According to one of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyers, just after the alleged incident with a hotel maid the Frenchman had lunch with his daughter in Manhattan. Now the Times has the details. It seems that DSK and his daughter ate at McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurant on West 52nd Street — a chain restaurant. How uncivilized.

As the paper notes, eating at a place like McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurant "was perhaps incongruous for a man renting a town house listed for $50,000 a month." In other words, McCormick & Schmick's is a slightly nicer version of Long John Silver's, and here's the man who has much of the developing world in an economic stranglehold eating frozen fish and drinking cheap wine. It doesn't add up! The defense claims his uncivilized daughter made the reservation. But this awful lunch could also determine DSK's fate. Was he laughing and joking around during this "leisurely meal" or did he seem distracted and nervous, like a man who had just sexually assaulted a woman? Here's what we know:

  • DSK and his daughter "shared a chilled bottle of white wine" and ate fish
  • They sat in a booth with "dark green leather seat cushions and plush chenille backs"
  • DSK's stated reason for being in New York was to meet his daughter's new boyfriend, who "briefly" stopped by the restaurant
  • DSK picked up the tab with a credit card
  • When he realized his IMF phone was missing DSK called his daughter, who was then seen crawling around on the floor of McCormick & Schmick's

Well, we have a few questions. Was the credit card an IMF credit card? If so, does that mean Dominique Strauss-Kahn was having leisurely lunches on Angola's dime? (Probably, yes). And who is this boyfriend and why didn't he eat lunch with them? Was he afraid of DSK? And then there's an even bigger issue: Air France says that the security video from that day, which would show DSK hanging around in the lounge waiting for the hotel to deliver his phone, was taped over. Hmm.

So many unanswered questions.

[Image via The Ardvaark/Flickr]