Chapter 592: Envy and Disappointment (4)
Min-joon wasn’t like him. Of course, sometimes he was too tired to show his cooking skills properly, but he regarded every moment of preparing three meals a day happily as if it was a festival. And he took it seriously all the time.
‘I’ve been slacking lately.’
All of a sudden, Anderson felt the strong urge to cook. He wanted to make this dish of his now, not the one as demanded by a head chef or a sous chef
He had grown up. He had become a father, and he had also learned how to stop his envy from turning into jealousy.
However, Min-joon was always ahead of him, as always.
In the meantime, Min-joon frowned fiercely after watching a shocking scene.
“Who the hell are these women?”
“Oh my God! I can’t believe this...”
When Min-joon and Kaya returned to the hotel room, the first thing they saw were two women lying on the sofa, completely drunk. Bottles of wine on the table and the scent of alcohol floating in the air greeted them.
“Well, it looks like they’re in a good mood, given the cheese and wine.”
“Yeah, a drinking party is always gorgeous at first.”
Min-joon shook his head with a sigh. He even thought of taking them to the bed, but they didn’t seem to feel uncomfortable, given their posture on the sofa. Besides, he didn’t touch their bodies in front of Kaya.
When he heard it later, it was Chloe who brought Delia here, to his surprise. In fact, Chloe had no friends in New York because Min-joon and Kaya flew to Los Angeles to serve as the judges of the Grand Chef competition for the past several days. He asked Chloe what happened during their absence, but she wouldn’t talk. Of course, he figured it out to the best he could.
As a matter of fact, Min-joon and Kaya spent one or two days a week at the Grand Chef House recently. The strange thing was that they felt the center of their lives was not New York, but the Grand Chef’s House. Was it because their experiences there, though brief, were so rewarding?
What was more, they couldn’t visit various restaurants for Choters Guide as often as before. They visited almost all the restaurants with good reputations in New York, but they could not visit restaurants far from their place because of time constraints. In other words, it would take them longer to go there than they expected. If they had not gone to Los Angeles for the Grand Chef competition, they could have taken time out a couple of times per week for Choters Guide, but the reality was not different from what they expected.
But the current situation wasn’t too bad. In fact, when it came to their cooking careers, Kaya and Min-joon boasted of a stellar record. Given that they were selected as the judges of the Grand Chef for their age, nobody could dispute their cooking skills.
Although he was so busy, it also helped him focus on cooking this time.
Cooking, sensuous cuisine, and kitchen leadership.
He needed to master these three conditions to reach cooking level 9.
Among them, the second one, namely, sensual cooking, that Min-joon could consciously focus on. In the end, cooking showed one’s skills. And what determined a chef’s cooking skills was how much time he spent on it. As far as cooking time was concerned, he had enough of it, so it was not a big problem. As far as kitchen leadership was concerned, he already had enough experience working as a sous chef at Rose Island. Of course, he could have cultivated better leadership if he had worked as a head chef, but he was not yet at that stage.
As for sensuous cooking, he really spent a lot of time on it whenever he had free time. In fact, as the name suggested, sensuous cooking was one of the most difficult conditions for cooking level 9. In other words, he needed to master how to make very delicate and demanding dishes like Cho Reggiano and Six Meats.
‘Maybe Kaya can master it faster than me.’
Thinking about it like that, he got more emboldened. It was true that Kaya was faster than him in raising the cooking level. For example, she reached cooking level 7 faster than him, not to mention cooking level 8. But he wanted to reach cooking level 9 faster than her this time.
He was even aiming at cooking level 10.
Lots of chefs didn’t know exactly what cooking level 10 was. In fact, many of them already gave up reaching that level. Even June and Rachel didn’t even imagine they would be able to reach Daniel’s cooking level. But Min-joon wanted to help them reach cooking level 10. And he also wanted to reach cooking level 10, about which he felt he was delusional. But his immediate concern was cooking level 9. He needed to meet the three conditions. When he already knew the three conditions for cooking level 9, it would be stupid if he could not master them. With that in mind, he dedicated himself to making sensuous cuisine.
But to his great surprise, the first condition he satisfied was completely unexpected.
To be honest, when he first decided to make sensual cuisine completely his own, he was so confident that it would not be that hard to make such dishes.
To be more precise, he felt he could make sensuous dishes within the time frame that he set by himself. As a matter of fact, when he wanted to do something or had something he wanted to achieve, it was very rare that he could not achieve it.
At some point, he started to take success for granted. So, he felt the same thing about sensuous cooking. But it was more difficult than he thought.
The most difficult thing was that he couldn’t get a good feel for it. In fact, he spent lots of time on sensuous cooking in the past. Although he was more concerned with analyzing the taste more artistically and more in three dimensions, he realized such an approach didn’t make a big difference.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like artistic cooking in the past. That didn’t mean he cooked only simple dishes. He came to be able to pursue what he had been always doing or aiming for more consciously, which was different from what he was in the past.
He also spent more time developing his own recipes, but he soon realized that it didn’t mean that much. Thanks to the help of the system, he could always explore recipes, so cooking by himself was actually no more than verifying the recipe idea he had in mind.
In addition, as for sensual cuisine, he was not sure what it was exactly, so he often felt so listless while he was at it that he didn’t know if he was cooking the right thing.
But he didn’t know how lucky he was. The system was definitely empowering him, but he rather complained about it to make excuses for his lack of progress in sensuous cooking.
But his slow growth might have been a great boon to him, for he didn’t have to impatiently dwell on the cooking level he once aimed for. When he realized finally that he could not achieve his goal overnight, no matter how much time he spent, he became much more relaxed than before.
It was at that moment that he seized the opportunity.
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The chefs of Rose Island were pros. More precisely, even the expression ‘pro’ was not enough to describe them because many of them were better than sous chefs or demi chefs of any good restaurants in terms of cooking skills, even though some of them were still typical cooks.
No wonder Rose Island chefs were generally way better than those working at ordinary restaurants with good reputations.
So it was natural that Min-joon came to compare the participants in the Grand Chef with those professional chefs working at Rose Island. The gap between them was so clear and so big.
By chance, or as fate would have it, he was faced with a situation where he would lead the participants of the Grand Chef competition.
‘Team mission...’
Two weeks had passed since they were given a team mission. In the meantime, there was one more personal mission in between, and as a result, those who survived until now were reduced to 15. Looking at the number 15, it was perfect for dividing them into three or five teams.
In fact, the organizers of the Grand Chef competition had 15 participants in mind from the beginning. There were three judges and three teams. What did that mean?
“Alright, let me call the trio who achieved the best results in the last mission. Hugo, Gwen, Merlyn. Please come out.”
Maybe they might have thought it was an unexpected roll-call. Aside from Gwen, who was the runner-up, and Hugo, whose cooking skills were well recognized by the judges, Merlyn, who they hated including in their teams, was included among the top three.
‘She’s really talented.’
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