The Grand Buffet of Human Endeavor

I. Arthur & The Restaurant

There was a restaurant, unmarked but well-known, nestled between a shuttered shoe repair and a psychic whose window sign always read Back in 10. In every direction, gated windows and boarded doors. Advertisements for plasma donation programs, military recruitment, and the brand new ePhone littered the street. Above the entrance, a simple, weathered plaque read: The Grand Buffet of Human Endeavor.

No neon. No gimmicks. Just the smell of something warm, nostalgic, dependable. Chicken.

Inside, there were no menus, no music, no waitlists. Just one dish: the House Special. Chicken. Every day, every time. The kind you remembered from when things worked. The restaurant’s appeal was singular: it promised nothing more than competence. Not greatness. Not revolution. Just something done right. A rare thing in a world bloated with choices and predictable mediocrity.

Arthur arrived like many before him. A man of refined tastes—not in flavor, but in grievance. His palate was a diagnostic tool, finely attuned to the failure of others. He appreciated systems, as long as they spared him effort. He expected functional quality and felt it was owed to him, like water running from a faucet. The very idea of needing to ask twice left a bitter taste.

Upon entering, Arthur was guided to his table with a silence that sounded like servitude. The waiter pulled out the chair and placed a napkin in his lap.

Without a single word from Arthur, the waiter brought a plate. One piece of roasted chicken, golden-skinned, resting in its own simple jus.

He cut in, tasted, paused.

“Hmm.”

He waved the waiter back, “Could I have another, please? A fresh one. Cooked properly this time.”

II. The Cycle of Disappointment

The second chicken arrived: pale, rubbery, sweat-beaded. Arthur chewed once and gagged theatrically. No protest yet. Just another mark tallied.

The third came cold. Raw in the center. He pushed the plate away with contempt; it skittered across the table, nearly crashing to the floor. He’d seen this before: deliberate incompetence. An institution testing your tolerance, seeing what it can get away with.

Fourth: a failed elevation of giblet gravy. Fifth: deconstructed, bone wrapped in mousse, surrounded by tarragon foam.

It became personal.

He looked around. Other diners wore similar expressions of disappointment curdling into outrage. Phones flicked on. Hashtags bloomed like mold. #ChickenFail. #BuffetBetrayal.

Arthur felt a swell of shared indignation, the warm righteousness of the wronged. He felt pride that his fellow restaurant-goers had palates refined enough to understand the disgrace being presented.

But…

No one stood. No one left.

He waited for the fix. The apology. The correction. He always had. Systems corrected themselves eventually. Didn’t they? Surely, the Chef understood what the people wanted, right? But alas, no change came. He felt his emotions boil over, like an unwatched pot of pasta. Glaring, watching his peers do nothing and continue to consume their own sad excuses for a meal. And when his frustration finally tipped into motion, it wasn’t born of courage, but fury.

III. Into the Kitchen

“That’s IT!” Arthur roared, shoving his chair back. He stormed toward the swinging doors, fueled by an indignation that he was the only patron brave enough to cross the boundary into a world he had only ever seen in movies.

He expected chaos: steam, shouting, sizzling pans.

Instead, the kitchen was dim. Still. A film of smoke circulated around the ceiling.

At its center stood a small, feathered figure. Apron-clad. Standing on a wobbly stool.

The Chicken.

Not a man in a suit. Not a chef hiding behind allegory. Just… the Chicken itself. Alive. Focused. It moved in a frantic, twitchy rhythm—not graceful, but urgent. It spooned pale mousse onto a glistening disc of meat jelly. It topped the mound with a twist of scorched skin, black-pepper tapioca pearls intricately placed about. Like a throne for a disgraced king.

Arthur froze.

The Chicken glanced up, nodded once, and returned to its work.

“What… what are you doing?” Arthur asked, his voice stunned into a whisper.

“Cooking,” said the Chicken, its voice thin and clipped, like breath through wire.

“But it’s awful,” Arthur said, incredulous. “Every plate worse than the last. Why?”

The Chicken set down its blowtorch. “At first, I tried,” it rasped, not looking up. “I made simple chicken. Roasted. Fried. But every simple meal was a battlefield. Too salty. Not hot enough. Too plain. They sent it back with notes, with threats. They wanted to dissect every choice.”

It gestured with a singed wing toward the dining room. “This… this they don’t understand. So they can’t critique it. They are just disgusted.” The Chicken finally looked at him, its eyes black, flat. “And disgust is safer than dissection.”

IV. The Misunderstanding

Arthur sank onto a milk-crate. The cold tile radiated beneath him. He felt hollow, a balloon deflated not by force, but by understanding.

This wasn’t sabotage. It wasn’t laziness, contempt, or malevolence. It was fear. A desperate, misguided strategy born from being endlessly scrutinized.

He had expected competence without engagement. The Chicken had chosen survival over service. And between their mutual self-preservation, there was nothing but plates of misery. He looked again and saw not a villain, but a mirror. Both of them clinging to their own form of inaction, waiting for the other to act first.

He stood and walked back to his table. The waiter had already cleared the offending plates. Arthur sat for a moment in the quiet hum of shared discontent.

His gaze fell upon a crumpled napkin lying on the floor beside his table. A small piece of refuse. An unattended detail. An imperfection someone else was supposed to fix.

He stared at it, and for the first time, truly considered what it might mean to cook.

Slowly, Arthur leaned down. He picked up the napkin, its paper soft and yielding in his hand. He walked to the bin by the entrance, dropped it inside, and left the restaurant. Still craving the nostalgia of warm chicken, Arthur stopped by the local butcher on his way home.