One Thing About These Dark Inns on the Blasted Heath, at Least They Don’t Hand You a Buzzer at the Front Desk
There are any number of reasons that these inns or pubs or taverns in out-of-the-way places – say, upon the blasted heath where werewolves are known to prowl, or deep within the dense woods providing cover to Dracula’s castle rearing just above the local abyss over there – but one worth leading with is that they don’t hand you one of those disks that light up and buzz when your table is ready.
Scour the entire cinematic portfolio across the decades of Frankenstein, werewolf, vampire, lurching-death-in-life-man-thing, mummy, doppelganger, golem, and ancient-unexplained-curse-murder movies and the many isolated inns and taverns that the characters dash into or duck out of, and you will not spot a single flashing and vibrating device handed from the front desk to the waiting diner.
“This will let you know when your table is ready.” Perhaps the filmmakers thought the words were too chilling for even their dark arts.
You can best picture these devices as the type of thing that the James Bond villain would hypnotize a sultry blonde in an evening dress into sneaking into the United Nations and slap up against the underside of a table in a huge conference room, where it would adhere and record the secret formulas and what not that go to make up the idle chatter of a fair number of the free world’s leaders.
They are a ridiculous thing to carry around under ordinary circumstances but are the height of hilarity to your companions when they go off when you least expect it, causing what is called in infants ‘the startle reflex’ with a vengeance and if the reaction of the casual onlookers around you are anything to go by, moving you smartly up the current rankings of prime world idiots in your weight class.
You would not believe it, but these vibrating flashing disk devices, which could double as electric shock pranks you’d order from the back pages of a 1968 comic book, are a step up from the other recent innovation in summoning you to your waiting table, which is to take your phone number and text you when the moment arises.
The sequence of messages in this matter goes something like this:
Dear valued customer: Your table is now ready!
Dear valued customer: Please return to the Welcome Desk, your table is ready!
Dear valued customer: Please return to the Welcome Desk to avoid losing your table to the next set of diners!
Dear valued customer: You have 30 seconds to return to the Welcome Desk, otherwise we cannot be responsible for the outcome.
Dear valued customer: For God’s sake man, are you daft? Get up here right now or this table is history. I’m counting backwards from three. Three….
Dear valued customer: Two…
Dear valued customer: I tell you, there is a sea of humanity waiting for this table you now seem to care nothing for.
Dear valued customer: Two and a half…
Dear valued customer: Three!
Dear valued customer: OK, I gave you every chance.
Dear valued customer: I’m sorry, you have lost your place in line, you are now #583. Thank you for waiting!
These messages slide by, all of them I mean, the entire batch from the first to the last, in the space of about 3.2 seconds.
For your part you have been trying to remember simply which end of your phone is right side up, and in your desperate poking at icons to somehow respond to the stream of messages, have first emptied and then criminally overdrawn your bank account. The FBI and the Treasury Department are now involved.
Well, this is my point exactly: this would never happen at one of these fog-shrouded isolated inns within moderate walking distance of Dr. Frankenstein’s castle.
It wouldn’t even occur to these fine people to put you to any inconvenience in this matter.
At these places they simply take your name, or better yet, just make room for you in a shadowy nook artfully lit with a flaming torch.
They’re just delighted to see you. They know how it whets the appetite to desperately seek sanctuary from whatever it is that is lurking, lurching, creeping, etc., out there, and view it as a good thing that you stumbled in here.
“We know you have many choices for your dining pleasure or perhaps your simple survival,” the sign on the wall might say, “we are proud that you have chosen The Butchered Calf, or The Dead Man’s Way, or Ozark Bob’s Bar-B-Cue,” whatever the name may be.
Despite the courteous sign, the owners know that when you burst through the door – you may be a village maiden panting with fear, you may be a vampire hunter who has yet to bag his limit for the season, you may be simple wayfarers who have stumbled into the wrong dark forest more or less fleeing for your lives from who knows what – regardless, under these circumstances, they know that to you this place looks like the finest place to eat in the world.
And the feeling is mutual! You are glad as get-out to be there! It is in any event better than being partitioned into bite-sized bits for the werewolf family just past the hill.
The actual quality of the menu items may vary and in fact, may simply be no good at all. No matter. When you have just escaped Death by Steady Chewing Upon By Some Monster or Other, you are in a space where you truly recognize that today is the first day of the rest of your life, and this meal is the first meal of that same rest of your life.
This tends to drive the taste buds in a very forgiving direction and up the appreciation quotient of our souls, a quotient otherwise most notable for its absence in these spoiled and downfallen times.
There are many fine restaurants along the byways and boulevards of London and Paris and New York and Berlin, but they cannot compare to this joint tucked away up a cobblestone alley in this village on the heath or at the foot of the Carpathian mountains.
There is just something about being stalked for the entire length of your evening walk and finding this spot of civilization seconds before The Leech Thing rips out your throat that whets the appetite like no other.
And the place looks great!
I mean, from the outside, the yellow light spills out onto the foggy streets, and through the thick glass windows you can see waiters bustling about carrying heaping platters of food to the tables, and by all accounts, every single dining surface in the place is either tucked into a little nook or cranny type area, or is a long rough-hewn table of the Viking variety where the food is presumably served family style, cozy is the word overall, yes, cozy is exactly the word.
And the gal behind the bar filling flagon after flagon brimful and then some, so that the suds spill over the rim and down the sides? She is the very picture of hearty hospitality.
She is a person, based on first impressions alone, that seems to advise you to drink deeply not only of the local offering, brewed by native craftsmen taking care that no hops were harmed in the process, but of life itself.
In the better advice books on fine dining, it is often recommended that the diner whet the appetite with a drink before dinner, or a small plate of appetizers.
This is weak tea compared to dashing along a country lane in the fogbound dark pursued by a man who has been put together from the spare parts of quite a few other men who didn’t necessarily sign the proper papers deeding over the parts.
This quickens the blood flow, accelerates the formation of red corpuscles, and stimulates the gastric juices so important to proper digestion.
You may call your appetite well and truly whetted by the time you stumble through the door of this establishment and are directed to your table, and you are of a mind to shout out, “Good God, give me one of everything upon your menu, good madam, for I have never felt more keenly the joys of enjoying good food than I do right now. And a round for the house while you’re about it!”
In this way not only are revenues in the dining category given a shot in the arm, but good fellowship is advanced in an entirely unexpected way.
Such activities improve the employment picture as well.
It is a touchy subject but the years have not been kind, my friend, to The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Hounds of Evil, The Mummy, these being the class of workers at or near retirement age, nor to the generation just under them, including notables such as The Slime People, Rodent Man, The Tentacle Ghoul, and The Headless Signalman of Track 35. These are the guys who are really out of luck and a number of them have seen no choice but to leave the monster industry entirely.
We could put a lot of fine people, or semi-people, or used-to-be-people back to work if we could only arrange things in the old manner, whereby they return to gainful employment lurking around lonely paths on the moor or the twisting alleys of the native village, driving diners inside.
As to the fine people inside, I can’t say a thing negative about them; if you had to make one small complaint, it would be their habit to gasp and drop crockery and come to a complete halt every time someone says ‘I heard a strange howling upon the heath,’ but they tend to recover nicely and get back to the flagon-filling or dish-heaping business in a brisk manner.
Menu design, décor, the outfitting of the wait staff, these are mere details. What the restaurant industry needs is more monsters and fewer flashing or buzzing disks.
