With the rain pattering softly outside, Celine Dion oozing from concealed speakers, I sat down to an exquisite dinner at an Italian restaurant the other day. I’d driven past this place for 15 years but never built up the courage to simply walk up to the door. Perhaps the reason was that it never seemed to have a buzzing crowd.

Not surprising, then, that I was the only diner that day. This made the place eerie, like that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone is dining with Sollozzo and the dirty cop McCluskey in an equally empty restaurant, making the atmosphere quiver with imminent danger. The unbearable tension breaks when Corleone pumps two bullets apiece into the heads of his fellow diners...

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