At noontime during the work week, customer turnover is swift, and sharing tables with strangers is expected.
The listeners, many of them sharing tables and nursing drinks, laughed at the punch lines that punctuated tales of death and sorrow, suffering and despair.
Rather than sharing tables, copying each other's answers, they sit at their own old-fashioned wooden school desks (with a cupboard at the front a flap over it to put all the books).
Here gather hung-over artists and college kids under ceiling fans in the heat, Vietnamese laborers and truck-driving Cajuns sharing tables and hot sauce, everyone slurping bowls of rich broth with beef tendon, with pork, with piles of vegetables.
It's not uncommon to see Oxford graduate students, American classical guitarists and local social workers with Che Guevara beards sharing tables and nibbling on skewered beef with Indonesian-style peanut sauce (9,900 pesos, or about $4.70 at 2,100 pesos to the dollar).
The restaurant has struggled, since it involves sharing tables with other customers, anathema to people all too accustomed to fighting over scarce resources.
