A detailed account of what really happened, as truthfully told by The Hunched Cornish, and why Shangri-La is now only a Lost Horizon
The Hunched Cornish wasn’t supposed to make his food-writing debut until later – being actually nefariously spellbound by a witch in another joint for well over a year – but reading the Shangri-La account available on the Kyiv Unedited website made me anxious to disembody my double and set the story straight, as it’s only part right.
As I was saying, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t. And that’s to say, The Hunched Cornish writes gourmand copy for The Checkout, being somehow compelled to do it without really understanding why. Which leads him to a sore point, wondering what some Jack Step is doing taking center stage at Kyiv Commix. The Hunched Cornish therefore invites Jack Step to a meeting at which the difference The Hunched Cornish feels is prejudicing him can be addressed – and settled – that is, if this certain Jack Step has no excuses for not attending.
Now on to business.
So it happened like this.
I was reading books when this guy I know called me because he wanted to talk about a website behind a meal. I was there before he was able to hang up the phone, coming out of the Poshtova Ploshcha metro – not a tad AFTER the appointed time of 4:30 p.m., as recorded in the first Shangri-La review by the guy, but actually a few minutes BEFORE 4:30 p.m. Not that this information will blast a hole in the ceiling of commodity prices in China.
The first thing The Hunched Cornish did when he got street level was point silently across the street to indicate to the guy, John Smith, that there is yet another Poshtova Ploshcha exit coming out the metro. Not that that information has anything to do with the price of tea in China. But John Smith was astounded – the effect I was looking for as a judgment of his character.
Yeah, so this John Smith likes to dress like a longshoreman, fantasizing the fistfights he’ll have at four in the morning scouring the Dnipro riverfront for crime-leaning deviants slinking in the tunnels, anomalous misanthropes crouching in glass-sprayed underpasses, crawling through sewerage, lip-thrusting drunks scraping the walls, misguided and delusional transients suddenly feeling brave and upping the ante only to get their faces pounded into the pavement, before calling it a day and crashing into a ramshackle joint tucked in a corner of nowhere, just opening up before the rest of Podil rubs its eyes open and yawns, for whisky and a club turkey sandwich, a thick side of the house cheese.
This The Hunched Cornish likes about him.
Yeah, so we go into this place, Shangri-La.
Inside, we walk past a fat Uzbek in a shiny business suit and go up the stairs to the second floor and then down a long corridor of Mid-Eastern seating, until we finally get to an elevated private booth carved out of the wall – a pillow-piled divan surrounding a table; pleasant adjustable lighting controlled by the wait staff. Nice atmosphere. No loudmouthed types, whom The Hunched Cornish takes care of in his own special way – if they appear. Most times what happens, as soon they get a load of The Hunched Cornish, they instinctively grow subdued.
The waitress was really nice and friendly and liltingly told us it was only her second day at work, not her first day, as John Smith wrote in his review. You know, these things don’t have an effect on the price of rice in China, but it’s the principle of accuracy The Hunched Cornish is usually after, though he is unable to base his sometimes obsessive drives on any sound argument of why that has to be.
So we’re there, eating. And of course, having left the place disgruntled, angered, raging, and just a little out of sorts, to say the least, neither John Smith nor The Hunched Cornish had the self-possession to take a copy of the 670-hryvnia bill with us so we could describe the food and prices in more detail.
John Smith had a dish of grilled bovine shashlik, which he said was good, and The Hunched Cornish had a rack of lamb, beautifully soft and succulent pieces of meat that vacuumed right off the vertebrae.
And we both had good salads – John Smith’s was a micro-diced Eastern vegetable mix; The Hunched Cornish’s, some kind of seafood-based commixture, quite possibly salmon.
But then the two pieces of dry unleavened lavash, or pita, bread that John Smith asked for to go with his meal, which wasn’t on the menu – instead of the unleavened loaf, which was on the menu at 64 hryvnias (not 60 hryvnias, as John Smith’s review had it), but was unavailable at that time –WAS CHARGED TO THE BILL AT THE SAME PRICE AS THE UNAVAILABLE MENU ITEM, instead of being thrown in as a small courtesy, for free.
For The Hunched Cornish to recap – that’s 64 hryvnias (or 8 USD!!!) for two pieces of flat, dry pita bread, not on the menu, or one-tenth of the entire bill!
John Smith and The Hunched Cornish won’t go into the verbal altercation ending that particular and ultimately unfortunate (for the restaurant) episode, but we left Shangri-La, admittedly harassed, nerve-racked, and frazzled, mistakenly shoving 570 instead of 670 hryvnias, into the little pay fold (although subconsciously, it was a highly appropriate reaction), got our coats, and left.
But then, our little waitress comes running out into the street and tells us we didn’t pay 100 hryvnias, and we said, okay, sorry, no problem, and gave it to her, and everything would have been fine, if the fat Uzbek in the business suit didn’t come wobbling out just to make sure everything was fine, making us feel like shysters, goons, hoods, petty criminals, and scum.
Needless to say, The Hunched Cornish wasn’t having it.
Leaving a somewhat rattled John Smith in appreciative amazement, The Hunched Cornish grabbed the fat Uzbek by the collar, dragged him on his knees back inside the joint and crashed him headfirst a couple of times through the palisades of tables and chairs on the ground floor. Dropping his sorry ass, The Hunched Cornish still wasn’t happy, so he set the place on fire.
In Kyiv, no one does anything, so Shangri-La in Podil burned to the ground.
Now, if you want to find it, it’s not there – kind of like in the book.
The Hunched Cornish, February 6, 2013