A disappointment to spider restaurants everywhere
The Fly Trap restaurant opened in the vegetable quartier of the garden about a week or so ago, so after some deliberation I decided to take a spin down there to see if the place could hold up to its prestigious residential location.
On my initial descent from my web above, the restaurant did not impress my eight keen eyes. Other spiders took up tall stools around a man-made sticky flytrap bar. The bar was covered with a mélange of trapped, live flies, though their haphazard, permanently glued-down arrangement made the menu choices very limited. Instead of setting the bar up as buffet style dining, which would allow patrons a choice, the layout is such that you have to eat whatever fly is stuck in front of you. Some of the regulars assert that this is part of the fun– a luck of the draw scenario– but I can’t say that I was pleased. Like any other restaurant, I would’ve preferred to have seen a menu.
Still, I played along. I sat down on one of the stools, careful to avoid putting my elbows down on the table, like a hapless spider a few seats down, who needed to have the bar attendants pull him free. I noticed that the walls had a smudged look, like the glue residue from the trap had migrated, making its way around the establishment, refusing to be cleaned.
The fly I chose was medium-sized at best, although it looked all the more syrupy and thickset in relation to its counterparts. It is with these low expectations that I began my meal.
The fly’s glued-in place setting disallowed any of my attempts to unstick it after administering the venom, meaning that instead of letting it bathe in my venom in a silk-threaded cocoon, I had to let the thing slowly deliquesce into a jelly in front of me. But no matter, I was out for the full experience. I gently cracked apart the caramelized, sugary wings with the back of my spoon, dipping into the liquifying fly with the wing shard like a table dip.
The taste was utterly revolting. After all the little it was worth for me to do into this dive bar, which should not have, for any reason, been allowed to open on such a prestigious avenue, this fly made me wish I had converted to veganism. I expected it to be a little undercooked, but for the waitstaff to have trapped a fly that had almost no nutritional value and proceeded to feed it no sauce, spices, or herbs to make the sinewy creature taste any less like the dry stinger of last winter’s carpenter wasp queen, makes my web spin. Almost completely flavorless, save for an over-salting that seemed to suspiciously taste like garden pesticides, I almost regurgitated the carcass into the lap of the patron adjacent to me. I would have demanded that the waitstaff bring out the chef so I could give them a piece of my mind, but the glue from the table had left a burning aftertaste in my mouth and I almost choked on the pain. That’s not a spice, that’s a health concern.
The texture, all things considered, was not bad, but that does not make up for the rest of this restaurant’s crimes. I would not even take my young children to eat here, the palette of these chefs was so unsophisticated and flavorless, even toddlers would push it away.
I got my check immediately and left, shocked when another spider quickly took my seat. I cannot condone or understand the appeal of a place which serves fertilizer-fed, glue-contaminated houseflies in a deplorably unclean atmosphere. I find no reason to recommend this to any other arachnid and offer this review solely as a cautionary tale.
I give The Fly Trap 0 stars.
Isabel Murray is a third-year writing major who prefers their flies cooked sous vide. Reach them at [email protected].