Backstory: Dining a la carte at Le Pretensio

"Good evening, and welcome to our restaurant. My name is Chawn, with a C-H, and I will be your server this evening. In this endeavor, I will be assisted, from left to right, by Skye, your bus person; Skeeter, your sommelier; and Allee (two Ls, two Es), your chair puller and napkin re-folder. Kathie, with a K and an I-E, your parking attendant, sends a big hello and thanks you in advance for the anticipated generous gratuity.

While you are deciding between using our traditional two-legged stool or a hand-sewn yak hammock we like to call a yammock, let me titillate you with tonight's specials.

For appetizers, there is a cranberry. One perfect cranberry, ripped from its Cape Cod bog by Allee, then flown, business class, to our restaurant, where it was hand washed and dried before being pounded by the entire kitchen staff. It was then placed on a plate and surrounded by the fingerprints of the cranberry attackers. It is $29.99 and we have two servings left.

As always, we are featuring an inedible soup. Tonight Chef has used the cranberry bog water, unfiltered of course, as part of our restaurant's continuing waste-not-want-not environmentally friendly approach to food. Chef boiled down the bog water, pureed it, put it through a food mill, pureed it again, and then added a shaving of dark chocolate. It is served steaming hot and meant to be inhaled. Thus the only utensil will be a salad fork. That will be $31.00

For main courses, Chef is continuing the New England theme with the saddle of clam, a unique creation that uses only the navel of the clam belly, sliced very thin and arrayed on a delicate yet sturdy plate before being drizzled with lettuce water. That is $45.45.

For meat lovers, Chef is offering a fusion of tough, yet gelatinous, Tahitian lamb knuckles with a pungent Sicilian goat cheese rind. Cooked for one week in a dung-burning clay oven at 75 degrees F., it combines the flavors of two different islands in one odiferous mélange. That will be $100.00 and a few pennies.

For dessert, Chef recommends the raw fruit crisp. This is different from your usual fruit crisps in that none of the fruit has been washed, peeled, or pitted. We do, however, have a dentist standing by in case of emergency. Thus, the $210.00 charge.

Finally, for coffee, we're serving a highly organic and kosher Guatemalan roast that will be poured by the family that picked the beans. After dinner the family is available to take home.

If you have any questions, please submit them via BlackBerry. I hope you have a pleasant experience and enjoy the Japanese war drum concerto that will accompany your meal. Ciao."

• Chuck Cohen is a California-based satirist and advertising writer.