The Hungry Shark

It was only a 2-star Michelin grade restaurant. Only?

Truth be told, any star from this tire company was a big deal, for its awarded and coveted polygon represented a much-coveted grade assigned to restaurants; and two stars meant excellent cooking that was, as they say, “worth a detour.” Presumably on Michelin tires.

Michelin tires, made via a French manufacturer’s petrochemical alchemy, was originally birthed by the brothers, André and Édouard Michelin. There, the juxtaposition of gourmet and rubber hit different existential and philosophical roads; yet, tires and destinations, it seemed, went together like rubber and food.

The Le Requin Affamé Restaurant, brandishing its two stars, featured skillfully assembled, imaginatively orchestrated dishes that represented Chef’s talents and his wunderkind, savant-like culinary artistry. His soufflés were the stuff of legend.

But 2 stars were not enough!

Two stars, Chef lamented, only declared his Le Requin Affamé to be, as they say, “worth a detour.” Three stars, however, would mean it was worth not just the detour, but “a special journey.”

Antoine Pointilleux had always wanted to be a chef. His father, an educated man—an astronomer of some renown, thought such a chef’s vocation was merely a trade. Something for tradesmen, not scholars. Antoine had to sneak in his culinary education at night so as not to interfere with his studies in the astronomy, upon which his father had insisted.

When Antoine had earned his PhD from the École Doctorale d’Astronomie et Astrophysique d’Ile-de-France, his father felt his own life was complete, and he finally could rest.

In peace, as it were.

Now Antoine Pointilleux—Chef Antoine Pointilleux —could go full tilt in the culinary arts without guilt. Displined as a scientist, he had no trouble finally garnering the title of Un des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, the absolute pinnacle of the craft.

But he only had two stars. Three Michelin stars, he mused, would make his establishment worth that “special journey,” a totally subjective designations of measurement. Subjective but quite stringent, meaning either enduring a hardship of weather (anything beyond tropical storm), unreliable transportation (rickshaw, Uber, or worse), or a geographical distance beyond the mileage capacity of the average hybrid automobile (as all hybrids were average, even when rolling on Michelin tires).

Ah, three stars, Chef cooed to himself lasciviously. Then life would be sweet!

If fully realized, he imagined, three stars would mean each worthy gastronomist and top-tier food critic would marvel at the paramount ingredients, the perfect (within 1º F) cooking, and the genius of his presentation’s architecture that would elicit that chef’s kiss, perfectly executed, from the lip-perched fingertips, with a smack. Surely, one would walk away knowing what was consumed was destined to be a classic.

He imagined the Michelin man adding another roll of abdominal girth. He imagined telling his late father, “Va te faire foutre!”

Chef’s PhD in astrophysics unfailingly came into play when he demonstrated why he was called “the King of Soufflés”—his own soufflés assembled on a base of stiffly beaten egg whites folded on a base of heavy cream, puffing up from the trapped hot air during cooking, to which Chef referred as “the breath of life.”

“Breathe!” he would coax his creations. “An inspiration,” he called it, when hot air inflated it with the blowback from a thermonuclear fusion of sorts, his conjuring the outward radiation and thermal pressure.

“And an expiration!” he would announce triumphantly when it deflated into a singularity, like some star no longer able to fight gravity, undergoing gravitational collapse.

His wait staff said his head was always in the heavens, for he likened all of his culinary accomplishments to some type of celestial event. Indeed, he had correctly concluded that his restaurant, on this planet, revolving around its star, must become the finest amalgam of the disparate disciplines of cooking and astronomy.

For that he needed at least another star!

Two stars were no longer acceptable, for now he longed to graduate to the three of a full Orion’s Belt. From there, who knows? His could be the Crux, the Southern Cross of restaurants—four stars!

Chef dreamed big. Lightyears big.

He knew that his soufflés and the “Voilà!” that followed each were, as he called it, “a good start.”

“What do do? What to do?” he prayed to St. Lawrence, in trying to come up with a bold, new—and exquisitely tasty—idea. St. Lawrence was the patron saint of chefs who, when being burned alive had said, “Turn me over, I'm done on this side."

“Grant me a heavenly recipe,” Chef beseeched St. Dominic de Guzmán, the patron saint of astronomers.

Chefs, generally speaking, did not have a PhD in astrophysics, but this chef knew what gravitational collapse meant. It was just a soufflé thing, so the common man might notunderstand.

In his search for his third star, Chef needed something excitingly unusual; something “destined to be a classic” associated only with him and his Restaurant Le Requin Affamé. He waxed exotic; he wanted provocative; he craved unique.

Perhaps it was St. Lawrence; perhaps it was St. Dominic de Guzmán. Or even his dead father. Or perhaps Chef thought of it all by himself. What Do Starfish Taste Like? he wondered.

He knew, of course. He had once attended a science seminar in the Far East, which was also where he had learned why the rickshaw was unreliable transportation.

Starfish tasted exactly like something from the sea—salty and briny. The taste, he knew, once savored, had a very pleasing aftertaste, assuming he could pull off the exquisite preparation needed.

“It’s me!” he boasted. “I can!”

The meat inside each point—leg, or appendage—the only edible part, had a tender, creamy, semi-solid consistency that tasted pretty good once savored; again, as per his exquisite preparation.

This is when Chef Pointilleux’s corpus callosum, that part of the brain that connects the pragmatic left brain with the artsy-fartsy right brain, misfired. Gastronomy collided cosmically with astronomy, for his brain was surrounded by skull that could hardly contain both.

