One of the best parts of Baldur’s Gate 3 is all the stuff you don’t even realize you missed. The half-orc waiter, Honk, isn’t exactly the juiciest morsel of BG3 esoterica, but as YouTuber Proxy Gate Tactician points out, he might be the NPC you’re least likely to have met even after hundreds of hours of play.
Act 3’s Lower City is home to an eatery called the Singing Lute, owned and operated by a half-orc named “Tender” Henk. It’s an ironic nickname, but the rude restaurateur seems to do just fine in the pre-Yelp Forgotten Realms. In the final scene of Karlach’s romance arc, Henk does his best to kill the mood on your “first date” with his gruff demeanor and sub-par service.
The thing is, since this is Baldur’s Gate 3, Henk can die at any point (though likely only by your hand). Enter Honk, Henk’s brother with the same face and a different hairstyle, a failsafe NPC to show up in Karlach’s romance scene and deliver the same lines. He reminds me of the similarly cheeky Biff the Understudy from the original Baldur’s Gate, an NPC who shows up to deliver dialogue lines if their assigned character is already dead.
Honk’s appearance is elevated by that classic Larian attention to detail, though. There’s a note from Henk to Honk you can find in the Singing Lute that alludes to his existence, and most surprisingly, unique voice lines for Karlach’s romance scene in the event of a Honk sighting. Karlach correctly addresses him as Honk instead of Henk, and Henk/Honk’s single voiced line in the scene, an orcish curse, is delivered by a different voice actor.
I wonder, though, if I might have actually seen Honk myself due to a since-patched glitch. When I first saw Karlach’s date scene, I noticed another half-orc identical to Henk in the background. I initially assumed this was a second instance of Henk, but I now realize it was likely Honk, a little overeager in his anticipation of his brother’s demise.
The attention to detail in this game never ceases to amaze me, and Proxy Gate Tactician has another nine rare BG3 encounters to show off in the same video. One of them, the dragonborn bard Quil Grootslang, I actually had met before. Though she’s intended as a failsafe for Dark Urge players who kill their designated first victim, Alfira, before the proper cutscene, knocking Alfira out with a nonlethal attack triggers Quil’s appearance in her stead, giving you a loophole to save the Tiefling bard.
