USA. Los Angeles. The menu was 21 pages.

I opened it. I closed it. I bowed to it. Then I opened it again, because a man cannot bow to a thing and then refuse to read it.

The binder was the size of a regional newspaper. Three columns per page. Two hundred and fifty dishes, each with a photograph and a sentence of advertisement. The household had committed every preparation it knew to leather binding.

A waitress named Tiffany arrived.

“Can I get you something while you look?”

“How long do I have?”

“As long as you need, hon.”

Page two: eighteen salads. Pages three through eight: small plates, flatbreads, sliders. Pages nine and ten: twelve pizzas. Page eleven: twenty-five pastas. One pasta with Cajun shrimp and chicken in the same bowl, which is two campaigns conducted at one table.

Page twelve: three chickens named after Italian regions.

Tiffany returned.

“Ready, hon?”

“I am on page thirteen.”

She returned.

“Steaks,” I said.

She returned again, with the patience of a household that has been waiting for generals.

“Hon—”

“I have finished. I cannot choose. Two hundred and fifty stratagems studied in thirty minutes and I have no formation. I will accept the recommendation of the household.”

“What kind of mood.”

“Hungry and far from home.”

“Try the chicken Madeira. Marco’s been making it twelve years.”

“He came from where?”

“San Salvador.”

“One country,” I said. “Seven cuisines.”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“El Salvador is the warehouse of every dish that ever arrived in America.”

“I’m gonna tell Marco you said that.”

Bread arrived in a wicker basket without my asking: brown bread, sourdough, butter in a small dish. Two varieties, delivered together. The household had decided nothing for the guest. The guest received everything at once.

They had won the war of generosity before the first course.

At the next booth, a birthday. Six adults, two children. Eight waitstaff gathered in a half-circle. A bell rang. They sang in formation.

I stood.

Everyone in the booth looked at me.

I bowed to the child.

“You have survived another year. That is a campaign won. Long may you continue.”

“I’m seven.”

“Long may you reign for the next.”

The waitstaff sang around my blessing. Whether they were being respectful or had not noticed me, I cannot say. Both are equally fine.

The chicken Madeira arrived on a plate the size of a small shield. Mozzarella covered the top the way snow covers a hillside in November. Four asparagus stood in a row like young retainers waiting to be reviewed.

I ate half. The retainers would travel east with me.

“Dessert?” Tiffany said.

“The rotating case.”

“Thirty-four kinds.”

“I will have the original. A man returning from his first campaign does not begin with the rare.”

The cheesecake arrived. Dense. Graham crust. Strawberry sauce on the plate. I ate it in seven bites. A man does not box the final page.

I left a tip large enough that Tiffany, two days later, would still remember the man who called the menu a book.

In my country, a commander hands a man a book of stratagems before a campaign and the man memorizes it in one night. Here, the book stays at every table and the household waits with the patience of an old country.

I have read the book. I have learned one of two hundred and fifty.

I will return, on a different night, and read another.