The Paradox Cafe resides on an asteroid with an irregular, tilted ecliptic that passes the solar plane somewhere between Mars and Jupiter or Saturn. It was started by three lesbians named Steve of whom no one has ever seen. They do find notes hidden around the restaurant from them, the wait staff occasionally does, "Time to order more napkins" in a drawer somewhere. It is rumored that they are clones of famed Los Angeles first basemen Steve Garvey's X chromosome.
This night we find the cooks involved in one of their famous bull sessions that passes for a night of honest work. Of course, no one would do what they do for the money that they get. Their poor earnings is matched by the deferential treatment the waitrons, as they are called, give them. It allows them to go on publicly hating everyone.
"I'm beginning to despise this job here, if you don't mind my sayin, fellas," said ole Dutch the length of whose arms are a mass of tattoos and scar tissue. He stirred a pot of beans bigger than his very self. Dutch uttered complaints all night, slightly modulating on a theme.
LuAnn, who cooked and ate the first two chefs she worked under, drank a long-neck beer and nodded to the statement as she picked up the basket out of the deep fryer. She had a brief hallucination that she had fried tiny horses instead of shrimp. LuAnn had the most talent and seniority of the bunch and could whip them all at pool.
"Personally, I think we got it good here," Big Jim Trawler said as he carved an impromptu pipe out of a yam. In spite of his size, he was capable of subtle things with his thick fingers. "Why, I remember the time i was working at this hot dog stand down in Amarillo,Tx, just getting by, of course, until I could find better work. I was sweating away over the grill when we heard a loud fog horn kind of sound outside, the wind started whippin up like crazy and tore the roof right off that taco stand."
"I thought you said it was a hot dog stand," LuAnn corrected
"So I did. Then there was this blinding light from above and I felt myself being drawn up towards it."
"Close Encounters of a Culinary Kind." Dutch sneered.
"That's right. Soon I was sucked up inside this mothership and wafted off to Jupiter where I prepared flavored gases and radioactive chowders for a race of intelligent clouds. I was fired in a breech of protocol. I had farted in the kitchen. They were very strict about such things." He tore off a tiny piece of aluminum foil and began shaping a bowl in a pit dug out of the yam.
"And that's also how you ended up here, I suppose," said LuAnn skeptically through her eyelids, "That's nothin. I cooked Crab Nebula for the entire Andromeda Galaxy." She nodded her scarfed head once and took an extra long draw from her long-necked beer.
A chorus of calls from the gathering crowd of employees at the ticket window, started, "Where the hell is my order?" "This table is on my case." "The fish is burnt."
"Shut the hell up or it will get a whole lot slower back here," yelled Dutch. "Somebody bring me a god-damned beer." Dutch was under the illusion that he was not only a short order cook, but royalty. "Hey, where are those baked spuds? Rusty!"
A robotic prep cook appeared from the back kitchen carrying a tray of baked potatoes. He rolled in on one wheel, slipped on the greasy floor. He was himself covered with a layer of congealed grease on his stainless steel hide. He sounded like he was saying, "Shit, fuck, damn," in a very high register and his motion was as wobbly as the slight jig the asteroid did as it spun through space. Perhaps the rotation of the big rock messed with his sense of balance that was probably tuned to the Olympus Mons. All of the equipment in the kitchen was dented from run-ins with the prepbot. Still, no one else could julienne 50 pounds of carrots in 25 seconds, so the cooks ignored the dents, but kicked him down into the wait station when he bruised their legs. Rusty threw the spuds one by one into the bin in a blur of motion, saying "ow, ow, ow." Even when the joke had grown old.
"And you have never eaten till you had my comet tail fettuccine with hearts of stars in a liquid helium sauce though you probably would not live long enough to eat it," claimed the famed bragadocio, the pastry chef Toneye Masuccelli, as he passed the kitchen on the way to bakery. He waved his hands in the air which was some Italian/Tunisian gesture designating mass buggery.
The cooks did not even look up. "I catered a black hole convention and survived," said the Dutchman in all seriousness.
Not afraid of such tactics, Jimbo called his bluff, "Oh yeah, and who picked up the tab?"
""You-know-who."
"Shit." Jimbo scoffed, lowering his head to a plate he was garnishing. "And you still can't make rice that's not sticky."
(These characters are a composite of many of the cooks I have worked with, but I'm sure they would recognize the basis for the characters if they read this. And probably want to crack my head open. Wait till you meet the breakfast staff.)