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Fine Dining in Hell

Michael Webster

16 Jul 2024 • 10 min read

Home, where I learned the truth about despair, as will you. - Bane

Broken Land. Mount Vernon, which I write some about below, made the national news the other day when some tornados touched down. You can’t really tell from this photo but one touched down very near this spot. If I zoomed out you’d see broken trees and there’s a lot of metal debris about. But none of that has anything to do with why I like this photo. Click on it to see a larger version and take a good long look like you would if you were in a gallery. You’ll thank me later.

I am pretty much an asocial hermit these days. My wife and kids are the only people I can stand to be around for extended periods. Most people who know me from childhood got that and moved on awhile back. So it was a surprise to us all when my oldest friend, M dropped by to wish me a happy birthday. I wasn’t home, but he hung around a bit and chatted with Lola and Jack. I was touched he remembered my birthday and stopped by to see me.

It was even more surprising the next day when another old friend, R showed up and invited me out for dinner for my birthday and to see the fireworks. Again, I was touched and Lola was somewhat dumbfounded, though it’s not that hard to remember my birthday as I was born on the Fourth of July. Lola bailed on the outing, but I took him up on the offer, figuring in addition to socializing with R and his girlfriend, I should get off my ass and shoot a small town fireworks display. I could get snaps of diabetics looking at the sky, the stumps from their amputated limbs dangling off the sides of their mobility scooters, that kind of thing. I really should be more interested in this small town life. Don’t know why I’m not.

I was also okay with it because the restaurant he wanted to take me to is interesting. It belongs to a couple who went to fancy culinary schools and were chefs in Nashville before moving to New Harmony. I’d written about them a few years ago. It was their dream to open their own fine dining establishmen and for some reason I don’t remember they settled on New Harmony. As is not unusual for creative people with dreams who set up shop in New Harmony, they seriously over-estimated how many possible customers there would be there, the business struggled, and ultimately failed.

So I was shocked to learn that they had opened up a new restaurant called the Zone in a strip mall outside of Mount Vernon. I’d driven by there and noticed it but thought it was just a sports bar. Apparently the place had been, or maybe still was at different times, a sports bar as there were four or five big screen tv’s on the walls. But during my special meal with R they were playing some kind of travel videos from scenic places that looked like the Mediterranean, Costa Rica or Belize.

They are serious chefs who use the freshest ingredients in novel takes on traditional dishes with a Southern lean. The portions are small and expensive, but if you have all the courses it’s an incredibly satisfying meal. New Harmony has its sophisticated elements and draws upscale, educated tourists who are generally interested in the arts and things like fine dining so that made at least some kind of sense.

But Mount Vernon is a toxic hellhole that is no doubt in the running for the title of “Asshole of the United States.” There’s a friggin oil refinery in the middle of town and several other major polluters who, along with the mass quantities of farm chemicals sprayed all over the countryside by the farmers, have made it into a cancer cluster. The McDonalds is the most popular restaurant in town by far. It has two lanes to the drive-through and lines stretch far out into the main street. Diabetes is much more the norm than the exception. Republicans win well over 70 percent of the vote for national offices. Trump signs and confederate flags are everywhere.

Oil refinery in the center of town, as seen from the public swimming pool. Note the ball fields in the foreground, there are quite a few more that are not in the picture. This is where the children play.

I don’t know if the environmental toxicity is a contributing factor (I think it is), but the town is socially toxic as well. People are generally petty, mean, poorly educated, and proud of it. I’m from Mount Vernon so if you’ve ever wondered what the fuck’s wrong with me, there ya go. With my deep and depressing knowledge of the place, I couldn’t see how a fine dining restaurant could possibly succeed, but I didn’t have any trouble whatsoever imaging many ways in which it would fail.

My old friend R is an eccentric individual who cared more about making money than all the rest of us combined growing up and has run quite a few successful businesses over the years. He’s become something of a do-gooder in his old age and one of his things seems to be adopting and trying to help restaurants he really likes. For some reason I don’t quite get, he’s adopted the chefs at the Zone. He helps them out by eating there all the time, throwing them as much business as he can, but also with advice on how to make it in Mount Vernon. The advice basically boils down to they should forget their unprofitable dreams, do away with all the aspects of fine dining and turn it into a local midwest diner like the one we all went to when we were kids. Perhaps that’s good advice for making money, and I know he is unable to imagine why anyone would have any other motive, but it’s clear that the chefs are true artists interested in creating great dishes, and only care about making money to the extent that they need some to keep the restaurant open. So I was curious how the meal would go. R clearly had a plan. How were the chefs taking this strange new reality?

