In early modern Britain and Ireland, the punishment for high treason was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. I'll spare you most of the gory details of this punishment, which was meant to deter future traitors with its brutality, apart from the section in which the offender's entrails are burned before his eyes.
Having eaten practically nothing all day, and after being turned away from Sanbada for an early closure, my date and I decided to try Mountain House, which she described as "authentic."
Several mistakes were made. Principally, because my date is from Hunan, her definition of authenticity is not the kind of "spicy" Szechuan food I've come to love at restaurants like Noah's Kitchen. Instead, it compares to a 1599 incident in which the Jivaro people of modern-day Ecuador executed a corrupt Spanish governor by pouring molten gold down his throat.
Starved, I ordered the La-Zi Chicken and shoveled two spoonfuls of it into my mouth, failing to note in the haze of hunger that the despite its name, the dish is at least 80% dried red chili peppers that have evidently been coated with military-grade pepper spray and subjected to a Satanic ritual to add to their flavor.
Survivors of gunshot injuries on the battlefield report that because of the flood of intense adrenaline and psychological focus inherent to combat, they often don't feel a bullet wound at all until after the firefight is over. Indeed, for a few blissful seconds, my body communicated nothing but "ahh, food, finally," before lapsing into psychosomatic reenactments of various medieval punishments throughout the ages.
As the intense stomach pains, sweating, and tears set in, I looked up to see the waiter, my torturer, standing beside the table. "You look like you're going through it," he grinned, rotating, I am sure, the handles of a rack just out of view. "This isn't even the spiciest thing on the menu, you know." The agony was hardly sufficient to smother my mental image of his same grin glimmering before the red light of dancing flames amid hot coals being shoveled down my throat.
Reader, I survived, but just barely. Luckily, the same date who betrayed me to this fate is also a doctor who set two full bottles of Pepto-Bismol next to the couch where she instructed me to lay on my left side in the fetal position. Currently, my toilet is on a leave of absence while it is being treated for PTSD on an in-patient basis; I try to send it sympathy cards, but I don't think it will ever forgive me.
Mountain House is not so much a restaurant as it is an experience of these historical events: it demands, like the best high school social studies teachers, that we do not shy away from history's horrors, but face them directly, so that in our humanity we choose definitively not to repeat them. I left these trials with a new appreciation for the suffering that people throughout history have been willing to subject one another to for political or social reasons, and thus recommend it with five stars for anyone who wishes to better understand the depths of human depravity. read more