But Hugo was not dissatisfied with the situation because there was a fat chance that a big restaurant could hire him as head chef. He was among the top contenders at the Grand Chef competition, so he had some recognition, but he was still an amateur. In other words, he was really nothing, compared with the first-rate chefs of famous restaurants.
Nevertheless, the reason Hugo decided to work at a small restaurant was because he wanted freedom. He knew he wasn’t quite perfect as a chef yet. However, he wanted to fix his problems one by one by confronting them little by little. He wanted to introduce new menus and communicate with customers all the time, which alone was like a dream job for him.
And it didn’t take long for him to find that he could not realize such a dream.
— Do you intend to change the menu? No. Customers showed good feedback these days. Why do you want to bother to take the risk now?
— Hey, Paul. You promised me you would leave everything about the menu and the kitchen to me! The kitchen is my own place. Don’t you want to follow that basic rule?
— But it’s my right to change the head chef here. Hey, Hugo. I’m not saying this to criticize you. But this is business, and I have to spend a lot of money on it. Are you going to force me to be considerate of your concern, but you are not going to pay attention to my concern?
After he argued with the owner of his restaurant, Hugo met halfway several times. But when he could not persuade the owner, he was fired, after all.
Maybe the Grand Chef competition was like a poison, not a blessing, to Hugo. At the Grand Chef, he was given a cooking theme, and he could make whatever dish he wanted to make according to the theme. But it was a different story at the restaurant. At first, he thought he could freely make the dishes he wanted, but he was wrong. The place he reached out of the jungle was not the open meadow but the fenced zoo.
“Actually, this was the dish I wanted to make when I worked at the restaurant,” Hugo said, looking down at the plate. From what he said, it looked like there was a lot of extravagant cuisine on the plate but it was not. Apples cut into slices and baked in butter were placed on one side like potatoes, and the mackerel, with its intestines and backbones clean, was shiny after it was cooked perfectly. In addition, the pure white cream sauce made by boiling fresh cream and cider vinegar covered only one side of the mackerel, which stimulated the appetite.
“I made it with a Normandy style. What do you think?” Hugo asked.
“Sometimes I think you’re from the Mediterranean, not Mississippi,” Min-joon said with a chuckle. Hugo smiled at him quietly.
It was Min-joon who lifted the fork first. He picked up the fork over Hugo’s mackerel, full of anticipation. In fact, this was the mackerel Hugo grilled to his taste. Min-joon liked Peter’s tandoori, and Michael’s non-tataki cooking was also good. Gwen’s mackerel was just as enjoyable. However, since he was used to eating grilled mackerel back in Korea, Min-joon naturally enjoyed the mackerel the most when it was grilled well-done. And Hugo’s mackerel was just that. It was baked to perfection, without missing the fat inside, then served with the sauce at the same time. The fork cracked through the skin of the mackerel then ripped open the flesh. Oil dripped down through the ripped flesh, just like chicken breast, and Min-joon immediately dipped it in cream sauce and put it in his mouth.
“Great!”
Obviously, Min-joon uttered such an exclamation for the first time today.
This was the taste that he wanted the most, a taste long-hidden somewhere in his memory.
The cream sauce was a stroke of genius.
It could have ended up as an ordinary grilled mackerel if he had only enjoyed the mackerel, but the cream sauce moistened his tongue with sweet and sour and relieved the fatigue accumulated on his tongue in an instant.
In no time, Kaya and Joseph uttered exclamations, too.
Min-joon smiled brightly at Hugo and said, “You are still as good as before, Hugo.”
Hugo didn’t want to hear him say that. What he wanted to hear from Min-joon was that he changed. Nonetheless, Min-joon’s compliment made him at ease somehow.
***
23, all told. Out of a little over a hundred participants, only 23 survived. Neither Min-joon nor Kaya were not interested in selecting more participants for the sake of broadcasting segments when they didn’t meet the qualifications for the next rounds. They believed that opportunities should be equal for everyone.
Normally, the participants would all go home with a brief interview as soon as their evaluation was done. But it was different today because it was the first day the participants camped together. So not only they but also Min-joon, Kaya, and Joseph stayed with them and shared their stories.
Of course, what they shared with each other was obvious. Some of the participants wondered what the world’s top chefs’ lives were like, and others asked how they could get there. And there were a lot of them who wanted to know about their problems and their future.
Gwen was the most characteristic personality among them all.
“Do you sympathize with me?” she asked Min-joon all of a sudden.
It was almost the end of their little party when she asked him such a question. While Kaya, a bit drunk, was out to the kitchen to do some cooking, Gwen stood before him and asked, looking at him. Watching her, he felt a strange sense of déjà vu. In the past, Kaya once stood before him, asking something.
“Why are you curious about that?”
“Well, I wonder if you wanted to help me out of sympathy or because you noticed my potential. I think it will affect your evaluation a lot.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference either way. So let me give you an answer. I sympathize with you, but at the same time, I saw your potential. Did I answer your question?’ he said, looking at her.
She wasn’t really enjoying the party. More precisely, she was avoiding it because she didn’t sip any alcohol yet. Maybe it was because she might be vulnerable to the temptation of drugs again if she drank.
At that moment, she asked as if she read his mind, “Have you ever had drugs?”
“I often take vitamins.”
“Well, I loved cocaine quite a bit.”
Suddenly, she began to confess to him. But he didn’t stop her.
She slowly continued, “At first, I had drugs at a club. My friends there gave me alcohol, and I felt really better after drinking it. Later, I found out that the drink had cocaine in it, and I realized that I didn’t have any symptoms of addiction, so I thought it was not a big deal. So I thought I was different from those who ruined themselves after having drugs. I reassured myself that I was just having fun. So every time I went to the club, I started having cocaine.”
Min-joon just listened without responding. It was something he couldn’t comment on easily.
“You know that? When I listened to music while I was drunk in a club, every beat of the music was flowing through my veins. It’s no exaggeration to say that music has become me. I am music, and music is me. When I kept dancing at the club like that, a day passed in the blink of an eye. So I went to clubs and house parties endlessly. I played like crazy, then passed out. When I woke up, I went to the club again and again. You know what’s funny? I feel really good. In terms of pleasure, it’s the highest pleasure in the world. But when pleasure reached its peak… happiness faded away. I’ve been feeling it at some point. I realized that every time I took drugs, I was borrowing my happiness in the future, so I knew I would be getting more and more unhappy in the future. I knew that without drugs I would spend day after day in lethargy.”
She paused for a moment then resumed, “And at some point, I wasn’t happy even if I took the drugs. In other words, I could not borrow the happiness that I could enjoy in the future. In other words, there was no happiness left for me in the future.”
She spoke in a calm voice for a while. It seemed as if she gave up everything. So he felt she was now crying desperately, appealing to him to help her out.
“I don’t have any more happiness left, so I’m not drunk anymore even if I drink.”
She was talking gibberish, so he found it hard to understand what she was trying to say.
Nonetheless, he seemed to grasp what she wanted to emphasize.
“Well, let bygones be bygones. I’ll try my best to like cooking.”
Gwen bowed her head then said, “Please help me!”
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