A Restaurant Critic Reviews His Own Cooking

Visit #1

The breakfast menu was underwhelming, to say the least.

There was cereal. Not name brand cereal, or even the good off-brand stuff. The other options were something called "Open Yogurt Cup Loosely Covered By Ripped Tin Foil", half of a pickle that appeared to have been floating in the jar for at least three months, and scrambled eggs with toast. I went with the scrambled eggs and toast.

Huge mistake.

The eggs were a lumpy, dense cluster miserably squatting in a congealing pool of water. Water. Did the chef use skim milk instead of whole milk? Did he cook the eggs at the wrong temperature? Mistake water for seasoning (there certainly wasn't any salt)? Anything is possible! Somehow, this plate of watery eggs also contained several paper-thin wafers of egg crust from where the chef failed to butter the pan.

Terrible.

There were supposed to be two pieces of toast. I got one, because the other had "just a bit too much" mold. My slice of toast was a small end piece with more wrinkles than molecules of bread.

If you held a gun to my head and forced me to compliment this dive, I would point to the decor. Sure, the place was poorly lit and hadn't been dusted since, well ever, but there were some great photographs of me. They were unexpected, and added a certain charm that couldn't be denied.

Visit #2

I changed my mind about the photographs. They're not as charming as I thought.

First of all, there are a lot. Hundreds. I'm in every single one of them. They go all the way back to my childhood. Some appear to have been taken from a distance, through blinds or bushes. More than one appeared to have been taken from a satellite.

Where did they get these? I called out, but no one was there. Just me. Creepy.

Lunch was a two-course affair. First course toaster pastries (unheated), second course a gallon jug of water. It was quite possibly the most lonely meal I have ever eaten.

Visit #3

I found myself in a cramped tunnel-like corridor. The air was stale, the colors muted. A soft light suggested something laid in wait just beyond the curve ahead. Escape? Some entity? I rounded the curve and found nothing but another curve, the same soft light just out of sight. This went on forever.

At some point it dawned on me that the surface of this tunnel was made of hundreds of thousands of mirror shards, all reflecting my hunched form. In each and every one my face was blurred.

I cannot say how long I wandered. Hunger and thirst, my affable companions for so many years, abandoned me and left me utterly bare in this grey realm. I sat down and gave up a thousand times. Continued twice as many.

Eventually I found the bathroom. When I got back to my table (a coffee table in front of a lumpy sofa) my meal was waiting.

Dinner was a slice of processed ham rolled up in a tube with mustard and stale potato chips in the middle. It was fine.

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)