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What's On the Menu?
In a basement apartment beneath an abandoned candy factory lives an unnamed Florida man and his roommate, Will, a stand-up comedian. After discovering Will can cook gourmet meals – though only while blackout drunk on tequila – the two begin a restaurant business, employing the audience members who regularly attend Will’s sets.
Things immediately start to get weird. Household appliances gain sentience and develop feelings; Tampa’s water system becomes tainted with psychotropics; Will keeps disappearing and reappearing, and starts going kind of mad with power; and a cult run by a man who looks like Santa may or may not be orchestrating everything from a motel in St. Petersburg.
Through it all, our Florida man keeps getting distracted by arcade games and his own thoughts.
Things immediately start to get weird. Household appliances gain sentience and develop feelings; Tampa’s water system becomes tainted with psychotropics; Will keeps disappearing and reappearing, and starts going kind of mad with power; and a cult run by a man who looks like Santa may or may not be orchestrating everything from a motel in St. Petersburg.
Through it all, our Florida man keeps getting distracted by arcade games and his own thoughts.
170 pages, Paperback
Published August 27, 2019
40 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 6, 2020
What's on the Menu? is equal parts The Crying of Lot 49 and The Simpsons, seasons 3-7. It's hot sauce pizza. It's an ejector seat.
April 30, 2020
This is a super bizarre and funny book! Chase Griffin’s writing is reminiscent of Bud Smith’s: rapidly paced, goofy characters, and a world that’s slightly off kilter. This was an enthralling, laugh out loud read.
July 17, 2019
I loved it so much, I decided to publish it.
July 28, 2019
That's ending though...
This book was very weird and I loved every minute of it. I chuckled several times!
You could say that "I took it and slurped down every drop"
Oh yes and talking refrigerators with feelings! I feel like I was left without answers about Fridge lol
Whether you love Tampa or hate Tampa this book happens in Tampa!
A very excentric story about "friends" and random ideas and occasionly Santa Claus and sentient appliances.
Also some of those appliances may or may not be murderers...
As a native of Tampa Florida I love the bits that are real parts of my town!
Although the book a short is it extremely fun read!
DOOO ITTTT
This book was very weird and I loved every minute of it. I chuckled several times!
You could say that "I took it and slurped down every drop"
Oh yes and talking refrigerators with feelings! I feel like I was left without answers about Fridge lol
Whether you love Tampa or hate Tampa this book happens in Tampa!
A very excentric story about "friends" and random ideas and occasionly Santa Claus and sentient appliances.
Also some of those appliances may or may not be murderers...
As a native of Tampa Florida I love the bits that are real parts of my town!
Although the book a short is it extremely fun read!
DOOO ITTTT
September 29, 2019
Chase Griffin is a menace. I love the hell out of him and he may or may not be a patsy in a big conspiracy of my devising, but he has problems. He's terrible at cleaning up after himself, he calls me Santa even though I look nothing like Santa, and he thinks I've made him a patsy. This book that he's written is true.
June 16, 2025
“What’s On the Menu?” is a recovered document, a leaked psychic transcript of Tampa’s unconscious, a fever dream baked in a pan lined with lead paint and late-empire anxiety. It is the most Florida book I’ve ever read. It is also, maybe, the last known surviving artifact of the real Chase Griffin.
Yes, that Chase Griffin.
The one born in 1942. The one who, if you read between the lines of Robert Anton Wilson’s correspondence (the real letters, not the redacted PDF crap they feed the public), was known in the scene as “The Waiter Who Serves Absurdity.” Griffin was there. Palmetto Beach. Ybor. He drank with PKD, once argued Derrida into a seizure, and allegedly got Alan Watts to briefly renounce dualism by handing him a psychedelic takeout menu with no entrees and only appetizers called “Simulacrum Nuggets.”
This book? It shouldn’t exist. Griffin died in 1987. Officially. “Died.” Except nobody could ever agree on how. Walked into the Gulf. Disappeared during a hurricane. Or as Rube Gerry tells it in this very book, Griffin got too close to the “water situation” and had to be erased. That’s where it all loops back in.
Because now there’s a guy calling himself Chase Griffin again. Writes like him. Sounds like him. Has a book with his name on it. And yet, something feels… off. Too curated. Too aware of its weirdness. Like a dream that knows it’s a dream. Or worse: a state-approved hallucination.
The current Griffin is almost certainly a plant. A culture-nexus agitprop asset. Some say he helped design the Occupy Wall Street narrative fail-safe, ensuring mass dissent always redirects into spectacle. He’s more a maintenance system than a writer. Ask yourself: if the real Griffin’s work was this potent, dreamlike, hilarious, quietly devastating, full of mutant fridges, seitan recipes, and spectral stand-up comedy, why suppress it? And why replace him?
Because “What’s On the Menu?” is dangerous. It’s a surrealist satire disguised as a slacker comedy disguised as a delivery order from the Gnostic demiurge. It’s a book about cooking, identity, exploitation, failed revolutions, and sentient refrigerators in love. I fink the “Fridge” is a metaphor for Griffin himself. Stuck between functions, yearning to love, always being looted for parts, vlah vlah vlah vlahddie vlah.
