Growing up, I ADORED the works of Douglas Adams, and I would even suggest that my wit and sense of humor is directly derived from reading, and re-reading over and over, the entire Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Series. The books could almost be taken as a curriculum of sorts, with the first book an introduction of the cynicism and mostly negative world that the hapless heroes would be subjected to (and reasonably easy to follow), the second book a rather convoluted mess of concepts and storylines, the third a method to tie up as many loose ends as possible, and the fourth a weird, quasi-romance. If Broken Goblet was a substitute for this book series by way of our timeline, we would be firmly entrenched in Book 2, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
I won't summarize the plot, because your head would be spinning, but I can say the following with certainty - the titular restaurant, which most certainly IS at the end of the Universe, is probably the least important part of the whole ding-dang book. It's funny that Adams elected to call the book this, and, with ALL THE SHIT going on in this book, the restaurant gets the top billing. It might be - and this is my uneducated guess - that he did this because he thought it amusing to center the idea going into the book that this nexus of the cosmos would be important, and instead it was ancillary to the big picture. Yes, it's location was important to the story, and yes, it's adjacency to the plot points was clever, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just a blip in the story. Not unlike a certain would-have-been food establishment adjacent to Broken Goblet, which leads me to the relevancy of this blog....
....so, what's the deal with the pizza place?
It is, quite possibly, the most asked question of our 2021. Not the question of how we survived, with the rent we pay on such a large spot, through COVID '20-'21? Not the question of how a business built on crowds stayed afloat in all this? Or what it meant to lose two Fridays and two Saturdays in December? Nope, it was "pizza place" related, by a long shot. Now, this is not me dumping on simple and harmless inquiries, or poo-poo-ing the curious. Because, honestly, what IS the deal with the pizza place? It's a fair question. No, this is just me channeling my inner (and more outer in 2021) cynicism. Personally and professionally, 2021 was the hardest year in recent memory, for all three owners. It's stuff we simply cannot talk about publicly. especially the professional stuff, but believe me when I say that it's the stuff of local legend. I would love to do a roundtable chat and spend 2 hours going over the details of our move to Bensalem, but I cannot. A loyal regular, who knows the whole story, has repeatedly said that, were he not to know this story was true, he would say it was impossible to believe all that has happened. So, yeah, when we get asked that question, an inevitable smirk usually appears followed by the phrase " They aren't opening, but something is happening there". It's almost comical to us now, that this convoluted mess that was our navigation through the plot lines at 2500 State Road in Bensalem could be affectionately titled "What's the deal with the Pizza Place?". I do have some good, if vague news...that third book is on the horizon, the one that ties up the plot lines.
What we can reveal, here on the first day of the first month of 2022:
The rear lot will be finished by summer 2022 (so we are told), with almost triple the parking
The front lot will be finished by summer 2022 (ditto), with triple the parking
The lower biergarten spaces will be going away
The Pizza Place is not opening as intended, and
The Distillery is not opening as intended, because
Broken Goblet has agreed to a new lease to expand into both spaces.
..........
And that's where we have to end. We have some incredibly exciting news to share in just a few short months, including WHAT we are actually DOING in those spaces, and what the plans are to offset the loss of the biergarten. We also have some 'splaining to do about some of the new faces seen around the facility. All of these plot lines will hopefully be cleared up very soon, and maybe we will finally discover, as it relates to our business, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. For now, I leave you with a slightly modified quote from the aforementioned book -
“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we have a beer?' the second by the question 'Why do we want that beer?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have a beer?”