Hi! Welcome to the Stetson Café. The specials are on the board—I would highly recommend the veal shank. Also, we’re sort of known for our burger. It’s a half-pound of grass-fed beef, your choice of blue or Gruyère cheese, and it comes with our signature house-made ketchup. That’s right. The ketchup here at the Stetson is made in-house with freshly diced tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a touch of paprika, and it’s disgusting. It truly is gross. Nobody likes it, and all the customers secretly wish we just served Heinz ketchup instead.
I guess you could say that our ketchup is a homage to an American classic—a foul, grotesque homage. It’s the 2011 remake of “Footloose” of ketchups. It’s a viscous concoction that gets its rough, mealy texture from chopped-up anchovies and horseradish, and you’d have to be a true sadist to want to put that shit in your mouth.
Bumpy—“bumpy” is a word I would use to describe our ketchup. Also “fucked up.”
Here’s the thing: When the ketchup comes out, you’re going to think to yourself, This doesn’t look like ketchup. And then you’ll ask me, “Wait, I’m sorry, is this the ketchup?” And I’ll look at you and say, “Yup, that’s the ketchup.” And then you’ll look down at the ketchup and think, This is some weird-ass ketchup. And you’ll be completely right. It is weird-ass. But it’s a-hundred-per-cent fresh, and it a-hundred-per-cent sucks.
Oh! Did I mention that our garbage ketchup has a spicy kick to it? Well, it does. It contains curried pickled cauliflower. Mmmmm. One taste will take you back to those days when you were a kid and your dad would grill up some burgers and you’d take a bite and think, Man, this ketchup is great, but you know what’s missing? Curried pickled cauliflower. Remember those days? Of course you don’t. They never happened.
Now, when I first mentioned that we make our own ketchup, you looked excited, no doubt because you thought, Wow, what a fresh, organic experience I’m about to have. I can’t wait to finally enjoy real, homemade ketchup. My entire life I’ve been conditioned to enjoy a corporatized version of ketchup and I have been deprived of what ketchup actually is supposed to taste like.
Couple of things: one, don’t think about ketchup like that. It’s ketchup. Two, the proper flavor of ketchup isn’t something people miss out on; people miss out on seeing the Beatles live at Shea Stadium. And weird people miss out on seeing the new Jack Reacher movie on opening night. Three, maybe we just need to accept that Heinz—a very large, multinational corporation—just happened to perfect ketchup. That’s why it has a crap-ton of money. It makes really good ketchup. It is No. 1, and we are No. 4,677,843, just below the ooze that streams out of the alien’s mouth and onto Sigourney Weaver’s face. And above that is Hunts.
By the way, your initial enthusiasm about our ketchup isn’t completely your fault. I, as your waiter, am absolutely complicit. When I told you we do our own little spin on ketchup, I smiled a smug, self-satisfied smile, as if to say, “Welcome to the exclusive world of D.I.Y. ketchup.”
Well, who the fuck am I, you know? You’d have to be a real piece of dog shit to smile that smugly about anything, especially ketchup. Truth be told, folks, I’m not a good man. Yesterday I asked my grandmother if she forgot to send my birthday check, and I have definitely paid for sex.
So, anyway, that’s our ketchup. It sucks. And nothing—not the exposed brick in this restaurant, the open kitchen that allows you to watch the cooks at work, or my pathological self-assured smile—can make it good.
Now that that’s out of the way, here at the Stetson we also do our own little spin on chicken nuggets. They’re made from grass-fed, free-range chicken; the nuggets are fatty and gummy; you can see the gristle when you bite into them; and, if you want chicken nuggets that taste good, there is a McDonald’s about three blocks away.
