St. Remedius Medical College: “Abandon Gorge Ye Who Enter Here”

Dallas Boasts Many Outstanding Restaurants. The Warnell Harkun Diner Was Not One Of Them.

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Aspect #1: Sometimes because of, and sometimes in spite of, the influence of St. Remedius Medical College, the greater Dallas, Texas area built a reputation in the 1990s for innovative cuisine and kept it going through the 21st Century Gregorian. The home of the frozen margarita and the home of the ultimate corporate food-like product, Dallas escaped its 1980s culinary bonds and exploded into an endless variety of imports, new adventures, and fusions, from its food trucks to only the best hole-in-the-wall places.

Aspect #2: While the general assumption is that humanity’s first encounter with the Harkun in 1987 Gregorian led to a decisive and unconditional surrender, the reality is that the Harkun only agreed to a cessation of open hostilities. Instead, the 2261 survivors of the initial conflict and their descendants decided to stay in their present time and place: the food was better, the weather was more amenable, and Dallasites’ long penchant for casual cruelty and entitlement made this an irresistable place to stay. As of the disappearance of St. Remedius, approximately 10,000 Harkun were registered in the latest city census, filling essential niches in the Dallas ecosystem such as corporate lawyers, HVAC repair dispatchers, Department of Motor Vehicles clerks, and weekly newspaper humor columnists. Not all, though: some of the psittacosaur descendants decided to expand their war against the upstart ape primitives by hitting them hardest where they lived. Namely, their stomachs.

Most Dallas dining guides are automatically biased against the restaurants that cannot afford advertising, and many restaurants worthy of higher attention and appreciation miss out on larger crowds because of inadequate promotion. Others are happy not to get too popular, and simply cannot make more room when a party of ten strolls inside. Still others reveled in their obscurity, knowing that while the masses would never know about them, they had a dedicated and appreciative clientele that covered expenses and a little besides.

And then there was the Warnell Harkun Diner.

Everything about Dallas’s most open secret screamed “Warning Danger Death Avoid,” which was its appeal. Those arriving at 2111 Abrams in the Lakewood neighborhood came first to a rutted and potholed parking lot, with the largest holes and divots filled in with broken bricks and liquor bottles. The Cafe itself was a set of three double-wide trailers stuck together with cables and duct tape, with the internal walls removed and the gaps in the floor between the trailers filled with old newspapers and used fiberglass insulation. The lighting was bare incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling off worn and sparking extension cords, and the tables and booths were ones obviously scavenged from the sides of rural highways. The entrance was an armor-plated door still reading “Flammable Liquids” under a crusted and fogged window, and the other windows were usually sheets of plastic stapled to the wall to keep the majority of flies inside. The dumpster for leftovers, trash, and the occasional fratboy interloper was next to the door, the sole concession to restroom facilities being a square hole cut with an angle grinder into the side of the dumpster, with a sign reading “Beware of Snapping Turtles” in six languages, three extinct, over the hole. (One night in 2001, the dumpster was supplied with a very large and very cantankerous alligator snapping turtle, mostly due to patrons challenging each other to “moon the beast.”) No wall separated the cooking, plating, and register areas from the rest of the space, and customers had to dodge the cook’s seemingly random flailings, with and without knives and spatulas, to pay their bills. At any given time, the inside of the Cafe smelled of kerosene, rotting mango, bug spray, and flatulence, and it was hard to tell which aroma came from the food or from the cook.

