It started fine. Seated quickly, first round out fast. For about eleven minutes I believed in this place.
Then the live music started, and the room was annexed.
To be fair to the band -- they were good. But somebody had handed them 250 JBL speakers in unison and the moral authority of a foghorn. I've been to quieter frat parties. Kids were covering their ears and crying -- the only honest review anyone gave all night. A Honda Civic blasting trap in a Walmart lot would have leaned out and said bro, take it down.
My cocktail died fifteen minutes before the appetizers arrived. I asked for another. Ten minutes later I ordered it. Twenty minutes after that it came. The man who runs the bar must be an Amish bishop whose mission in life is to bring sobriety to the English. I both respect his discipline and resent him.
The apps were fine. Impressive, even, considering a head chef who is clearly a Samsung microwave, a bottle of vegetable oil, and a can opener. Hard to eat, though -- no plates. My party ate directly off the tray like dogs. A fitting psychological appetizer for the humiliation ritual about to begin.
Above it all, four TVs played WWE. Silent, of course -- nothing in that building could be heard. Odd for a high-end place. Hold that thought.
The music got louder. There's no reason for it to have gotten louder. It got louder.
The waitress reappeared and we screamed at each other for five minutes, faces six inches apart, both lip-reading. Food is clearly secondary here; the primary business is a CIA-funded study on human tolerance for millennial stomp-clap.
Most entrées were fine. But the seafood pasta. The house special. The reason I'm writing.
Imagine a cheap Walmart essential oil, but it isn't Moonlight Beach or Tea Tree. The label says FISH MUSK. What the sink tastes like after you wash a fish in it. Fold that into fifteen gallons of seed oil and noodles marinated overnight in lukewarm tap water in a Ziploc bag. Garnish with one six-hundredth of a crab leg, a can of scallops, two shrimp, and oysters.
Prophetic oysters. One bite and I saw it the way saints see things: hours on a toilet, praying to gods my ancestors abandoned generations ago for the mercy of death -- and beneath it, my own private concert, a bass line off the porcelain loud enough to set every dog in the neighborhood barking. Even at home, no escape from the volume. That prophecy is being fulfilled as I type. The only honest thing in the building.
The oil warrants EPA involvement. The smell is on my car. It's on my cat. It is on an unborn grandchild four generations down, moving through my bloodline like the ocean's revenge for PFAS.
They were out of four things. In hindsight, God's mercy.
And still, under a $43 pasta, the music. Not music by then. Weather. A pressure system with a drummer. I stopped hearing it and started receiving it, the way a house receives a hurricane. My party spoke to me. I watched their mouths move. There was no sound. Only fish musk and my brain shutting down the five senses permanently, so this could never happen again.
There's a specific loneliness in shouting IS YOURS OKAY? across a two-top three times and giving up. That's the house specialty. Not the pasta. The giving up.
And that's when I understood the televisions.
I looked up at a silent man in trunks throwing another silent man through a folding table, and it was beautiful. Shakespeare at the Globe. Mozart conducting Mozart. Against the violence of that room, professional wrestling was the only art present. I watched a chair shot in total silence and felt something close to prayer.
I got into my car and the band came with me. So did the fish musk. Neither has left. But like devil's club, there's a therapy in it -- so much sensory abuse that the body has nothing left to give, and what's left is a strange, unearned appreciation for being alive.
Two stars. One for the band.
One for the oysters. They showed me the future. They were right. read more