“I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.”
28 February 2025 ~ Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
There is a gastro-bar on Mira Avenue Kaliningrad which lies at subterranean level. At the bottom of the steps that lead down to its entrance is a sign. The sign says enigmatically: “Fall into the Hole, Get Lost in Time”. The name of this gastro-bar is unlike any I have ever encountered. How many Rabbit Holes have you frequented? Through the windows of the front door, I can see the bar itself, the thing with beer taps on it. Without a second ado, like a ferret down a rabbit hole, and what could be more appropriate, I cross the portal to the other side.
Like Alice who passed before me (Who the !*!* is Alice?), who, it has been suggested, had an addiction of her own, I find myself in Wonderland. But first a passing word, or more, on what we mean by ‘cozy’.
Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
When people use the term ‘cozy’ they usually employ it in a complementary or even compensatory way, intimating that whilst the place they are describing may be small, it is warm, comfortable and inviting.
Before becoming a city slicker, I lived my life among country folk, whose view of the average rabbit hole was anything but romantic, and I tended to concur with them. But this strictly urbanised concept persuaded me to revise my opinion.
From the moment I entered its rarified world, I felt the urge to compare it to the British pub of yore, with its typical two-room segregation: one for the serious drinker, traditionally known as the public bar, and the other for more discerning types, which went by the name of the lounge. But the two-room similarity ends at this point of the parallel, since whilst one side of the gastro-bar has a discrete and inglenook feel and the other, being slightly larger, though not tremendously so, an aspirant sense of restaurant, neither one nor the other can be said to be less cozy.
It is the larger room of the two, however, where Wonderland is best perfected. Not exactly the gossamer Wonderland as conceived in the maze-like labyrinth of Lewis Carroll’s inventively playful, playfully odd, often obtuse and fantasy-making mind, but rather the rich star-spangled extravaganza bristling with special-effects, which, we are told at the time of writing, is the highest grossing film of director Tim Burton’s career. The framed anthropomorphist images displayed on Rabbit Hole’s walls are not the exquisite renditions of Tenniel or of Attwell, they are loud, near-modern grotesque, decidedly Burtonesque, and the looped Alice in Wonderland film shown silently on the wall-mounted screen needs no introduction: it is Mr Burton’s Hollywood blockbuster.
One of the most compelling draws of this pantheon to Burton ~ no, not a monogrammed pair of Alice’s ~ is its enticing assortment of Wonderland hats. Casually tossed in a wicker basket just below the TV screen, these simulated props, which identify with Alice’s fictional characters, enable those who are smitten by the happy-snappy smartphone age to plonk them on their bonces, take photos of each other and feed them proudly to their ‘Like-clicking’ friends, who are presumably waiting, phones in hands with nothing but bated breath, for the next instalment of lives that surprise. ‘If the hat fits, it fits’, and the management of Rabbit Hole have latched onto this modern compulsion, for it certainly fits their marketing ploy.
Wearing an Alice hat or not, there is something important you need to know about dining out at Rabbit Hole, which is that before the evening is out you will be rubbing Deep Heat into your neck. I think we can safely say that the last thing Mr Burton would likely want to hear is that his multi-billion-dollar film has been upstaged by a ceiling, but there you have it, and there it is.
Rabbit Hole’s ceiling is a work of art, an engaging, colourful illustration that wouldn’t look amiss in an early 20th century children’s story book. It is in itself a fitting tribute to the golden age of authentic Alice.
Its canvas is awash with iconic Wonderland objects, which float around in a densely turbulent space as though, caught up in the Wizard of Oz tornado, they have been flung at random and as a whole into ever-lasting affection, which, as all we avid readers know, is the library of our impressionable years to which we owe a lifelong membership.