The menu continued the typical Harkun sensibilities. The Cafe bragged about its fine ingredients, particularly going through kilograms of premium European cigarette ash and specially imported Eniwetok Atoll sand for all of its dishes, particularly its coffee. Almost all of the menu entries were Harkun names, with handy English phonetic pronunciation beneath each name, and only repeat customers learned that every last entry was a particularly disgusting and violent Harkun insult. (One restaurant review at the time described it as “imagine walking into the worst Taco Bell on the planet and asking for a chinga tu madre, a pinche perro, and a dozen cabrones, and not knowing how badly the staff is going to cut you once they take your order.”) Of these, the dishes were all Harkun delicacies, perfectly suited for diners with a functioning gizzard full of quartz gravel: chopped sago palm, sauteed poison oak, crape myrtle blooms, raw acorns, and durian peels, and any customers not cleaning their plates were interrogated ruthlessly as to why. A few items were listed in English, to the orderer’s regret: as obligate vegetarians, the Harkun had no aptitude or respect for cooking meat, so the “Carnivore’s Delight” arrived at the table equal parts burnt and still-frozen, with additional cigarette ash “on the house.” Likewise, one of the few sacrosanct items in Harkun life was a respect for and care of eggs, no matter the species: the Harkun had no tradition for spitting before encountering humans, but anyone ordering “The House Omelette” got firsthand experience with the flavor and consistency of Harkun phlegm with the first bite. Most noted of all was the coffee: a reverse-engineering of Kopi luwak made with the help of local stray dogs and armadillos, it was hard to tell if the thick oil bubbling up to the top came from the coffee beans, the unwashed cup, or the equally unwashed spoon. Cleanup included scraping off leftovers with sand, half of which went on the individual tables and the other half into the house specialty, churruk, a vegetarian goulash made with ripe ginkgo fruit.

To go with the cuisine, one had to look at the staff. To begin, there was no Warnell, either owner or manager, and very deliberately so. By treaty, the cafe was official Harkun territory deeded by international treaty, subject to their laws and deliberations. Anyone demanding special treatment or free food because “I’m a close friend of Warnell” was immediately thrown, roundhouse while held by the ankles, through the front door, and Harkun laughter was a horrible thing to experience even when not aimed at the person hearing it. Sometimes the door opened as the person was thrown at it, and sometimes not, and sometimes incoming customers became prone and occasionally unconscious customers. The same went for anyone screaming for the manager or owner, only the thrower was as likely to aim for a window as a door. Best of all, since the entirety of the cafe’s property was official Harkun territory, anyone calling for the police discovered that at least two employees inside were duly appointed Harkun law enforcement officers, allowed to hear arguments, take statements, and render judgments, which usually involved a head-first return trip to the dumpster. On hot summer days, namedroppers and management carolers went immediately face-down into the dumpster and held there until they stopped resisting. The staff all wore nametags that shared the same phonetic pronunciation as the menu, with the same personal insults, only insults reflecting back on customers, and the cook on any given shift was always chosen based on blindness and determination to use up the week’s supply of cigarette ash. And those customers who didn’t immediately offend every non-human in the place found themselves challenged by the head waiter, “Big Polly,” who expected everyone in his establishment not just to share his encyclopedic knowledge of Uwe Boll movies but list their top fifteen favorites, including acting out their favorite scenes in each, or get their food delayed by another half-hour.

With all of this, one might be excused for assuming that the Cafe shut down after its first week, or at least when word got out about its unique attributes. This ignored the supreme Dallas attitude toward humiliation kinks, especially among residents of the surrounding Lakewood neighborhood. Every morning and every evening, the Cafe was packed solid, with lines running down the street of strapping young and young at heart psychopaths just waiting for the beatings they never got as children. Whether inhaling deeply at the front door, peering inside through the toilet hole on the dumpster to see who and what was inside, or Instagramming a party of four as their food was tossed on the floor and their waiter insisting that they needed to get on their knees and eat it there, the waiter openly scratching his cloaca while doing so…not only was the neighborhood getting exactly what it had been craving for the better part of a century, but for every local who finally tired of swatting wasps nesting right above the toilet, ten Atlas Obscura fanatics arrived for “the ultimate experience in customer service” and left memorizing the Harkun approximation for “Daddy.”

The biggest business the Cafe did, though, was with Dallas corporate interests. The Cafe did plenty of takeout business for offices wanting something besides the usual doughnuts and coffee cake, but the real draw was for managers to schedule “team-building breakfasts” at the Cafe, require employees to attend, and then sit back when the check arrived and tell the organ donors “Well, I hope you brought money to pay for your meal, because I only have money for me.” Michal Kasparek, the editor of the weekly newspaper Creative Onanism, famously invited new hires at the paper to join him and the staff, loaded them in his car so they couldn’t leave on their own, then sat them down with the menu while he and the staff gossiped about the size and shape of their latest genital warts. And then pass around clinic photos while the new hire was attempting to eat. “They look like pepperoni slices” became one of many inside jokes at the paper: brutal, demeaning, and potentially dangerous hazing may have been outlawed in their colleges, so they were determined to make up for missing out earlier in life.

(Many thanks to Jaymie Moore for the reminder.)

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