Pasta Parlour

The Pasta Parlour is a restaurant located just around the corner from the MELODIA record shop in the city center, and it serves as the setting for a pivotal episode in Alex's life of crime before his eventual arrest and imprisonment. It is here that Alex, having just purchased the Beethoven Ninth Symphony record, encounters two ten-year-old girls, Marty and Sonietta, who are buying pop records. Alex, adopting a predatory and manipulative persona he calls "uncle," invites them to eat with him, and they agree, claiming to be hungry. At the Pasta Parlour, Alex lets the girls fill their "innocent young litsos" on spaghetti, sausages, cream-puffs, banana-splits, and hot chocolate sauce, while he himself lunches frugally on a cold ham slice and a dollop of chili. This act of feeding them is a calculated prelude to his later assault, demonstrating his method of grooming and his complete lack of moral restraint. The Pasta Parlour thus represents a space of apparent normalcy and youthful indulgence that Alex corrupts for his own violent and sexual purposes, highlighting the predatory nature of his character and the vulnerability of his victims in the seemingly safe, everyday world of the city.