So I finally decided it
So I finally decided it was time to go to The Restaurant. I had heard people rave about it - both friends in the know and media-whore gossip-types. On arriving, I found the interior a little brutal but impeccably executed (whitewashed limestone cave walls dripping centuries of rounded blobiness, fresh coats applied nightly so that no stain could blot out its immaculate perfection, the sparse fixtures and fittings contrasting in black and red).
At the entrance the maitre’d, a broad squat man of around five-foot six enveloped in a dark grey crombie, lifted me by the scruff of my neck. My limbs hung zen-loose as he propelled me high into the air where I felt a snapping at my jacket collar. I was trundling forwards, tranquil flying along the length of The Restaurant. A crocodile-clip secured the back of my clothing to a conveyor-mechanism, halfway between a ski-lift and a device for transferring orders from the waiting staff to the kitchens.
I glided gently above the long, narrow restaurant, gazing down upon table after table. There were no diners seated, but with each table a new ingredient was added so that after passing over several I could make myself a complete meal (if only I could reach the ingredients, had some means of cooking them, and knew the procedure for doing so). Meanwhile, a staff of dwarf waiters busied themselves bringing food to and from the kitchen and arranging slices of raw vegetable and splashes of spice.
I gently curved around the outside of the waiters’ station, positioned halfway along the restaurant, and on the far side I saw the only table with occupants. A man and a woman dressed and polished to shiny perfection, from their patent leather shoes to their slicked 1920s hairdos they looked like a pair of newly gloss-painted wooden peg-dolls. Suddenly my winch plunged me downwards towards their table. The table’s surface parted and I found myself descending into a hot dark fiery pit, deeper and deeper until I reached the kitchen with a twang. I was held in mid-air just for long enough to glance at the surlier-than-the-waiters dwarves crouching over hot cauldrons, and then I was gently raised back up through the floor and into the restaurant. The table returned to its original position and the wooden couple continued their wooden eating.
And that’s how I decided what to cook for dinner for Ed and Anaïs.