Ransom Riggs
Restaurants to Die For
by Ransom Riggs - June 27, 2008 - 5:05 AM

p.jpgThere are certain cross-cultural no-nos when it comes to designing, naming and theming a restaurant, the primary among them being, don’t associate your restaurant in people’s minds with things that taste bad, and things you should under no circumstances eat. Poison, for instance, makes a good band name but a terrible restaurant name. (See example at left.) A close second, in my book, is death, dying or dead people — I’ve always found it extremely weird when people put out little snacks and coffee at funeral parlors, for instance. I’m near dead people; I don’t want anything in my mouth. But just as with every seemingly hard-and-fast rule, there are people out there to break them; much to our amazement there are not one but several restaurants that trade on death as a theme.

Eternity

Nestled at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains — home, not inappropriately, to Dracula’s Castle — is Ukraine’s newest eatery, Eternity. The building itself is fashioned in the shape of a giant coffin, 20 meters by 6 meters, and decorated on the inside with wreath displays and, naturally, more coffins. Its dishes sport mysterious titles like “Nine Days,” “Forty Days” and “Let’s Meet in Heaven,” the third of which seems a foregone conclusion after you’ve ingested the first two. Apparently its owners are hoping to get into the Guinness Book as the world’s largest coffin. (I guess there’s no category for “grossest restaurant,” or they’d win that one hands-down.)3.jpg51.jpg

The “Lucky” Hotel

Amazingly, “Eternity” isn’t the world’s only death-themed restaurant. There’s another one in Ahmedabad, India, the key difference being that in this eatery, the coffins aren’t just there for display — there are dead people in ‘em. 22 Muslim tombs rest between the tables, which waiters hop over while making their way around the restaurant. So what’s on the menu? What else — Indian food.
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The Heart Attack Grill

burger.jpgTempe, Arizona’s Heart Attack Grill has a motto — “taste worth dying for.” With fanciful offerings like “flatliner fries” cooked in pure lard and the “quadruple bypass burger,” at least you know what you’re getting — and if you can finish the whole burger, which contains a whopping 8,000 calories, the waitresses — dressed like sexy nurses — reward you with a ride to your car … in a wheelchair. That “nurse” bit got the restaurant in trouble with the Arizona board of nurses — a controversy that this very non-pc establishment relished, to be sure. Here’s a silly news piece on the kerfluffle:

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Comments (13)

  1. The Heart Attack Grill is in Chandler, not Tempe. I live right down the street from it. I’ve always despised Tempe and now it has deprived my beautiful hometown of recognition on Mental Floss!

    posted by Lisa on 6-27-2008 at 7:28 am

  2. I have friends who would love to go to Eternity, mainly just to say they’ve eaten in a coffin-shaped restaurant. Now the other one, with the actual dead people inside is weird. It seems disrespectful in my opinion. but i guess if the families don’t mind it doesn’t really matter.

    posted by Claire on 6-27-2008 at 8:49 am

  3. Oh, those burgers look DEEElicious!

    posted by Brian on 6-27-2008 at 9:37 am

  4. I came across a wonderful beer hall in Brussels, Belgium, named (IIRC) ‘a la Morte de Subite’ – Sublime Death.

    And it was … what great beer!

    posted by Mark on 6-27-2008 at 10:27 am

  5. While an interesting article, I am most impressed by your use of the word “kerfuffle”. Perfect. I think I will see if I can weave that into conversation today.

    posted by kate on 6-27-2008 at 10:44 am

  6. I’ve been to the Heart Attack Grill, and it’s really only worth one visit for the novelty. The fries were bland, the burger was just ok, and they were both waaay overpriced for such mediocre food. The nurses are friggin’ hot though. The humorless PC police who tried to get the restaurants shut down just because they wore sexy nurse outfits need to get a life and learn to laugh.

    posted by Jessica on 6-27-2008 at 12:24 pm

  7. My favorite death themed establishment is Six Feet Under, in Atlanta, Ga (in historic Grant Park). You can get a cold beer, a dozen oysters and gaze across the street into beautiful Oakland Park Cemetery.

    The Vortex Bar and Grill, also in Atlanta (in Midtown and Little 5 Points) has a burger called the “Coronary Bypass Burger” (sirloin burger w. a fried egg, 3 slices of cheese, and 4 slices of bacon) and the “Double Bypass Burger” – which is the “Coronary Bypass” – but substituting two grilled cheese sandwiches for the buns. Yummy. Oh!And you walk through the mouth of a giant skull to enter the restaurant.

    posted by Danielle on 6-27-2008 at 1:03 pm

  8. @ kate:

    I second that! I’m going to try to use it, too.

    posted by tej on 6-27-2008 at 1:26 pm

  9. So long as the food is good, what difference does it make how the place looks? :-)
    I’ve never been to one but I did eat in the Vampire Room at a restaurant in Los Angeles called The Stinking Rose. Everything’s made with garlic and tastes great.

    posted by Sheldon Siegel on 6-27-2008 at 1:54 pm

  10. Dracula’s Castle, or Bran Castle, is in Romania, not Ukraine. Oh, and it’s worth noting that Dracula’s Castle was never a home for Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler. It was just where Bram Stoker’s book took place.

    posted by elih on 6-28-2008 at 12:33 am

  11. yes but the Carpathian Mountains, where the castle is, stretch over romania and the ukraine as well as a few other countries.

    posted by katherine on 6-29-2008 at 12:09 pm

  12. During my junior year in high school a group of guys in my English class went to the Heart Attack Grill. One of them finished a quadruple bypass – plus fries – and with all the hubub of being wheeled out and whatnot he hadn’t noticed that he never paid! I still don’t understand how teenage boys can eat so much…

    posted by amber on 7-2-2008 at 4:55 pm

  13. We had a place called Death By Chocolate a few years ago. It was insane (in a good way), everything was made of chocolate: chocolate butter on chocolate toast, etc.
    The business didn’t last long – don’t know why.

    posted by Carl on 7-2-2008 at 6:54 pm

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