"Japanese is still popular. And with the small portions, we could make a bundle."
"Insurance would kill us. Those damn knife juggias flipping and flinging those heavy blades in the customers' faces-before long, someone'd lose a nose and we'd lose our restaurant. No, this latest reconcept will work."
"People are finicky about what they put in their stomachs."
"Hey, they eat blue cheese. And blue corn is big now. Whoever heard of blue food? Show me something edible that's naturally blue. People eat Indian cuisine. That stuff tastes like rat in goat sauce. And Indian desserts might as well be sweetened rabbit pellets. Yet people flock to Indian restaurants."
"People also understand the four basic food groups."
"I thought it was five."
"Four. They learn in school that you need so many grams of cereal grain, fruits, vegetables and meat."
"Dairy products. That's the fifth basic food group. Not that anyone drinks dairy anymore."
"Five. Five basic food groups. I stand corrected. It's five. Not four. Not six. But five." She held up five fingers.
"Well, we just discovered the sixth."
"People will not pay to eat bugs, Perry."
"Not bugs. Arthropods. Or maybe insects. Don't say bugs. You say bugs, you might as well say snots. Or boogers."
"Might as well say boogers. That's what we're serving up."
"No, we are serving fried grasshopper on a bed of romaine lettuce. Chocolate-covered fire ants. Sweet-and-sour crickets. Yellow jacket au jus. Perfect grazing food. We are not serving anything people don't eat in other countries. This is L.A. We knock down cultural and culinary barriers every month. We'll sweep east with this revolutionary restaurant reconcept, and by the turn of the century, we'll be overseeing an empire of-"
"McRoaches."
Perry winced. "Don't say roach. Add it to the taboo list. We don't serve roach in our restaurant. That's going too far."
"Maybe we should put that at the bottom of the menu in Florentine script. 'Positively no roaches served.'"
"Not funny, Heather."
"Not appetizing, Perry."
Perry Noto looked at his wife, Heather. She was not hard to look at. Not after the tummy tuck, the boob job and butt lift. Her face had been spared the multiple plastic surgeries. It was a clean, sunscrubbed face and would be presentable for another three or four years even under the California sun. After all, Heather Noto was only twenty-six.
"You could be blonder," he said, trying to change the subject.
"What?"
"Your hair. It could be blonder."
"The next-lighter shade is platinum. Platinum blond went out with Jean Harlow."
"Blonder."
"Look. I've been ash blond, champagne blond, honey blond-all the way down to summer blond. I'm stopping here. My follicles can't take all this dying and rinsing."
"Image is everything. Especially in our business."
"If we don't imagine up a name for this latest wild hair of yours, our image will be guacamole."
"I got just the thing."
And from a shelf of New Age books-a relic of their failed macrobiotic plunge-Perry pulled down a red paperback, and opened it.
"What's that?"
"Thesaurus."
"My question stands."
"It's like a dictionary, except it shows you every possible variant on a word. Right now I'm looking up 'food.' "
"You're on the wrong page. Try 'bugs.'"
"Shh."
Suddenly, Perry Noto's eyes flew wide. They became two white grapes under pressure with their seeds squeezed out.
"I got it! I got it!"
"What?"
"Grubs!"
"Grubs!"
"It's perfect. 'Grub' is a synonym for 'food.' And a lot of perfectly scrumptious insects start off as grubs. We're serving them up before they get out of the larval stage."
"Why not just call it McMaggots?" Heather asked bitingly.
"Will you cut the shit?"
"Who in their right mind would pay forty dollars an entree to eat in an eatery that calls itself Grubs?"
"It's cute."
"It's death." And with that, Heather Noto went to her own office bookshelf and took down a yellow book with a plastic cover.
"What's that?" Perry asked suspiciously.
"French dictionary."