Letter to an Overly Ambitious Alien Chef of the Future

by Mari Ness

Leon D' Razi'chn
Chef and Owner
X'Rstys Restaurant
The Caltog Quadrant

My dear Leon,

Such a pleasure to dine at your charming establishment the other day -- as you promised, delightful location, just lovely, particularly for the view it gives of both the D'rksdrfety landing strip and the Arghteopo slaughterhouses. You were quite correct to boast that I would have seen nothing else quite like it.

If I may, however, some brief suggestions:

1) While your choice to decorate the walls and ceilings with the dead, or in many cases, dying, bodies of your enemies has a certain daring and occasionally even risqué appeal, placing tables directly under these bodies occasionally leads to body parts falling into the soup. (Quite delicious, I must say, and finding true Vietnamese Pho Tai Nam soup in this sector of the galaxy is truly a pleasure. And where, may I ask, did you manage to procure fresh lemongrass here of all places?)

2) Cartellian eyeballs as an appetizer certainly provides the needed touch of exoticism that any restaurant aiming for the highest galaxy standards requires, but serving these eyeballs on a mirror is just tacky.

3) You may wish to caution your waiters that their customary habits of pulling various limbs from patrons, following the hospitality rules of their culture, may not be fully appreciated by all of their clientele. Most patrons hailing from the planet Earth, for example, including those arriving encased in water bubbles and requiring XeDanon translators to transform their burbles and whistles to the duller but customary EarthTalk communication, are unaccustomed to having their limbs ripped off while they are ordering from the menu. This is particularly problematic when approaching one of the cetacean species now engaged in space travel, as an attempt to do so typically results in the following actions: the outraged cetacean expends its last life force in using its powerful tail flukes to pound the hell out of the offender, and, more critically, other restaurant patrons become doused in salt water, a procedure that, as we saw to our dismay, proved quite fatal to some patrons. Was your maitre d' unaware that the Zogloians are rather allergic to salt water?

4) Leon, Leon, Leon. I have told you, and I have told you again and again: not all mushrooms are mushrooms. Serving _shitake_ mushrooms when the dish quite clearly calls for _portobello_ is a faux pas on the order of blasting the Intergalatical League of Un-United Planets with a Krashelian stink bomb. Or, worse, using canned tomato soup.

5) Back on Earth in the old days, we, like you, had chefs that would experiment with adding strange and exotic flavors together -- vanilla cream with lobster! Garlic and cherry on pizza! Anchovies and chocolate! They were, as you might imagine, almost celebrities for doing so, celebrated and fested in these dreadful cooking shows, given restaurants that sprawled across their home countries and indeed the world, until, to the relief and joy of all humanity (and quite possibly saving the alien species who contacted us only shortly thereafter) they were all rounded up and swiftly electrocuted for crimes against humanity. (Supposedly, they were condemned for combining flavors that should never have been combined in the first place, although I feel their greater crime was making us all feel like completely inadequate cooks while doing so.)

Do you understand what I am suggesting here?

We do, however, wish to thank you for the lovely Crème Brulee Razi'chn; using your own blood (or is it serum, in your species?) to create an added creaminess is certainly a delightful personalized touch that remains, sadly, unused in even the very best restaurants back in my home planet in Kansas City, Missouri. (No, no, my friend. Not Paris. Their food triumphs are from a day well in the past.)

Again, my thanks for an utterly delightful evening, and my assurances that Rosa and I will be returning just as soon as we have the opportunity to return to this quadrant and she has quite recovered from her stomach surgery.

Yours, as always,
Joe

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©Mari Ness

Mari Ness lives in South Florida under the tyrannical rule of two cats. Her work has previously appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 3 and Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2, and will be appearing in Antipodean SF. She keeps a weblog on livejournal.