16 April 2012
AS A WISEMAN ONCE SAID: ‘I THINK, THEREFORE I WOULD NEVER VISIT THIS RESTAURANT EVER EVER EVER AGAIN EVEN IF I WAS PAID BY THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY KNOWN TO HUMANKIND SO MUCH MONEY THAT IF I CONVERTED IT INTO CREDIT CARDS AND BUILT A CASTLE OUT OF IT I WOULD NOT ONLY BE ABLE TO SEE THE CURVATURE OF THE EARTH, BUT WOULD BE ABLE TO LICK MARS WITH A BIG ENOUGH JUMP.’
(This is the title, not the article. Here is the article: my restauRANT)
I was stuck one lung-shatteringly cold winter’s evening as to what to do in case I was ever very very bored, and decided, in my naïve misjudgement of the kindness of both life and restaurants, that if I did ever reach such chilling limits of boredom, I would book a random food place and go there immediately. It just so happened that that night, I was involved in a family scrabble game with my twelve under-5 illiterate spoilt sadistic nephews and nieces, and took it upon myself to (very very very quickly) get the leaflet and get absolutely as far away from my home as was physically possible under the circumstances, picking Q’s and G’s and H’s out of my skin.
I chose the ‘hairy piano’ restaurant.
My first mistake was to not book a table. No. I lie. My first mistake was to allow this restaurant to ever slither into existence. I should have marched up to the slimy gates as soon as the blasted thing opened (though I was only six). Still. A neurotically livid six year old is better than no six year old at all. I could have stabbed them in the leg with a pair of safety scissors.
Anywhoo. I trudged down the single most tasteless and virtually non-existent conglomeration/horde of chairs, tables, waitresses, waiters, ‘food’, and the ‘food’ that had recovered from the illegal doses of Rohypnol and medical Anaesthetic, and convulsed off the edge of the table; that called itself a restaurant.
I entered, and sat down. I stood up, wiped the faeces off the chair and sat down on a different chair. The room smelt as if the entire contents of an oversmokers anonymous club had been poured into the very deepest cesspit of Stinky McStinky farms and then mixed it with the contents of with a small volcano to produce an aroma pungent enough to drown a monkey.The other people’s food looked as it had been laid by something out of a genre defining Ridley Scott movie, so I looked at the menu, wiped it, and hailed the waitress so I could order the thing least likely to move while I wasn’t watching: a steak and chips.
I hailed the waitress, or it may have been waiter. To this day I still haven’t cracked that one, but to be honest if I asked him/her I don’t think they would have known. They took my order with surprising efficiency, the only drawback being that it was written in the young mr/mrs bending-the-boundaries-of-gender’s blood, and that by the disproportionate size of his/her pupils; the donation, if consumed, could probably kill a healthy bull-rhino.
While I waited I was delighted to be given a complimentary biscuit, free with the knives and forks, which I later discovered to be a beermat. While feasting on this delicious, chewy, cork-based snack, I was able to glance at my surroundings. The walls were the colour of coffee stains, as if the early sixties designer had decided to cut open a particularly rabid dog, and use the various colours that flopped out as a kind of chart to work from, while asking the poor creature for advice on how to furnish the floors.A very slightly worrying amount of people were avoiding at all costs to sit anywhere near the ominously red casket in the corner labelled simply ‘trespassers’, but overall I found the decoration wonderfully distracting, having plenty of time to read the scrawlings of ‘get help’, and ‘don’t let them smell your fear’, but I soon gave up on reading the long winded ones starting with ‘by the time you read this, something terrible will have happened to me…’.
The steak arrived just in time for me to shave off my comedy grey beard and stop my obsessive-compulsive disorder chanting of the countdown themetune to the minute hand on my watch, from ten past nine to half past twelve.
As usual in restaurants, I tucked in. then I tucked out. The meat, if indeed it was meat, and not some kind of gelatinous substance excreted by silicon-based monsters from the planet zork, was about as pleasant to eat as hearing the NSDAP talk about paint drying until my eyes bled, whilst being loudly dismembered by something from the blackest pits of despair that my1984/nightmare on elm streetinduced visions could conjure. Well. I may have exaggerated. It was the single most tiring meal I have ever endured. The steak probably took more calories to eat than the poor, cattle prodded, dishevelled, barbecue-fodder cow had ever been able to use in it’s cramped, claustrophobic little battery-farm operated life. The relentlessly chewy meat (most probably scraped from the bottom of a tin of soilent green with a damp spoon), was not the only problem that was immediately visible. The ‘chips’ soon started converging among themselves to rid their kind of the horrid predicament they were in, and escape to their rightful kingdom: the sea. Or possibly the moon. Who knows?
I was starting to notice the other customers in their own little worlds, as they gulped down their various flavours of gloop, including rice-gloop, pig gloop, mama gloop, papa gloop, and baby gloop. I think the overfed French Shetland pony in the kitchen who was thinking up all these new gloop ideas was getting a bit tired of the complaints of it being ‘too gloopy’, as knives started flying out of the doorways and cries of ‘yes chef’ started slowly turning into cries of ‘please no, chef. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it again. Please put the ladle down’
The pudding may have been there. I’m not entirely sure. It could have been an intentional splodge of brown. Or it could have been an awful accident with some laxative and a stencil. I think it tasted like chocolate. I’m not sure about the taste either, really. I must have blanked it out.
leaving both my wallet and my dignity on the table, I paid the extraordinarily extortionate price for whatever slurry-pit waste I had been fed during the past seven hours, and left as quickly as my radium-filled stomach would allow, not before sneaking a glimpse of the incredibly hairy mad chef throwing a suspiciously brown stencil into the overflowing waste-building.
Overall, apart from the service, the food, the décor, the general atmosphere, the price, the smell, the general ominous sense of foreboding that dawns on you as you enter, and the strange man that sits in the corner looking at you and licking his lips, I would say it was a wonderful restaurant, and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who has read this article and feels undeterred about going there. The gene pool doesn’t need them.
RestauRANT • Opuss № I