Eureka! I have found the weirdest restaurant in my immediate vicinity. It's a place called Pizza 'N' Pipes, and it is a cavernous pizza parlour with, yes, a pipe organ. I think there used to be lots of them, probably back in the 70's when it was still possible to think people would pay good money to eat pizza while someone bashed out jaunty tunes on a pipe organ in the same room.
The 70's experienced a sort of a wacky pizza restaurant boom, did you know that? The first Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre was opened in 1977 in San Jose, California by Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari Electronic Games and the inventor of Pong, the first home video game. Not content with sucking up the pocket money of every teenager in the land, Bushnell decided to cash in on the youth market by creating a pizza place featuring animatronic animals, tons of pinball and video games, utterly bland pizza that children loved and adults loathed, and, get this, a mascot who was a tough-talking rat from New Jersey. He made a bundle on it before some of the shareholders noticed it was essentially a pyramid scheme. I know a lot about it because I worked on the class action lawsuit brought against Bushnell and Pizza Time in San Francisco in the early 80's.
Anyway, wacky pizza places hold a special place in my heart although I shy away from them if I actually want good pizza. Up until today, I hadn't felt much like eating pizza on my lunch hour; it's heavy, and sits in my stomach all afternoon, and I get sleepy from the carbohydrate and protein mix. But it was a grey, drizzly day and I felt like substantial food so I wandered around and found this funky old restaurant near the railroad tracks. Huh, I thought. Anyplace called Pizza 'N' Pipes just has to be worth a look-see. And I was right, oh so right. It's suitably demented in there. They have the pipes (thankfully no one plays them at lunch). They have pizza, of course, which was acceptably tasty under the circumstances. And the entire room, which looks to be a former warehouse, was decorated entirely in Early Swedish Troll Figurines.
Yes, Sweden. You know, that country so reknowned for its pizza recipes that it rivals Bulgaria for the title of Pizza Capitol of Europe. It was weird as hell, I'm telling you. Dozens of capering, jolly gnomes with funny hats and clogs and twinkling eyes were painted on the walls. They looked like the forerunners of the Smurfs, only far kitschier. It wasn't like they were left over from an earlier restaurant theme, either. They had names like Pesto Pjoter and Anchovy Annike. The colors were blue and gold with lots of that distinctive Swedish folk art embroidery painted onto their little clothes. It was sort of menacing after a while. I ate and got out while the getting was good.
I think tomorrow I'll have salad.