One could argue the entire book is a coded confession. Like, of memory tampering. Look at the way time sloshes back and forth, how dreams infect reality, how characters disappear for whole chapters then return without explanation. That’s trauma (but fuck that fnord).
If you want to understand America’s postmodern condition, how sincerity got deepfaked, how rebellion got branded, how the real gets replaced with the performative, read this book. Read this menu as proof.
Why did the military industrial complex give us this wonderful book?
Yes, that Chase Griffin.
The one born in 1942. The one who, if you read between the lines of Robert Anton Wilson’s correspondence (the real letters, not the redacted PDF crap they feed the public), was known in the scene as “The Waiter Who Serves Absurdity.” Griffin was there. Palmetto Beach. Ybor. He drank with PKD, once argued Derrida into a seizure, and allegedly got Alan Watts to briefly renounce dualism by handing him a psychedelic takeout menu with no entrees and only appetizers called “Simulacrum Nuggets.”
This book? It shouldn’t exist. Griffin died in 1987. Officially. “Died.” Except nobody could ever agree on how. Walked into the Gulf. Disappeared during a hurricane. Or as Rube Gerry tells it in this very book, Griffin got too close to the “water situation” and had to be erased. That’s where it all loops back in.
Because now there’s a guy calling himself Chase Griffin again. Writes like him. Sounds like him. Has a book with his name on it. And yet, something feels… off. Too curated. Too aware of its weirdness. Like a dream that knows it’s a dream. Or worse: a state-approved hallucination.
The current Griffin is almost certainly a plant. A culture-nexus agitprop asset. Some say he helped design the Occupy Wall Street narrative fail-safe, ensuring mass dissent always redirects into spectacle. He’s more a maintenance system than a writer. Ask yourself: if the real Griffin’s work was this potent, dreamlike, hilarious, quietly devastating, full of mutant fridges, seitan recipes, and spectral stand-up comedy, why suppress it? And why replace him?
Because “What’s On the Menu?” is dangerous. It’s a surrealist satire disguised as a slacker comedy disguised as a delivery order from the Gnostic demiurge. It’s a book about cooking, identity, exploitation, failed revolutions, and sentient refrigerators in love. I fink the “Fridge” is a metaphor for Griffin himself. Stuck between functions, yearning to love, always being looted for parts, vlah vlah vlah vlahddie vlah.
One could argue the entire book is a coded confession. Like, of memory tampering. Look at the way time sloshes back and forth, how dreams infect reality, how characters disappear for whole chapters then return without explanation. That’s trauma (but fuck that fnord).
If you want to understand America’s postmodern condition, how sincerity got deepfaked, how rebellion got branded, how the real gets replaced with the performative, read this book. Read this menu as proof.
Why did the military industrial complex give us this wonderful book?
November 19, 2023
I discovered this book through Chase Griffin and Christina Quay's radio play podcasts, The Rocco Atleby Foundation & Rocco Atleby's PataPhone, and through Griffin and Quay's How To Play A Necromancer's Theremin. And I must say, What's On The Menu did not disappoint. I think I'm only going to read and listen to Griffin and Quay from now on. If you enjoy wacky books, this menu is for you. The story, form, and the overall book are self-àware, self-conscious, and kind of alive. And this menu seems to be built on ludicrous yet internally consistent coincidences. This book is like a modern Harry Stephen Keeler novel. There's random interjections and asides all throughout the menu, and on a first read they come off as the random thoughts of the nameless narrator, but after a second read I think they might be the thoughts of the book itself. What I love about Griffin and Quay is that the books and the radio plays are kinda the true main characters of themselves. Pretty trippy stuff! There's a giddiness to it all that sorta acts as the menu's driving engine. And the menu has it all: a Santa lookalike motel owner who hates when the narrator calls him Santa, sleepcooking basement apartment dwellers, Florida, the rifuckingdiculous sale of a vintage family photo album for tens of thousands of dollars, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a warehouse that reminds the narrator of the train station from Prince's Cream music video, everything. This is high class absurdity. I hope Griffin and Quay have a hundred more books in them. My glands are ready!
November 30, 2023
Rip-roaring fun time! Pretty sure this book and the one he wrote with Christina Quay is about Wilhelm Reich. Menu appears to be about the macro orgone experiments with weather and Theremin seems to be about the micro bion experiments and bions' relation to Chalmers' idealist consciousness. Never read a novel-of-ideas before that combined David Chalmers and Reich. I wish more authors would mess around and be silly and serious at the time. Can't wait to see what else Griffin and Quay will write.
December 1, 2023
Loved this wacky book. It's the Notes From Underground by Dostoyevsky meets The Carol Burnett Show book that every goofball writer has always wanted to write. This son of gun goofball writer finally pulled it off. Thank you!
November 24, 2023
A thoroughly enjoyable satire about hyperobjects. I highly recommend this hyperbook.
November 27, 2023
Chase Griffin's debut menu is a modern day William Hope Hodgson novel meets a Studio Ghibli movie
November 20, 2023
Totally fucking wild pranky book. You can tell this book was written by someone raised on The Simpsons, Monty Python, Robert Anton Wilson, and sad bastard music.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews