WAIT WAIT HOLD ON. Did you say chef boyardee and The Menu in the same sentence?? And stardew? I'm sat.
I SURE DID! (thanks for the ask!)
So full disclosure, I have no snippets to share (yet) because I wanted to wait until I wrote (or at least drafted) the unhinged fic with Lucky first before I went down that rabbit hole. Also I've only eaten Chef Boyardee a handful of times in my life and haven't seen The Menu yet tho I know pretty much all of the spoilers and the general gist of the plot. Point being: This is one of those fics that I want to do decent research for in order to make the jokes land and I aintent done that yet.
General plot gist (behind readmore bc I know people follow me who haven't seen The Menu yet and might be spoiled):
Morris or another brandhuman/mascot invites Gus to an evening of fine dining on Chef Boyardee's private island.
I think I'm gonna skip the sex work backstory for the sake of word count, so maybe that also means whomever invited him didn't know what was going to go down.
Chef Boyardee presents the guests (people tied to the Chef Boyardee branding/cheapening of its ingredients and original flavors) with a series of courses based on his line of canned foods but made the way he originally intended them to be.
The courses get increasingly aggressive as Boyardee starts to crash out, especially after some of the guests are clued into this being a Last Supper of sorts.
When Gus realizes his goose is about to be cooked, he calls for help (from Willy? idk), and then makes a ploy for his life by asking Chef Boyardee to make something very simple with love i.e. like cacio e pepe or similar and then, of course, takes it to go.
Chef Boyardee ends the meal with a traditional Italian dessert (proving that he is more than shitty, mushy, oversalted pasta) that he uses to kill every one except Gus. Not sure what dessert tho. I might need to crowd source this.
{Ask me about one of the WIPs in my writing folder!}