‘Crikey!’ you might think, as you crane your neck in admiration, ‘they’ve even crimped’ the ceiling, but in this respect you’d be lavishing praise where praise is not readily due, for whilst the effect lends the images an appropriate dreamlike character, as every student of Königsberg’s history knows, or if he doesn’t should, the series of narrow arches that give the ceilings of basements and those in old industrial buildings in this part of the world their characteristic ripple, as aesthetically pleasing as they are, are principal to the fulfilment of an essential structural purpose. Having made this distinction, however, artistic concept and construction complement each other, as though their eventual coexistence had been ordained by Carroll himself. Carroll’s tale has innumerable twists, but Rabbit Hole’s ceiling has a few of its own.
If you haven’t come to Rabbit Hole to gawp in amazement up at the ceiling, the only explanation can be that perhaps you are here for the food.
Rabbit Hole Gastro-Bar Kaliningrad
I see a lot of positive comments regarding the quality of Rabbit Hole’s food posted on the internet but have failed to find anything much written about the quantity. A word in your ear, if I may. On the evening that we dined there, one amongst our group was rather disappointed that the prawn salad she had ordered only contained as many prawns ~ two to be precise ~ to justify its name and warrant its plurality. And I was not exactly impressed when the baked potato for which I had paid the British equivalent of three whole pounds was lost in the landscape of a bowl whose suspiciously disingenuous proportions could have taken a single olive and optically turned it into a melon. Taste in all things was in place and thus it goes was quality, but the whereabouts of quantity was anybody’s guess, perhaps it was off taking tea with Carroll’s March Hare and Mad Hatter.
I have no idea what brand of beer they serve in Alice’s wonderland, do you? But down in Kaliningrad’s Rabbit hole, I was perfectly happy to reprise my friendship with the ever-amenable Maisel’s Weisse, which, as every student of good beer knows, perhaps those very same students who are so up to scratch on Konigsberg’s history, is a special Bavarian wheat beer.
I would have been quite content sitting and sipping at my Maisel’s Weisse whilst gazing at the ceiling ~ pass the crick-in-the-neck cream, please ~ had it not been for my discovery of that something exciting going on at a nearby table of ladies. They had just received a wooden platter from the waiter in a bowler hat containing umpteen shots of different vodkas. You may recall, and if you don’t here is the link that will jog your memory, that I knew all about these special platters and the different vodkas they conveyed, having been bought one at the Dreadnought.
Did Rabbit Hole have a vodka or two tinctured with different flavours? Most certainly they did not! They had a vodka or 54, replied the indignant waiter, and before we could disarm him, he had whipped his phone out of his pocket as smartly would have Hickok had he possessed a mobile phone instead of his trusty side-iron, and tippy tapping away on his phone, not Hickok but the waiter, he began to recite a list of vodkas as long as Alice’s arm when whatever the potion it was she drank inflated her general stature. The only way we could switch him off ~ and here’s a mark of salesmanship ~ was to interrupt his roll call by ordering up a batch of those vodkas upon whose fragrant personalities he was so zealously expatiating.
The least adventurous of our party, and, if the truth be known, cursed by the same affliction as Wonderland’s White Rabbit, I stuck to my staple flavoured vodka, horseradish, a choice I presumed would be safe by precedent, but which, as it transpired, was nothing of the sort. The grimace on my face could, I suppose, have been mistaken for the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat, but whatever it was that he was on, this was not my fix. I am not sure what became of the radish, but I felt the kick that came with the horse.
The next safe bet was cherry flavour, but this concoction as nice as it was being rather more sweet than I cared for, made me think that it may have been more prudent had I approached it via the stepping stones of turnip, carrot, swede and cucumber, but that my friends is what tasting is, a bit of a tightrope to getting it right, but a talking point when getting it wrong.
By the end of this Rabbit Hole evening, the unpredictable marriage of Maisel’s Weisse with exotic vodkas brought me to the realisation why when Alice drank her magic infusions one minute she felt too small for the room and much too tall the next. But the sorcery hadn’t ended here. Before returning to the ground above me, I was aghast to see in my reflection that some of the vodkas had gone to my head and one ~ it must have been carrot ~ had definitely gone to my ears … Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit …
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