A spoon is the smallest and least trustworthy mirror at any dinner table, and in "Family Restaurant" Dave Bonta turns it into a whole drama in fifteen short lines. A girl looks into the bowl of her spoon and sees her face flipped upside-down. She cannot tell whether she looks "outlandishly skinny / or outlandishly fat." She doesn't decide. She closes her eyes and eats. Her mother, across the table, asks if it's delicious. Almost nothing happens, yet the poem shows how someone can feel completely alone in the middle of her own family.
The imagery starts with a shift of scale. The chowder in the spoon becomes a "small lake," and the girl peers into it like someone leaning over a pond. The fear is that her face "is still staring back," and "still" works twice. The face hasn't gone away, and it won't stop looking at her. Then comes the strangest comparison: she looks "upside-down, like / some girl in China." The poem doesn't explain this, but judging by the image, it seems to borrow the childhood notion that China lies on the far side of the world, where everyone hangs upside-down. Whatever its source, the effect is clear. The reflection is not quite her. It is a stranger, a foreign girl. The word "outlandishly" quietly keeps up the geography, since "outlandish" once meant "from another land." Her own body has become foreign territory.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no stanza break, so the poem gives the reader no pause, much as the meal gives her no escape. The lines are short, mostly two or three stresses, and the first sentence runs for nine of them, wandering and qualifying itself: "& depending on the angle, / either outlandishly skinny / or outlandishly fat." The repeated "outlandishly" sets up a trap with two extremes and no comfortable middle. The phrase "depending on the angle" is the poem's quiet insight. Self-image here is a matter of tilt and curvature, not of truth. The line "like" dangling at the end of a line also makes the reader hesitate, just as she does.
Then the rhythm snaps. "She shuts her eyes / & quickly shoves it in" is the shortest sentence in the poem, packed with hard, hurried sounds, the "sh" of "shuts" and "shoves" pushing the action forward. The ampersands, which appear twice in the poem, look like speed-writing and make the line feel rushed. The verb "shoves" is the most violent word in the poem. It reads as a small act of self-erasure, as if she is swallowing the troubling face along with the soup.
The mother's line, "Delicious, isn't it?", is the only speech in the poem, and it is perfectly ordinary. The tag question expects a cheerful yes. Her smile shows she has noticed nothing, and the poem never suggests she is unkind, only that she is somewhere else. Bonta stretches the distance with a line break: she smiles "from the other side of / their round, round table." That "other side" echoes the girl in China. Mother and daughter are only a few feet apart, but the poem places them at opposite ends of the world. The doubled "round" curves back on itself like the bowl of the spoon, so the table becomes a larger version of the distorting mirror. Everything in the scene is curved, closed and inescapable, and the poem ends on the circle. The title adds its own irony, since a "family restaurant" promises togetherness and delivers a setting for private anxiety.
The poem is significant because it never names its subject. It does not mention dieting, body image or any disorder, and it doesn't need to. A spoon, a bowl of chowder and a polite question are enough. The word "outlandishly" even lets in a flicker of dark humor, which keeps the scene from sliding into melodrama. What remains is the sense that a person can be looked at all day and still go unseen.