Halloween 2
In an unintentional continuation of the Halloween theme, a friend and I went to a rather strange restaurant on Sunday evening.
It was called “the Lock Up” and had been name-dropped by said friend on a number of occasions. Half out of interest and half out of a desire to suppress the unyielding praise that spewed forth from this person’s mouth any time we talked about drinking, eating, or drinking and eating, I agreed to go.
The restaurant is one of those ‘theme’ places, this one having a dungeon theme. Normally any meals I eat in such places are served with a combination of shame and extreme lament, but this venue was to smash my cynicism with its vivacity and prove itself to be quite a fun place to wine and dine.
After the initial hurdle of not understanding a single word that the squeaky policewoman uniform-clad waitress said, we established that we wanted a table for two. A limp ceremony takes place whereby you are handcuffed and shown to your cell, slightly dissatisfied at how timid and shrill the waitress is, despite her outward appearance of dominance.
Inside, the illusion of a dungeon is quite competent, what with the minimal lighting, bars on windows and a variety of scary paraphernalia hanging from the walls. Sitting on the floor of your cell, the staff appear to be huge and menacing. That is, until they kneel down, bob their head and plead “shitsureishimasu” (excuse me) in a typical Japanese apologetic vernacular before they speak to you.
An English menu was available, but it proved to be quite unhelpful. In keeping with the ‘horror’ theme, all the food had amusing names, some of which didn’t even have a veneer of semblance to whatever the hell the dish actually was. Henceforth, we (read: I) accidentally ordered some tongue. It was prodded around the plate until we were told what it was, with a helpful gesture.
15 minutes into eating, all the lights suddenly went out. The cheeky knowing smile on my friends face told me that this wasn’t a spontaneous blackout, and that I could stop urinating down my leg. In fact, we were about to be treated to some half-hearted amateur theatrics. B-movie-reject monsters shuffled around the dungeon, grabbing any stray legs that happened to be in reach.
Paying the reasonable bill, we left the dungeon and were plunged into the blinding lights and bracing cold of Kumamoto city in autumn. The weekend was over. Only five more days until the next one.
