A. J.'s restaurant rampage

A. J.’s restaurant rampage begins as a provocation at Chez Robert and ends with a hundred hungry hogs overrunning the restaurant. The episode’s reversal is its defining action: after A. J. is cornered by the people he has insulted, he uses the animals he has stationed nearby to escape, with lethal consequences for Robert.

The Provocation at Chez Robert

A. J. had reserved a table a year in advance at Chez Robert, where the proprietor, Robert, was known for presiding over his cuisine with a contemptuous gaze that could reduce clients to desperate attempts to please him. A. J. arrives with six Bolivian Indians, who chew coca leaves between courses. When Robert approaches the table, A. J. calls for ketchup. The account also offers an alternative version in which he produces a bottle and pours it over the food; either way, the gesture rejects the restaurant’s culinary ceremony in a deliberately public way.

The room’s response makes the insult more than a private clash between diner and proprietor. Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. Robert runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat cleaver; the sommelier breaks a bottle of Brut Champagne, and Pierre, the head waiter, takes up a boning knife. They pursue A. J. through the restaurant as tables overturn and the diners cry for him to be lynched. An elderly gourmet begins fashioning a hangman’s knot from a red velvet curtain cord. A. J. is no longer simply disrupting the meal: he is cornered and in danger from the people whose order he has mocked.

The Hog Attack and Its Immediate Outcome

With himself surrounded, A. J. plays his trump card. He gives a hog call, and a hundred famished hogs that he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant and consume the food. In the ensuing chaos, Robert falls to the floor and is eaten by the hogs. A. J. remarks that the animals do not know enough to appreciate him, turning the episode’s comic insult into a final, grim reversal: the proprietor whose authority centered on discerning and judging food is destroyed amid its destruction.

Aftermath and Significance

The rampage does not end with Robert’s death. His brother Paul emerges from retirement in a local mental institution and takes over the restaurant, serving what he calls Transcendental Cuisine. The quality of the food declines gradually until the menu includes literal garbage, yet customers are too intimidated by the reputation of Chez Robert to complain. The restaurant therefore survives as a name and an institution even as its food deteriorates into a grotesque consequence of the attack.

The incident is one of A. J.’s disruptive exploits: elaborate social arrangements are undone by a calculated provocation and an abrupt reversal of force. Here the sequence moves from a reservation made a year ahead and the rituals of haute cuisine to ketchup, a pursuit through the dining room, and the arrival of a hundred hogs. The episode makes the restaurant’s hierarchy look precarious: the person who commands the table and the diners’ deference cannot control what happens once A. J. turns the scene against him.