Latest headcanon: As part of the fine tradition of puzzlecraft, monster fine dining (and occasionally less-than-fine but presentation-focused fare) often involves presenting the food itself as puzzles.
Appetizersare traditionally “tactile” spatial puzzlese.g. mozzarella-stick Jenga towers or garlic knot puzzles.The process of neatly untangling them helping diners keep themselves occupied until the main course arrives.
Locked sandwich platters containing parallel plates of ingredients, which are rotated in order to get everyone’s order in the proper configuration – like, “stacked lazy susans,” as it were – at which point they unlock. (Sure, you could specifically order things that share as few ingredients as possible, or only have one or two people get sandwiches, but that’d defeat the whole purpose.)
Salad bars, frozen yogurt places, etc. having you choose a price before serving yourself, right alongside the size of your bowl or plate; you then carefully choose and mete out your toppings so that you actually reach that price. Hopefully you don’t mind switching out those boiled egg slices for an additional scoop of bacon bits.
It’s not in and of itself a faux pas to say “instead of ordering, we’re going to give you a list of six entrees, a list of six sides, and a series of hints as to who wants which,” but you’d better be a really good tipper.
Cakes, pizzas, etc. naturally use the old “cut X pieces with Y slices” standby quite a lot. Typically this is done by the chef/baker/server rather than left to the consumer, to ensure that the outcome is pleasingly asymmetrical without some pieces being ludicrously small. Another, more modern and significantly more labor-intensive option is the “edible jigsaw,” to be first assembled by the diners, then – once complete – disassembled and eaten.
And, naturally, often the menu itself takes the form of a cipher, word scramble, crossword, rebus, etc.
So, I posted this on the Undertale subreddit, but I thought I’d post it here too. I’d like to reach out to the budding Undertale community and see if anyone would be interested in a collaborative project. I know a lot of you folks love to draw or write, but if you enjoy cooking or baking (you don’t even need to be particularly good at it!) you might enjoy this creative project as well.
What I’m thinking is an Undertale-themed cook book. There is so much cooking and wacky foods in this game, there would be ample fodder for it.
It’d be pretty cool if the recipes came from everyone in the community. Different folks could choose what they want to invent a recipe for and we could collect them all in a book. We might even be able to do illustrations for the book if somebody wanted to– or photos of the recipes in the very least. Eventually we could create a free ebook!
Here’s a list of foods and some ideas (this list contains minor spoilers related to items/events/locations in the game):
–Ruins–
Toriel’s Cinnamon-Butterscotch Pie (recipe already done by several
folks out there)
Flowey’s Fire Magic-Infused ‘Friendliness Pellets’ – Done by bonfirepupkin
Sans’ Ketchup Shots (ok but not really ketchup. more like Bloody
Marys maybe. pretty sure you’d throw up if you actually tried drinking any
appreciable quantity of ketchup.) – Unclaimed!
honestly just really like undertale 