This Food Is Haunted

I have just come this evening from the Twilight Zone, from the Land That Time Forgot.  There is a time capsule of a restaurant – a shrine to the color mauve – within a mile of our house that remained, until tonight, undiscovered.

We dined this evening in a place beyond description – a chapel bathed in silk damask, with a thirty-foot ceiling and a four-piece band.  This is the dining room scene they edited out of “The Shining.”  This is the last vestige of the mediocre country club meals of which I never had the mostly qualified privilege to partake and never had the stomach to imagine.  This is where the 1960s Milwaukee mob goes to celebrate after a big heist.

I am at once horrified and delighted to report that such a place exists.  That it exists within a mile of my house prompts similar ambivalence.  This place sets out real silver and gilded plates for two seatings a night in a dining room of delectable irony of which the management is stubbornly unaware.

They stop short of doilies, but only just.

If you ever wondered what happened to Sole Meunière and Steak Diane, wonder no more, for these throw-backs survive in geriatric splendor at a restaurant called “Chantilly.”  If you’re willing to bump elbows with patrons 50 years your senior eating cuisine of a similar era, you too can stare agape at the six-foot flower arrangement – bristling with gladiolas – that dominates the room.  I didn’t fully grasp the meaning of the word “milquetoast” until tonight.  It is a triumphant and unsettling spectacle of mediocrity.

The entire experience is devoid of imagination – everything about it had been done, and done better.  The food is as musty as the 70-year-old four-tops around you, and, but for a three-generation-family celebrating the birthday of a 13-year-old the spitting image of the Beave, we would have been the youngest people in there by leagues.

The food is, frankly, abysmal, but if you, like I, celebrate the strange and unusual – relics that defy the odds – you will make it a point to see it for yourself.

Go there (but do not eat anything).  They have a full bar, which is the strategy I would recommend.  I am sure – with a certainty approaching fact – that the kitchen is whittling down overstock from the 80s, but these past few hours spent in a freakish David Lynch snow globe has inspired in me a gratitude and appreciation for our current reality that I would not have imagined possible.