Mayhem Where the Millionaires Meet to Eat
The latest in the current epidemic of mass killings in Michelin starred restaurants has left thirty-eight dead in Manhattan’s pricey Per Se, “perched” high above Columbus Circle. The dead included a busboy, the coat check girl, the maître d, ten police officers, ten members of the FDNY, and fifteen diners whose income averaged $2.5 million and numbered among them some of the country’s top business executives, their wives and/or girlfriends, and a top Hollywood agent.
A shaken Thomas Keller, owner and executive chef of the exclusive Columbus Circle eatery that recently had its Michelin third star restored after a despicable hatchet job by NYT restaurant critic Pete Wells who was six months ago exposed as a secret Trump voter or maybe a MAGA sympathizer or at least as an unwoke monster who had failed to support Bette Midler and Cher in their brilliant campaign of inventive against the Mar a Lago ratbastard. All Wells could say was, “I’m so ashamed” as he canceled himself and slunk off to upstate New York for a fresh start as an unlicensed abortionist.
Evidently the unpleasantness started when the waiter, having presented the multimillionaire patrons their bottled water menus, which included a new entry of a $1000 bottle of Agua Milegrosa from the Pope’s own private spring that carried a plenary indulgence from the seven cardinal sins. “Pretty fucking good deal, if you ask me,” said the CEO of Chase, as they all signed on. A $100 get out of hell free card was, even to an atheist, too good to pass up.
So far so good. The first signs of trouble came during the salt presentation. There were twelve choice of salt, ranging from white Circassian to black Molokaian, with a color wheel of hues in between, all sustainably harvested by equably compensated salt artisans. The grousing began. That “equably compensated” part got their goats. “So salt mine workers got a union now! No way.” One of the business leaders complained that with stimulus checks and extended unemployment benefits his gardener shows up once a week “if I’m lucky. Rainy days he doesn’t want to get wet. Sunny days he’s playing golf.” Heads nodded.
But at least they were still getting along. The bonhomie started fraying when the butter was passed out, all sourced from our upstate dairy cow “Scooter.” One patron said, “Now I gotta eat butter from a Yankee cow? No way,” which led to jeers about “the team from Queens.” A very ancient and very rich wife yelled that she bled pinstripes and that “Yogi blocked the plate. Robinson was out! I seen it with my own two eyes.”
That’s when the bread throwing started, salted breadsticks from Italy and Palmer House rolls from Chicago. The waitstaff grabbed as many of the missiles as they could and replaced them with slices of white bread, figuring they would be hard to throw, and if thrown unlikely to do any harm.
Well these bozos didn’t become heads of Fortune 500 companies without being able to improvise, so first one, then all, started rolling the bread into balls, soaking them in our olive oil from a tree on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, lighting them from the artisan table candles from Mongolia infused with ghee, and then catapulting them at each other with their soup spoons.
Now the waiters made a fatal blunder. They passed out steak knives to the diners ordering our tenderloins cut from bull killed that week in the corrida in Seville, and not just any knives, but Mossad-branded assassin’s knives of Damascene steel, each engraved with the name of a Mossad ace who had made his bones killing an Iranian nuclear scientist with that very knife.
Those ordering the fish got, of course, fish knives, very nice ones, crafted from space-ship quality alloy of silver and molybdenum that had traveled to the moon (and back, oviously). It didn’t take long for the meat-eaters to realize that fish-eaters were practically defenseless, and the fish-eaters instead of scattering in a “prevent defense,” huddled together near the floral display in the center of the room, flowers cut from the Queen’s own garden (Elizabeth, that is, the roots watered by her own Corgis). It looked pretty much like that awful day Custer’s troopers scrummed together on Last Stand Hill as Crazy Horse’s braves moved in for the kill, scalping knives in hand.
Evidently the same idea occurred to a hedge fund mogul who gripped the fish-eating wife of a top Hollywood agent by the hair, slashed her throat, painted his face with her blood, scalped her, and then tossed the bloody scalp to his woman who began a wild dance shrieking curses at the terrified Dover-sole eating wretches, graphically describing the body parts she intended to carve out and eat from the still living bodies of “you losers.”
At which point the fish-eating tycoons, determined not to let their wives and mistresses fall into the clutches of the steak-slathering maniacs, began strangling their women to keep them out of enemy hands (and worse) and building a protective barrier from their corpses. Not to be denied their joys of victory, the meat-eaters began breaking apart our original Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and piling the pieces around the terrified mackerel snappers and their defunct ladies.
They were in the act of lighting this ungodly funeral pyre when the police and fire department arrived. But instead of just killing the knife wielding attackers and putting out the fire which would have allowed the badly burned survivors the grace of a horribly painful death in New York’s most expensive hospitals, the cops and firemen began fighting each other over who had dibs on the buffet of 100 year old brandy and priceless bottles of pre-war Sauternes (pre WW I that is), and while they were squabbling one of the meat-eaters grabbed an assault weapon from a cop and slaughtered all the first responders as the fish-eaters, all of them, were consumed by the flames, fried to a crisp, or turned into “tycoon flambe” as one of the tabloids poetically put it.
God, will I ever be able to forget their screams!
Then waves of lawyers arrived, the victors’ legal advisers escorting their clients off the battlefield, down the service elevators, and into waiting limos, carrying the reservations list with them.
The losers’ legal counsels, realizing they were unlikely to collect any fees from the roasted carcasses of their clients, began sifting through the pile of the dead, retrieving watches, rings, necklaces, wallets, and breaking loose any teeth with gold fillings.
One lawyer, a little quicker on the uptake than the others, began selling the credit cards he had stolen. “Guys, if we each take a couple of these and charge some diamonds at the shops downstair we got a better chance than if I try to use them all myself. You gottem for $200 apiece. These things are worth thousands.”
“Birds in hand,” a couple of the great legal minds demurred, as they pulled paintings down from the walls, and made off with pretty darn near priceless eighteenth century nature morte originals.
Other quick-thinking D.Jurs. crammed chickens flown in from Normandy into their satchels and others wore strings of saucisson looped around their necks as they made their getaways. The last lawyer to leave sprayed the room with grease from the kitchen and torched the place.
My heart goes out to the loved ones of the victims this unspeakable tragedy and my prayers. There is a lesson in all of this, which is that these scenes will recur perpetually until the last billionaire is strangled with the entrails of the last lawyer. Until that day, duck, you suckers.