Say When with Max Silvestri: The Rabbithole
A man about town writes about town
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When the Rabbithole opened around the corner from my house in Williamsburg, I was skeptical, but not for any good reason. The owners seemed to be taking great care with their renovations, and, beside that, a place with outdoor space that serves breakfast is more than welcome. Skepticism is just my default response.
I am more Scully than Mulder—if, say, a restaurant-going Mulder wanted to believe that antique fixtures make food taste better and Scully, ever the analyst, needed more proof. (Speaking of which, remember in last year's X-Files movie when Scully performed a really dangerous cancer surgery with just a little web research? Like, literally printed out a webpage she found on the Internet and referred to it while in the O.R.? Was I the only one who saw that? This isn’t a column for talking about last year's X-Files movie, but let’s imagine for a second it was: What a terrible movie.)
If you visit the website for the Rabbithole, you'll notice a couple of things. Hey, you might say to yourself, this website looks a lot like a screen from the computer game Myst! If the Rabbithole is like the game Myst, then the puzzle you have to solve must be: Why is the guy who works at the Rabbithole on weekday mornings always so brisk with me? Is ordering iced coffee not cool? I’m sorry I’m not getting it “to stay,” and that carrying dry-cleaning into your restaurant seems to offend you and your homemade sleeveless T-shirt. It’s just that I'm busy, and also that I buy really cheap shirts from H&M, which need to be dry-cleaned so they don’t look like I slept in a free-clinic bathroom.
If you are too young to know what Myst is because you were born playing Quake III on your crib's Tamagotchi, Myst is a crazy-frustrating adventure game that was also the best. It was the bestselling computer game of all time until The Sims came along, and that game is nonsense, too. It seems like any idiot can make a hit video game! Here, watch: I just invented a game about two Italian plumbers who jump around a lot, and also solve rape cases. I am going to call it the Super Victims Unit. Somebody write me a check for a million dollars.
The other thing you might notice on the website for the Rabbithole is the restaurant’s manifesto, which begins, “We opened the Rabbithole with the intention of offering a sense of integrity to everything we do.” I think that’s a Lewis Carroll quote? While I'm not calling the owners liars, I have a crazy feeling that their actual first intention was to sell Belgian beers and top-shelf liquors at a healthy markup to locals. Then, super-close behind that, was offering a sense of integrity to everything they do. It would have been a total photo finish between those two intentions.
I got a crystal clear sense of the aforementioned integrity on my first visit to the Rabbithole. My drinking partner knew an employee there, whom we’ll call Diego, and after serving us some french fries (which are great, owing in large part to the fact that they were french fries), Diego somehow quickly segued into a story about how one time he was allegedly hanging out with a coked-up Johnny Knoxville and a coked-up Vincent Gallo (this story was clearly already taking the bullet train straight to Integritytown). Gallo tried to hit on Diego’s girlfriend (model, obviously), so Diego shoved him. And then, another time, Diego kicked Michael Pitt in the throat while drinking nearby at Clem’s. And also something about a three-way.
As the Rabbithole offers a sense of integrity to everything they do, I can only assume these stories were out-of-control true. The truest! From God’s lips to our ears, or something. I hope Michael Pitt is okay.
(Editor's note: After this column first ran, Vincent Gallo called The A.V. Club to make it clear that "Diego" was either mistaken or lying, and that the incident mentioned here never happened. Gallo tells us he does not do drugs and does not know Johnny Knoxville. Just to be clear here, writer Max Silvestri was making that point: Diego was either mistaken or lying. The A.V. Club apologizes for any confusion. We enjoyed Buffalo '66, Vincent.)
