The Devil's Larder

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OUR STRANGEST restaurant, the Air & Light, survived five months before its joke wore thin.

We’re not immune in this small town to global trends. So when the food and healthcare magazines were full of stories from Japan about a prana sect that did not eat or drink but lived instead on ‘atmosphere’, two of our lesser artists, tired of paint and canvasses, installed the front part of an empty shop with tables, chairs and blinding lights. It was, they said, the world’s first prana restaurant. Their friends dressed up as customers and waiters. There was a pompous maître d’ and pretty tablecloths. Orders were taken. Empty glasses, dishes and plates were delivered to the tables. Passers-by could look through the shop’s front window to watch nobody eating anything. It was live art. It was, as well, the liveliest and smartest place in town.

It wasn’t long, of course, before outsiders — students mostly — came into the restaurant and filled the empty places, keen to play their part and not be fed. There was a queue of volunteers. What isn’t clear is how the perpetrators, instead of closing down after a day or two as they had intended, began to charge for admittance to the Air & Light, a modest table fee at first. But then something much more complex, listed on a bill, including details of the ‘atmosphere’ provided, quantities of prana consumed and a local tax of 12 per cent.

The charges made the Air & Light too expensive for the students, but still the tables were packed out each night by the better off, keen to be part of the installation and at the cutting edge of food and art. They tipped quite heavily. But, in a way, they were not cheated. The ambience was wonderful. The restaurateurs let buskers in to entertain the clientele. The waiters were attentive and amusing. The conversation was the most animated in town, and uninterrupted by eating and drinking. The ‘meals’ were meditative and purifying. And outside, on the street, there was always a deep and noisy audience, hustling for places near the window. If you needed to be noticed, then the Air & Light was the place to go.

Al Pacino, in town to film The Girder Man, was photographed being witty with an empty plate. The singer Tambar went there and sang an aria, leaning on the till. It was, according to the local radio, the coolest spot to take your girl. By the end of the first month — such is the vulgar power of modernism — determined customers had to book their tables a week in advance.

It was, of course, a splendid comedy — but there were some who claimed that the restaurant, by formalizing diet and restraint, was servicing a greater cause than simply a desire to be amused. The Air & Light combated publicly, they claimed, the countless tyrannies of food. It opened up new channels from the body to the mind. It celebrated emptiness in an otherwise oversated world.

It was a bad mistake, in retrospect, to start the takeaway. It brought the poorer students back and let the street crowd in. There was a lot of jostling between the tables. The waiters could not move around as easily. Conversations were interrupted by the general din. The restaurant soon lost its atmosphere. Such things are delicate. Besides, the lesser artists had grown rich and famous, and bored with labouring till the early hours of the morning without a drop to drink. They wanted to get back to their own work. They’d have no trouble selling their under-coloured paintings now. So they closed the Air & Light without a fuss, and all the smarter, richer people from the town were forced to take their hunger and their patronage elsewhere.