Le Potage Dangereux

S3 E13: The Tale of the Dangerous Soup

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, 1992

There is no greater hallmark of fine dining than a hundred-dollar bowl of soup served by a man with a medieval beard and the energy of a cursed puppeteer.

In The Tale of the Dangerous Soup, Are You Afraid of the Dark? trades flickering flashlights for bubbling consommé, asking the eternal question: what if your repressed trauma could be slow-simmered into a signature dish?

It begins, as all great tales do, around a campfire, where the Midnight Society confronts that universal human truth: everyone is afraid of something, even if that something is birds. One by one, the kids reveal their fears—dogs, heights, slasher movies (which Gary insists don’t count, because apparently genre snobbery survives the apocalypse). Then Frank, tough guy extraordinaire, admits his deepest fear: the dark. He throws a handful of the Mystery Dust into the fire and launches us into his tale, a hot ladleful of dread and gastronomy.

We’re quickly ladled into The Wild Boar, a restaurant with décor like an upscale mortuary and customers who cheer when the chef enters the room. That chef? None other than Dr. Vink—yes, the Va-Va-Va-Vink himself—who is apparently moonlighting as a restaurateur with a secret recipe he definitely did not source from the Food Network.

The restaurant’s star dish? Le Potage Dangereux. A soup so good, so terrifyingly transcendent, that people are shelling out a hundred bucks for a single bowl and quitting their jobs in a kind of post-soup fugue state. Kitchen workers vanish. Waitresses go pale. But still the soup flows. A greenish, viscous flow of pure fear.

Enter Reed: the new hire, a loner with parental issues and a strong jawline. He’s tough, skeptical, emotionally unavailable—the exact kind of guy you cast to battle eldritch broth. His only weakness? Soup. He can’t stay away. One illicit taste and he’s hooked. But soup addiction has consequences.

Dr. Vink, being a generous boss in a very specific way, decides to let Reed and co-worker Nonnie in on his little secret. Turns out the soup’s main ingredient is fear itself—extracted from unwilling employees via a magical gargoyle statue that locks you in a freezer and conjures up your most traumatic memories, which are then juiced into consommé. Bon appétit.

What follows is a phantasmagoric descent into psychological horror. Knives rain from the ceiling. Coffins open. Claustrophobia crushes. The gargoyle breaks loose and begins a reign of terror that, if extrapolated to its logical conclusion, probably ends with it haunting a Trader Joe’s.

But Reed, having watched one too many late-night PBS psychology specials, realizes the trick: face your fear, and the illusion disappears. He waves his hands through his undead uncle and everything vanishes in a puff of cowardly logic.

Except—Dr. Vink’s not done. He’s recaptured the gargoyle. He’s still open for business. And he reminds us, with a chuckle that tastes like beef stock and despair: it still knows what scares you.

Would you like that in a cup or a bowl?

Make it! Pea Soup from Eating Well.