We started with a Caesar salad with freshly grated Parmesan Reggiano. I had the crab cakes, which were excellent, and significantly better than the ones I’ve had in Maryland. They came on a cold bean salad with fresh herbs. R and his wife had the Chicken Cordon Bleu special. It turned out that R had talked them into that as it was his favorite from the restaurant we all went to during our childhood. It looked good though, not at all like the deep fried goop of yesteryear. Dessert was a Panna Cotta with a cherry/basil infusion. And I had a Manhattan, which was prepared the traditional way with a high-end Rye, cooled with an ice sphere and served straight up in a Martini glass. The vermouth could have been better, but I wasn’t in a complaining mood. R had brought in some special ground coffee he’d been given as a gift a few years back and the chef prepared it for him in a French press. That must have really hurt, even more than the Chicken Cordon Bleu. Unsurprisingly, it tasted like two year old coffee. R was ecstatic though. I was happy as well. It was a nice meal and a nice time, and the Mount Vernon-y aspects were more amusing than toxic.

Due to social obligations, I didn’t get to take any pics at the fireworks. This is a snapshot from the phone. Looks like fireworks, eh. I’ve been over fireworks for many years now.

Afterwards we went to the fireworks where R had reserved a table on the patio of a Mexican restaurant. We took a little walk before the show started and ran into my old friend M, the one who had stopped by the house the day before, and his wife. They ended up joining us on the patio of the Mexican restaurant. When the subject of the fine dining restaurant came up, M told the story about how he had gone there and made a big scene and stormed out when he found out how expensive things were. Then he and his wife told us stories about all the other people in Mount Vernon who hated the place because it was so expensive and the portions so small and how they’d told off the snobby chefs in one way or another and then stormed out. Apparently going out there and acting like an ass was something of a local pastime.

An odd structure I found deep in the swamp near the river behind a lake. Carcosa, perhaps? Unlikely. I’m sure the Yellow King has better places to be. It did occur to me that it was the type of place where someone might get attacked by a pack of wild dogs or eaten by a pack of wild pigs. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. This time.

Although Mount Vernon is a toxic hell hole in every sense of the words toxic, hell and hole, there is a lot of interesting countryside around it and my night at the restaurant spurred me to take my mobility scooter down there the next day to do some exploring. I found some interesting places like the ones pictured above and below and somehow managed not to get attacked by a pack of wild anythings or otherwise hurt myself too seriously. That’s always a plus.

Coutnry Kitsch. This is a common piece of country art. The old vine covered wagon under the overhang of an old barn. Old tractors and rusted farm implements are also popular.

Eventually all that exploring made me hungry and it occurred to me to stop by the restaurant in the hope the chefs make me a traditional French omelette.

I’ve been working on my French omelette skills for awhile now. I’ve watched the Julia Child video many times, have an expensive egg pan, use organic butter and fresh herbs from the garden. We’ve even grown our own chervil. But despite all that, I am confident I’m not getting it right and wanted to see what real chefs could do.

It got off to a bad start when I saw that Fox News was on the television in front of me. I steeled myself to ignore it and enjoy a good breakfast anyway.

Graffiti on a bridge over Big Creek outside of Mount Vernon. The PoCo in upper right hand corner stands for Posey County. There is racist graffiti spread throughout the countryside. County cops and road crews drive by it all the time and never do anything about it.

Unfortunately however, they were sticking to the menu that day and wouldn’t make me a French omelette. I more or less respected that. I say more or less because the reason they gave was that they’d done something off-menu before and other diners saw it and wanted the same thing and that screwed up the entire service. Of course it was basically just a plain omelette and how hard would it be to chop up whatever fresh herbs were around, there was only one couple on the other side of the restaurant so no one was even going to know, and I was willing to pay a premium, but fine.

So I needed a few minutes to think about the menu and during that time I couldn’t help glancing at the screen and seeing Fox News and that really started to bother me, so when he came back to take the order I asked if he could turn it off or put on a travel video like on the other tv’s. He said “No,” that his regular customers insisted Fox News be on at breakfast and that they got very obnoxious if it wasn’t. That I could understand and sympathize with, fucking Mount Vernon, amirite, but I was the only one there and I was not expecting that “No” and it took me aback. I got up and started to move to a different section of the restaurant, the one with no tv’s, but he told me that section was closed, so I sat as far away from the Fox News tv as I could with my back to it.

Moments later some bikers came in and sat down in the section he’d just told me not to sit in. I was seriously annoyed by that point and was about to tell him what I really thought and storm out, but then I thought about M’s stories of people doing that and didn’t want to be part of that crowd. So I just ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, which was just regular sausage and eggs, a nod to local tastes, something R probably talked them into including. He was clearly disappointed I didn’t order one of the fine entrees cooked with fresh ingredients and great care, but at that point I didn’t give much of a fuck and was pissed off I was wasting my money on something I could easily cook at home for one tenth the price. But I did get a Bloody Mary to mellow out a bit. It was a very good Bloody Mary, though definitely light on the Vodka by big city standards. Then I was outta there. Still running.

Oh, you think the darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man; by then, it was nothing to me but blinding!