The Restaurant De La Sirène At Asnières

The Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières is crumbling; you can see it clearly when you stand up close, the bricks are split with age, the boards are warped with weather like the damaged spine of an old man. The building is a decaying, moldy monument to the men who look upon it.

- Greg Bogaerts

THE BRICK AND SHINGLE OF THE building, housing the restaurant, is silver. At a distance, the building looks like the balding head of an old man with scrubby patches of sparse hair fading to grey.So off-putting is the building that when male pedestrians come around the corner into the town square, they are often rendered immobile by that balding pate of grey brick and masonry.

You can see them if you sit at a table outside the front of the restaurant or if you sit at a table at the window inside; they stop and stare. And you can see the looks of incredulity ingrained into their faces as if the lines of worry and consternation had been carved there with a hammer and chisel by some sardonic sculptor.

Their hands go up to their heads, venture around the back where they pat the bald spots they know are there because most of them,each morning, mirrors in hand, stand in front of their big bathroom mirrors, screwed to the walls, and ponder their naked scalps. They look away from the mirror, most of them, and try to ignore the clearings of shocking pink flesh they see in the undergrowth of grey hair.