“I’m starting to feel like Jack Nicholson,” my husband said. He’d been waiting by a dimly lit bar while languid women in long gowns wafted past to the strains of ’20s jazz — no wonder Bruce thought he’d stumbled into “The Shining.”
Yet this wasn’t the Overlook but the McKittrick Hotel, home since March 2011 to “Sleep No More,” Punchdrunk’s hit immersive mashup of “Macbeth” and “Rebecca.” In November, the company added a culinary component — a restaurant called the Heath, replete with a live band and dead (stuffed) coyotes. Seven nights a week, it serves hearty fare not only to showgoers but anyone craving dinner with a side dish of drama.
Chef R.L. King’s menu is oldschool British — the stuff you’d imagine the “Downton Abbey” staff eating on their days off: pork pies, fish and chips, along with a few vegetarian dishes. There’s a $49 prix-fixe menu and à la carte options; we mixed and matched, with middling results.
Delicious veggie crisps arrived in a brown paper boat; unfurled, it was a typewritten “confession” from a 16th-century witch. And it was hard not to think “Sweeney Todd” when the meat pie arrived: Under its flaky crust, I pulled out a lean baby carrot the size of a finger. It seemed less like dining than performing an autopsy.
Then again, we came not for the food, but the noir-ish, sexually charged atmosphere, and the Heath has it in spades. Just after our entrees, a mysterious “Mrs. Lindsay” knelt beside me. “A friend is waiting for you at the platform,” she murmured. “Will you come?”
How could I not?
She led me out of the room to what looked like a train’s dining car. Standing alongside it was a young woman with a Zelda Fitzgerald bob, who drew me so close I braced for a Katy Perry moment.
“Last night, I dreamed of Manderley,” she whispered. And then she pulled me through a door marked “Private.” In the gloom, I saw what seemed like a wheelchair. A woman in nurse’s whites stood beside it and helped me in, lowered the headrest and . . .
But why spoil it? Perhaps one day, someone will beckon you through a back door, too.
Led back to my table, still dazed, I asked Bruce how long I’d been gone. Five minutes, he guessed, during which time the band’s singer had stopped and asked where I was.
“Dragged off,” Bruce told him.
“Don’t worry,” the man said. “If she doesn’t return soon, we’ll send our search dogs.”
After dessert — a Fair Maid cocktail of vodka, Meyer lemons and sugar for me, and an icebox Nutella pie for Bruce — we paid our $135 check.
Then, draped in warm goodbyes, we eased our way back into the chill, 21st-century night.
What was it my guide whispered when she released me? Ah, yes: “You can never return to Manderley.”
Maybe not. But we’ll always have the Heath.
The Heath serves dinner nightly at 542 W. 27th St.; 212-564-1662, mckittrickhotel.com/theheath.