roast Coffee with Chicory and Indian Chief Balloon Tire bicycles and Edgeworth Pipe Tobacco and 666 Cold & Cough Medicine. The ads were sheer decoration, mementos of the old two-lane hardtop days in Louisiana bayou country. A sixth sense made Kramer flinch. This faux-Down Home shit was as expensive as the/awx-Bohemian Casual shit. He didn't even want to think what this was all going to come to, maybe fifty goddamned dollars. But there was no turning back now, was there? Shelly was sitting right across from him in the booth watching his every gesture and expression, and he had spent the past hour and a half projecting the image of a man who takes charge and is in control, and it was he, the manly bon vivant, who had suggested that they proceed forthwith to dessert and coffee. Besides, he felt an acute need for ice cream. His mouth and his gullet were on fire. The Cafe Alexandria didn't seem to have a single item on any course that wasn't a conflagration. The Creole Gumbo with Bayou Sand -- —he thought the word sand must be a metaphor for some gritty condiment, some ground-up root or something, but there was actual sand in the goddamned soup, apparently drenched in Tabasco. The Cornbread Cayenne—it was like bread with fire ants in it. The Catfish Fillet with Scorched Okra on a Bed of Yellow Rice with Apple Butter and Chinese Mustard Sauce—the Chinese mustard raised a red flag, but he had to order the catfish because it was the only semi-inexpensive entree on the menu, $10.50. And Andriutti had said it was an inexpensive little Creole restaurant on Beach Street, "really terrific." Beach Street was a crummy enough street to have a cheap restaurant, and so he had believed him.