Tridents, treasure chests, and a ticking clock: Dining at The Lost Eyrie isn’t just a meal – it’s an adventure you might not survive.
The Lost Eyrie, Bonaventura Road, The Gulch, Guardian City
We’re at The Lost Eyrie. We eat, although not comfortably.
“Relaxed dining” does not feature on the marketing material of this new and cultish venue.
The owner painfully settles on his haunches beside our table and tells me the origins of the dish. Something to do with an ancient recipe? Some bone shavings perhaps? Did he say orc? I wasn’t really listening, in fact, I told the esteemed chef to shut up.
Shut up and let us eat, I said, my mouth full, my jaws relentless.
I’m normally not that rude. A little rude but not that rude. But, you see, I was on the clock. No time for chit-chat.
It’s the chef’s own fault.
The brains behind the Lost Eyrie
Professor Amulk Curry, former archeologist and adventurer but now chef (following the onset of arthritic knees) has made our dinner an adrenaline-soaked challenge, you see.
That’s the concept behind The Lost Eyrie, a three-story establishment in the Gulch where an abandoned cinnamon warehouse has been updated with a kitchen, table, knives, forks – all the usual attributes and accessories – as well as tridents, pikes, slides, caverns, treasure chests, and a particularly interventionist parrot that gives away spoilers if you feed it pecans.
We’re on our third course. We made it this far. The Warrior Grill – that we’re wolfing against the clock – derives from the prof’s explorations in, where was it, the Tondorto Valley perhaps? Again, I wasn’t listening but there is a booklet for diners to take away afterwards, if they survive.
- Book review – Gruesome Tales of Fatal Deaths – gruesome alright
- Food review – inside the spider cafe that’s making everyone squirm
We’re in a tomb, I guess. Vast sandstone bricks. There’s a cracked sarcophagus and some mystical guards who may or may not be animated or murderous. Sand trickles down pipes, building up on a pyramid on a weighing scale. Once the weight of sand hits a tipping point, the stone door will grind closed. That will be our evening over.
Why are we doing this?
We could flee now, of course, move to the next challenge upstairs, via the spiny vine trellis, but then we would miss out on the quite sumptuous flavours of the Warrior Grill. Which is the point. Sort of?
Good question. What is the point?
Professor Curry, now 72, says the point is to give people a taste of his life when he still had good knees. Grabbing meals, wrapped in fig leaves or bats’ wings. Eating fly-festooned spider’s webs for the protein and drinking from carnivorous streams, all the while on the hunt for the Bill. That’s something of a joke. The Bill is depicted as a golden duck-like bird atop a globe atop a stave. It’s the prize. Get the Bill and you eat free, which is the irony.
Professor Curry has written five bestsellers, three about his adventures and two cookbooks, so there’s every reason to suppose that his dining experience won’t go down a storm with people who get fidgety after the soup course and really have no small talk to offer.
The sands of time slip away
The sand really is relentless. My companion and I – a proper athlete – escaped the Dungeon Room – canapes and fiery cocktails – by figuring out the code to the portcullis by means of deciphering… actually, I’m not allowed to say.
Next up, in the Relic Room, we will feast on a kind of grub crouton soup and baggy cabbage sandwiches. The table, we’re told, is a map that will reveal how to cross the so-called Yawning Chasm safely. Neither we, nor our food, will be allowed to settle. Professor Curry is quite beside himself with glee.
He has presented himself as our unofficial companion although we might dump him in the Omelette Oubliette if he slows us down.
Seven courses – and a bill
There are seven courses – challenges – in all at The Lost Eyrie. A bar at the end which offers no material hazard apart from a particular piquant herb gin. Somewhere in the labyrinth five other parties are plugging away on the same route, some choosing a special vegetarian option which is twice as hard (says meat-lover Curry with a wry smile).
Me? I’m remembering the silky textures of a green herb sauce that dressed a rare alpaca kebab back in the Jewel House which, at one point, threatened to skewer us similarly with an array of twanging arrows only held in place by a curved reed and my desire to leave a clean plate.
The threat of imminent death really does heighten the appetite.