• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1313 0

up at The Castle, where we joined many large families of fun-loving suburbanites (including Cub Scout troop 266) climbing out of their station wagons. The Castle is covered in beige simulated-stone-textured siding. Once inside, we were handed paper crowns (nearly everybody wore one for the next few hours) and were then continually battered by attempts to lighten our wallets before the dinner and jousting began. These included three extensive gift counters, two long cash bars, an extracharge dungeon displaying a dozen gruesome medieval tools of torture I had never even read about ($1.50), computers that investigate and print out your personal heraldic devices ($19.99 and up), the opportunity ($7) to have your picture taken with the Count or Countess (she’s a native of Lyndhurst and has been the Countess for six months), and the rare chance to participate in a single ($10) or double ($20) knighting ceremony, complete with clumsily calligraphed scrolls.

After an hour and a half of this, in large and gloomy rooms that reminded me of American Legion halls, we were finally herded into the Grand Hall of Dinner & Tournament. In the center was an oval arena 50 by 100 feet in size and paved with sand; surrounding the arena were five stepped tiers of tables, at which hundreds of us sat and ate and watched the show. Hanging from the ceiling among the air-conditioning ducts, loudspeakers, and electrical conduits were bright red and yellow squares of cloth meant to set a medieval tone. The only medieval thing about the food was the total absence of utensils with which to handle the vegetable soup, bagel pizza, whole roast chicken, ribs, and cherry pastry. The horse show (mainly Iberian dressage) and the extremely violent jousting and combat (with lances, swords, whips, and maces) lasted two excruciating hours but were not without interest, though everything was choreographed like professional wrestling conducted in Ivanhoe costumes. The horses were amazingly fast. The people around me had a much more positive attitude than I—one woman cheered and stamped so deafeningly that I considered asking the management to calm her down, until I looked over and saw that it was my wife. Near the blessed end, our serving wench reminded us that gratuities were not included in the prepaid charges ($35.95) and then went from person to person shaking hands. Several large and festive frozen theme drinks in novelty glassware would have relieved some of my pain, but there was nothing to drink besides tiny glasses of feeble sangria.

Which brings me to my own theory about why the major theme places along Fifty-seventh Street and across the nation thrive. I remember my very first theme-restaurant experience, a million years ago when I was twelve, at the Trader Vic’s in the palmy Beverly Hilton Hotel. Trader Vic’s was the ultimate goal, at least for my sister and me, of our family’s automobile trip from New York City to California and back, in our turquoise-and-white Oldsmobile 98. And what an exotic theme it was. Polynesia! How many people, except the natives themselves, had ever visited the real island of Samoa or the actual country of Tahiti? So Trader Vic’s could take liberties with its grass and bamboo huts, its Pu Pu platters laden with deep-fried delights and fueled by reeking purple Sterno, and its widemouthed frozen drinks. The mai tai was the most justly celebrated—decorated with mint and lime and orange paper umbrellas. The Trader created it himself in 1944.

It is in these distant memories of Santa Monica Boulevard where it crosses Wilshire that I have discovered the fundamental reason why somebody would be attracted to the national theme restaurants. The secret lies in their long lists of frozen specialty theme drinks. Sipping from these frosty beverages surely made for my happiest moments at the dinners I endured along Fifty-seventh Street. Fresh fruit and rum, novelty glassware, straws a foot long—where else can such pleasure be found? If the real restaurants of New York City—the ancient pizzerias and hand-sliced-pastrami places, and the palaces