And so it came to pass that the Chainsaw Buffet staff set up a soup kitchen in order to make the holiday happier for those who needed it the most: themselves. The serving lines were set up, signs were posted alerting the city’s homeless that free meals were being offered, and the Meatcutter sharpened his rubidium-plated cleaver.
If there is one thing that can be said about the homeless (besides that they smell bad), they are certain to congregate wherever there is free food being offered. Being left to the not-so-tender mercies of the world with no means of supporting oneself does leave one with a powerful appetite. The good folks at Chainsaw Buffet, however, are dedicated to solving the world’s homeless problems.
Needless to say, the soup kitchen was a big hit for the Buffet, and without giving further details, the restaurant’s supply of meat for cooking was summarily restored. The Sommelier’s stockpile of radioactive soup was also safely disposed of.
With the Chef stirring the pots, the Grillmaster stoking the fires, and the Busboy grinding bones to make the bread, Chainsaw Buffet was soon doing booming business. The Sommelier only recommended the finest well-aged wines, and the Maitre d’ greeted everyone at the door with a haughty attitude, a clean towel, and a well-oiled chainsaw. From the Good Doctor’s Special (liver of census taker, served with a side of fava beans) to the Catch of the Day, the fabled restaurant’s mysterious cuisine caught on like wildfire. The only problem was a certain snarky Waitress who had to occasionally brought back into line for abusing the customers…but only because said abuse was the job of the Maitre d’. Times were good for Chainsaw Buffet…until disaster struck.
It all started with a very special bottle of wine the Sommelier had tucked away in the back storeroom. Festering for three hundred years, this very special bottle of red harbored a dark secret. Long ago, in another lifetime, the Buffet’s winemaster had used his necromantic arts to curse this special bottle of wine with a dark, magically-enhanced virus. This virus would, as part of the Sommelier’s cunning plan, bring out the horrifying inner essence of anyone who consumed it. Then, of course, the Sommelier got distracted and forgot about his evil plan, leaving the bottle of wine mixed in with the rest of his collection.
As fate would have it, the Chef needed a bottle of red wine for preparing a special order of Hobo Bourguignon. It is true, also, that the bottle he retrieved from the Chainsaw Buffet storeroom was no ordinary red. Thirdly, it is true that the bottle was in fact the same one cursed by the Sommelier’s dark magicks three hundred years before, and that the necromancy had been lying dormant until the bottle was opened.
Sadly, as fate would have it, there would be one more thing that would add to the tragedy. The meat that the Chef was preparing had not come from any ordinary hobo. Said hobo was in fact a Native American shaman from the Northwest, and as he breathed his last breath, he uttered a powerful curse that whosoever ate of his flesh would…well, something would happen to them. You see, he never did get to finish his curse, because the Meatcutter was running behind and was too impatient to wait for any last words the entree might utter. True, too, that he probably would not have understood said last words in the first place. The Meatcutter, in the words of a famous man, was not real bright.
Nonetheless, the hobo’s curse combined with the magicks inherent in the wine his flesh was basted in, and the two sorceries mutated. Together, they infected the garlic, onions, and carrots that garnished the well-tenderized flesh.
As the Waitress was busy with another table and the Maitre d’ was too busy being haughty and telling everyone it wasn’t his job (but really, what is his job?), it fell to the lowly Busboy to deliver the Hobo Bourguignon to its customer. The delicious, marvelous, wondrous smell of meat wafted from the tray. The Chef truly had worked a miracle in turning a smelly hobo who hadn’t bathed in a year into this masterpiece.
The temptation was too much for the Busboy. He surreptitiously set down the tray and tried a bite of the Bourguignon. He moaned in ecstasy as the unholy entree plummeted down into his stomach.
Then the curse hit. The unstable combination of magicks took its toll on the unfortunate Busboy’s body, and he felt his flesh begin to crawl, like that guy in The Mummy who had a scarab beetle burrow under his skin and crawl around before eating his brain. His body lurched, reshaping itself, white fur springing from every orifice. He grew to eight feet tall, and with a ravenous “Busboy SMASH!“, ran out into the city.
As everyone knows, consuming human flesh tainted by some kind of curse inevitably turns a person into a wendigo. It’s a law of nature, like “Any object from another planet shot into space in a random direction will always land on Earth.”.
The wendigo formerly known as the Busboy then went on a rampage across the city, destroying several city blocks and the entire Thanksgiving parade. Fun was had by all, but unfortunately that fun had to end when the Sommelier, furious that his bottle of wine had been consumed, turned the Busboy back into a human as punishment for his hubris. That particular dish, it seemed was reserved for the gods and/or the Immortal Robot Reagan himself.
And that is the tale of Chainsaw Buffet’s first Thanksgiving. Join us next month as we celebrate a Snake Hooptie Christmas!
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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