Phillip Foss has never had much of an internal censor. A gentler way of putting it is that he’s always worn his heart on his sleeve. The chef arrived in Chicago in 2007, taking the top job at Lockwood, the Palmer House’s fine-dining restaurant, during a time when chefs had become public figures rather than faceless, nameless galley drudges. Foss also launched the Pickled Tongue, one of the first and most consistent chef blogs, and was a prolific Twitter scamp. In fact, it was an attempt to broker peace between two battling chefs that got him canned from Lockwood three years later when he tweeted: “Why can’t we all just smoke a bong?”
The opening panels depict off-duty chef “Josh” waking his young daughters with the intoxicating aroma of thousands of dollars’ worth of white truffles—much to their disgust and his cost-conscious wife’s disapproval. From there a trip to the chiropractor elicits a vision of a giant anthropomorphic truffle goddess (“All chefs worship truffles”), and then a longer, lysergic trip to the neighborhood cannabis dispensary, where Foss encounters the ghosts of his dead heroes—partial stand-ins for Charlie Trotter and nouvelle cuisine chef Jean-Louis Palladin.
Or to put it another way, from an early preface:
