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Neo-Archaic Cuisine
Foodists are reporting on the growing popularity of "Neo-Archaic Cuisine", a hot new culinary craze sweeping the Bay Area. The most famous neo-archaic venue is Moira's Murgish Restaurant where Moira Feglesh and her partner Zelf have been serving traditional Murgish delicacies ever since they arrived from their tiny homeland of Togo Doro.
For those unfortunate enough to remain unacquainted with the delights of Moira's kitchen, a hasty background in Murgish cuisine may be helpful. Until the beginning of this century, Murgish dishes consisted almost exclusively of the wild peccary, or Wapoosi as it is known in the Murgish tongue.
Since time-immemorial the Murgs and their fractious neighbors the Turgs, have hunted the Wapoosi, by blowgun, in their native hills of Dragu. The animal, therefore, is an intricate part of Murgish religious life, as well as the mainstay of their diet.
At Moira's, guests participate in an age-old Murgish propitiary rite in which a carefully anointed virgin or Wapoosi-Mama, is seized, dismembered, and offered up to the deity. In Moira's modern version of the ancient ceremony, a high school honor student is forced to read excerpts from the California drivers manual while carefully placing strips of Tofurky over a department store mannequin.
On my first visit to Moira's I was delighted to find the hospitality as abundant as the portions of crispy "singing"chips, (fried Wapoosi-skin laden with rainforest psychoactives that were placed on the table at the outset of our meal.
By ordering Moira's special combination plate as an appetizer, we were able to sample several famous Murgish specialties at once. The most famous, known as Pasnic, is a grease-saturated dumpling served in a flavorless jell. It is traditionally taken up with the thumb and fore-finger and pressed briefly into the right cheek, before being slid counter-clockwise towards the mouth. In Murgish, this time-honored gesture is called Surprising the Gums.
Though delighted up to this point with our meal, it was upon ordering our entrees that my date and I met with an unfortunate surprise. Misunderstanding our order, our waiter assumed that we also wanted to participate in the ancient Murgish fertility ritual known as Imak (pronounced: eemak).
This ceremony, which originally involved waterfowl, is an age-old tradition amongst newly married Murgs. Before we knew quite what was happening, a small bearded man approached our table dressed in traditional Murgish garb. In one hand he held a small free-range chicken, in the other a tube of cinnamon-flavored personal lubricant.
Though reasonably priced at $32.50, this unsettling ceremony should really be reserved only for those with a strong constitution and a keen interest in Cultural Anthropology.
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