“Contrary to popular belief,” he explained to his sous-chef, “starfish are not really fish. They're actually made of hot gas, just like the stars, from which their name originates.”

Whatever, the sous-chef thought but did the only thing his position allowed, lest his career end. He nodded.

“Yes, Chef!” he shouted.

The list of scheduled Michelin star appraisals went years into the future, but as fate would have it, a long-awaited slot coincided with Chef’s universe when a previously designated restaurant burned down. The Universe was telling him something!

Chef had connections, so he was able to learn ahead of time when, and that day came.

The preparation was as exquisite and magnificent as Chef Pointilleux deemed necessary when Mr. Frawny sat at his designated table. He was the famous senior food critic for the Times whom the Michelin folks had assigned to the restaurant. What he reported could either doom or canonize an eating establishment.

He boasted, often in every review, that “I never eat the same thing twice,” for which he would explain, “because I don’t have to.”

He didn’t.

The head waiter addressed Mr. Frawny with authority but also with consummate respect.

“Tonight Chef Pointilleux has prepared, for you, a progression of dishes that includes a humble beginning—his savory signature oyster soufflé appetizer—as an elegant, light starter.

“There will be a very special and elegant main course he is sure you’ve never had the rarefied pleasure to masticate and ingest. Of course, there will be the brilliantly complementing side dishes and wine pairings carefully chosen by our resident connoisseur, who, incidentally, was trained by none other than the Court of Master Sommeliers.”

He paused, awaiting Mr. Frawny’s reaction, which was, “We’ll see.”

The waiter’s adrenal glands winced.

The soufflé served was surrounded by freshly shucked oysters, served with the Le Requin Affamé signature vinegar sauce, Loire Valley shallots, and piperine pepper. Accompanying this, a moment later in the presentation choreography, came the impressive seafood “tower” of lobster, crab legs, steamed clams, and pan-seared golden-brown crusted scallops that promised a sweet, tender interior, accented by a Vermont creamy cultured butter.

“I’ve had all this before!” complained Mr. Frawny to the waiter, who—ironically for being in a gourmet restaurant—swallowed hard. “I never eat the same thing twice. I’ve come to sample this new, exotic main course someone from your untrustworthy staff has leaked to me.”

“That would be me,” Chef Pointilleux announced proudly from behind him. The head waiter returned to the kitchen in tears.

“Well?” Mr. Frawny demanded, whereupon the waiter returned with Chef’s new, history-making innovation.

“May I present to you,” he boasted, the “five-star restaurant Le Requin Affamé Pentagram!”

“A starfish?” Mr. Frawny said in an incredulous tone.

“More than that, sir,” Chef beamed. “It’s actual starstuff, which I’m sure you’ll realize when you allow it to meet your palate. And now, I’ll leave it to you.”

Mr. Frawny considered this course with as much curiosity as apprehension. There it lay on a bed of baby spinach, supine—that is, ventral surface up—each one of its legs splayed and butterflied open. Atop each running appendage was a sparse layer of spice that would remain a mystery until tasted.

Which Mr. Frawny did, albeit with a tiny portion plucked and retrieved by a three-pronged oyster fork left behind from the seafood tower.

“Three prongs,” Chef mused. “One more than the two stars we have. It’s a sign. But behold, the five-pointed starfish, two more points of a star more than we need!”

Since there were no three-limbed fauna available on planet Earth, and since four-limbs meant some mammalian meat meal, already beaten to death in restaurants (but not like a dead horse, in deference to restaurant sensibilities), Chef's choice of limbs went to five.

“Five. A nice prime number. Like three—the number of stars we need.” His corpus collosum again misfired.

He realized that the theoretical Fine Structure Constant (α, or approximately 1/137.035999206; approximately?) model proposes using prime number sets to delineate the universe's evolution, making it a great prime number starting point as the basis of our universe's quantum and material properties.

This caught St. Lawrence’s and St. Dominic’s attention.

“Everyone knows that,” Chef intoned. “Even this guy,” although nothing could be further from Mr. Frawny’s mind.

Mr. Frawny liked it! He liked the starfish. He waited patiently for the pleasant aftertaste, which did not disappoint.

Chef liked to think that Saints Lawrence and Dominic de Guzmán had finally gotten together—just for him--for a miraculous show of thaumaturgy in his very own restaurant. Being of “starstuff,” as Chef had proclaimed, that aftertaste was followed by a few laws of physics, one of which was that his meal was drawn into its event horizon of the black hole that collapsed upon itself in his stomach, which would leave him forever hungry for the Le Requin Affamé five-star restaurant’s pentagram.

How ironic, Chef thought to himself, for his PhD had him know better: at such relativistic levels, Mr. Frawny’s ingestion would be infinitely slowed, the time dilation essentially making him digest so slowly that just eating that one thing would be eating forever.

Alternatively, relativistically, he also would wax epicurean, savoring forever.

Mr. Frawny is no longer the senior food critic for the Times. Anyone who happens to wait the 18 months for a reservation at Le Requin Affamé can still see him, sitting at his Frawny Memorial Table, eating the repeating, prime number decimalth five-star restaurant pentagram and its supernatural, possibly evil, and proudly served by the only Michelin five-star restaurant in the greater galactic cluster area.

And since a restaurant full of pentagram-eaters would be a bad business model, Chef Pointilleux retired the Le Requin Affamé’s five-star pentagram.

Currently he is pondering the next prime number, seven.