Made Marian, Volume Two by Lucy Lennox

 

Prologue - Griff

When the entree came, it looked more like a pile of empty scrotums (scrota?) stacked one on top of the other. I blinked and looked again. Yup. Still a big ole stack of sac.

“Remind me again what I ordered, if you don’t mind?” I asked the server.

“Deconstructed aubergine nestled amongst tousled morels paired with a sugared sunchoke soufflé accompanied by foraged youngling sprouts and teased with a lemon foam.”

I blinked again. What the ever-loving fuck did he just say?

“In English, please?” I asked.

“Eggplant, mushrooms, some Jerusalem root thingy, sprouts, and yellow puffy stuff,” the man whispered next to my ear. “Good luck with that.”

I sighed before lifting my fork to take a bite. A promise was a promise and I couldn’t very well write a review of the restaurant without tasting the food. Monte Mancini owed me big time for this one.

The day before, I’d gotten a message from a friend of mine who was the regular food reviewer for a magazine called San Francisco Nights. Monte had called in a panic, begging me to take his place writing the review so he could fly to Italy to visit his ailing mother. I got the feeling his ailing mother was really a nude beach on the east coast of his native country. Lucky bastard.

But I had agreed to write the review in his stead and submit it in his name, taking his reservation and showing up at the appointed time that night. As a freelancer, I had been assigned a few restaurant reviews before, but I was certainly no expert on gourmet fare.

In order to fool the readers into believing the half-assed attempts of Griffin Marian were really the choice words of vaunted Monte Mancini, I would have to pay attention and take copious notes as soon as I returned home.

The meal tasted like… how did I say this politely?

A gargantuan mountain of testes.

The resulting review wasn’t pretty, and I made Monte swear never to throw me to the wolves like that again.