Chef Eats Last by Alex Sitze, is a 5 course meal of a song, with the opening appetizer coming back out last, smothered in something sour. The secret sauce to Sitze's song is its lyrics. You taste one thing first, something wistful? The promise of summer? And it's served straightforward enough: 1/2 cup The Mountain Goats, 2 tablespoons of Bon Iver, and glass of They Might Be Giants. But the lyrics start changing taste. Course 2 comes out and suddenly we're in a nice summer night breeze of yacht rock done modern and tasteful. Bass guitars, shimmering keyboards, a tambourine roll out of the kitchen to meet the single singer-songwriter at his acoustic with well-produced and performed vocals sliding into falsetto.
But then, what's this? A psychedelic folk rock bands comes out hot and there's a sense that something is wrong. Sitze is angry or frustrated about something. This lyrical secret sauce is a taste you can't quite identify until course 1 comes back sour and he lets you know, "crack is on the table/Egg is on your face." Yes, the chef does eat last. He's tired and he's been hinting to you something about the kitchen you've never seen. The ingredients that sour a gateway pinch of "that old sugar moon/measured by the spoon" (read: cocaine) into something that ruins the lives of many people, particularly those who work in hospitality: crack. Chef Eats Last is a dream of a song, like the dream of an ambitious young chef. Until it turns into a nightmare. 5 courses. Eat up.