The illustrations, by Michael Foreman, are a little pallid and storybookish, with at least one — a depiction of Grendel's mother as a grass-skirted fashion disaster with scaly green breasts — that is apt to elicit snickers rather than shudders.
Main dishes include risotto with wild mushrooms; roast rack of lamb with braising greens; breast of free-range organic chicken with zucchini in carpione and baby rucola; and aged Angus steak, Florentine style.
When one alights, he erects an iridescent blue-green breast shield and raises a cape of velvety black feathers that lay across his back, into an ovoid shape around his head.
RECOMMENDED DISHES -- Sea scallops with ravioli, crab cake with root vegetables, wild mushroom ravioli, mussels and green curry, breast of duck, roasted lobster, seared salmon steak.
He had a mustache he trimmed but never shaved off, round titanium-wire glasses, and a moth-eaten wool cruiser vest, olive green, complicated breast pockets bristling with pens and little flashlights.
