The story you are about to read is entirely true. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Our story opens in the Maitre d’s basement, somewhere in the wilds of South Dakota. The Maitre d’ himself, of course, was going by another name then, since he was not yet the Maitre d’ of the world’s most famous and glamorous cannibal restaurant. He was also much less well-coiffed at this time, as he had yet to don his tuxedo, polish his diamond-toothed chainsaw, and slick his hair back with a half-gallon of Brylcreem. Instead, there he was, slumped low on the couch, wearing a white wifebeater stained with curry corn chowder and sweat, his hand down his pants in true Al Bundy fashion. Two days’ worth of stubble flocked his face like the outer fabric skin of a Muppet. The grease from a half-eaten bag of pork rinds glistened on his lips by the flickering light of a really strange episode of The Outer Limits. This humble figure was, in his words, “meditating on world peace”, by which he meant he was fast asleep.
The yet-to-be Maitre d’s holy repose was interrupted by a banging on the front door. Slouching Babylonically toward the noise that dared interfere with his dreams of Eliza Dushku wrestling Jeri Ryan in a tub of warm Jello pudding, he paused for a moment to scratch parts best left unmentioned. When he opened the orifice (the house’s, not his own), he discovered a strange man standing on his doorstep.
This stranger – if it indeed was a stranger – had an errant gleam in his eye, as if his alignment was bordering on chaotic stupid. His hair flew in wild spikes around his head, like a cross between Doc Brown and some anime character who wears an orange jumpsuit and does martial arts. This man, of course, in keeping with our theme, would become the Chef in some future alternate timeline-thingy. The Maitre d’ would later deny knowing who this person (whose true name shall remain secret to protect national security) was before this moment in time, but they were in fact old accomplices, having participated in several heists of European gold repositories in the years before.
“What do you want?” the eventually-employed Master of the House demanded. “It’s too early in the morning for this shit. My sinuses still hurt from the party last night.”
The impish freak of nature held out a sandwich. “Here,” he said with enthusiasm, “You’ve got to try this! It’s great!” It would not be the first or the last time that the future Chef’s pushiness dragged everyone else in sight into some crazy scheme.
Reluctantly, knowing his sometime cohort’s penchant for the unusual, the man who would later be known as the Maitre d’, took the sandwich with some trepidation. It could be anything from roast gopher to wildebeest to (horror of horrors) tofurkey. However, the heavenly aroma wafting from between the bread opened his eyes. This – this was some wonderful meat, smelling like a genetically-spliced mutant combination of roast beef and bacon. As he took a bite, his taste buds collapsed in a massive orgasm of flavor. The flavor took on a life of its own, dancing on his tongue and tickling his senses, then crawling up to infect his brain like a virus, demanding that he eat more.
“That’s awesome,” the soon-to-be Maitre d’ said. “What is it?”
“It’s a homeless guy I hit with my car on the way over here. I cut off a slice and grilled it on my engine as I drove.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, really. He just darted out in front of me. I’ve got the rest strapped to the fender. Know someone who butchers hominids?”
That, my friends, is where this restaurant started, but it is not where our story ends. For the pair began a buffet, one of questionable moral character. However, it was not all wine, roses, and barbecued nuns in the early days. Times were tough as the new millennium lurched slowly toward its second decade, and a simpleton from Texas futilely tried to salvage his presidency. As time lurched on toward Thanksgiving and the grand opening of the Chainsaw Buffet, trouble set in.
Originally, the Buffet had contracted with the firm of Donner, Schlitz, and Lecter to provide the ingredients for the Chef’s “special” dishes (this contract, of course, was worded in such a way as to provide plausible deniability should the Buffet’s owners be questioned by the authorities – officially, they were just buying something called “long pork”, which they ostensibly thought came from some part of a pig). However, the economic downturn hit the Vietnamese orphan market hard, and Donner, Schlitz, and Lecter when belly-up and were devoured by the competition. As a result, the Chainsaw Buffet’s supply of ingredients was getting low. Capital was also tight, as the Maitre d’ insisted on blowing all of their dough on whores, a diamond-toothed chainsaw, and that snazzy suit he wears. So it came that the Buffet staff were facing an opening day with nothing to serve and no money to buy it with. The only thing in the pantry was fifteen cases of soup which the Sommelier had bought for sinister purposes best left unmentioned.
“Hold on!” quoth the Chef, busy fighting back an errant tentacle escaping from one of his pots. “I have an idea!”
“What is it now?” the Maitre d’ demanded, annoyed at having gotten flecks of cthulhian calamari on his lapel.
“Let’s start a soup kitchen!”
“But Chef, we already have a kitchen!” the Meatcutter protested. He carried a cleaver, and his eyes never pointed in quite the same direction. While he had a way with slicing through tendons and trimming fat both from budgets and politicians’ flesh, the Meatcutter (bless his soul) was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. “Narf!”
“No, you idiot,” the Chef corrected him gently but firmly. “A soup kitchen for the homeless!”
“You mean to make Thanksgiving better for those in need, to make the holiday a bright time for them instead of dreary and cold?” the Busboy asked.
“Yeah…sure…” the Chef said, with a knowing wink toward the audience as he broke the fourth wall. If you, dear reader, cannot tell what was coming, you perhaps should go read something simpler and not involving the consumption of human flesh.
The Chef’s pronouncement might have been more convincing if, at that very moment, outside the kitchen the Grillmaster’s monster-sized barbecue pit hadn’t exploded in a giant fireball, killing three bystanders but leaving the Buffet and its staff miraculously unscathed.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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