Chapter 430: Totsuki Chef Shirou
Shirou was in the kitchen—a small, intimate eatery. It was laid out like a Japanese ramen shop, with a counter surrounding the kitchen so that dishes could be served directly to the customers as soon as they were plated. The shop was quiet; the other tables were already finished, and only two customers remained at the counter, waiting for their orders. One was a middle-aged man with a beer belly, and the other was an office worker wearing glasses.
"What's the matter with you? Little boss! Don't tell me you're tired?" the man asked with a laugh, nursing a small cup of sake as he caught Shirou dozing off.
"No, I was just dozing off. I had a shocking dream," Shirou replied casually, waving his hand.
"What kind of dream?" the customer asked, curious, as he snacked on dried squid and sipped his drink.
"No, it was nothing special. I just suddenly had many, many younger sisters in the dream," Shirou said, his voice flat and calm.
"Ah, you don't mean those kinds of sisters, do you?" the man smirked, giving him a look that all men understood.
"No, I considered them my real ones," Shirou said, his eyes reflecting the emptiness of a dead fish. At that moment, his face took on a transcendent expression, as if he had attained Nirvana—devoid of worldly desires, oblivious to both object and self.
In truth, this wasn't the first time he'd had this dream. But it felt so real that it still affected his life to this day. Whenever he walked through places like Shinjuku, new memories would constantly surface in his mind, as if an "other" version of him had personally experienced it all before.
"How many is 'many'?" the drinking customer asked, intrigued by Shirou's enlightened expression.
"Twenty thousand..." Shirou replied, eyes glazed over.
In this life, he had woken up alone. The prospect of having sisters was impossible; he was content just living out his life like a salted fish.
"Pfft!!!" The customer sprayed his drink.
"What the hell is that?! I've got two daughters and that's already enough to drive me crazy! They even complain about my 'old man smell'! What 'old man smell'? I'm not even fifty yet!" he grumbled, venting his frustrations.
"Yes, yes. You're not even drunk yet, so stop the drunken rambling," Shirou said unhurriedly, handing the man a hot towel before picking up a cleaning rag.
"By the way, you were sleeping just now, weren't you? If you're not up to it, I'll go to Chef Yukihira's shop next door. If they don't get too carried away with weird innovations, their
signature dishes are extremely good—not much worse than yours," said the other customer sitting on the right side of the counter.
"Alright, alright, I'll do it right now! Grilled saury and sauce-drenched tofu, right? Please wait a moment!" Shirou flicked the wristband he wore, turning it into a long white towel which he tied around his head.
Swish! The fabric curtain at the entrance was flung high, and a haughty young lady with long golden hair burst in, hands on her hips, shouting loudly:
"Wait! Shirou! What on earth are you thinking after graduating from Totsuki?! You've already decided to enter the Chef's Grand Prix! Why are you still dawdling in a place like this?!"
"Erina, I figured you'd be arriving here around now," Shirou said with a light smile, greeting the girl who had stormed in. "Ah, Hisako, welcome."
"Pardon the intrusion, Shirou-sama." The secretary-chan, Arato Hisako, peeked out from behind Erina, bowing her head. Dressed in professional office attire, she was the consummate secretary and looked at Shirou with great respect.
In this world, after Shirou had awakened, he discovered he was in a realm where gourmet food reigned supreme. The common saying was "food is the heaven of the people." The most profitable businesses weren't mobile phones or the internet; they were food conglomerates.
Shirou had accidentally discovered he had a natural talent for spices. His nose was incredibly sensitive; he could distinguish every single component and ratio in a pot of mixed spices without missing a single one.
From the Chinese cuisine he started with back at the Totsaka residence, to his own specialty—Japanese washoku—to the Western-style dishes he shared with Sakura, and...
While gourmet food was popular in his previous world, it lacked a formal system. It was like how "Chinese food" was a blanket term in the West, as if Westerners had only had one school of cooking over the last few thousand years. In reality, the Roman Empire had its gourmets, not to mention world-renowned French cuisine, Italian pasta, German sausages, the notorious British "Stargazy Pie," and Nordic fermented herring.
When a foreigner visited and asked you to take them out for "Chinese food," every Chinese person would be stunned. Leaving aside the Manchu-Han Imperial Feast or state banquets, just counting the Han cuisine alone, there were eight major regional cuisines, each with their own sub-cuisines based on dialects and ethnic groups.
To Westerners, it was like being face-blind and unable to tell the difference between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people. Many lumped Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisines all together as "Asian cuisine"—the so-called "Eastern food." You might walk into an "Asian restaurant" and find a hodgepodge of Chinese food, sushi, kimchi, Thai tom yum, Vietnamese fish sauce dishes, and Nyonya cuisine from Malaysia and Singapore. Furthermore, the store owners were a mixed bag. For instance, in America, more than half of
the sushi shops were run by people of Chinese descent, and jianbing (savory crepes) were sold by white people.
But in this new world, new dishes were being developed constantly. Even with Shirou's talent and his "super learning ability"—where he could master a dish just by seeing it—he couldn't learn them all in a lifetime.
Then there was the issue of food safety. In his old world, there were various problems—some exposed, some unspoken—like gutter oil, processed additives, and "magic-infused" genetically modified foods. Every year, regardless of the country, strict inspectors would come to check the hygiene of the shop, and if anything failed, it was shut down for a week of rectification. But in reality, every shop warehouse was stacked with food, and since cooks worked with grease all day, even the chefs were covered in it. How could a kitchen not have stains? As a producer of blood, water, and grease, the sewers were inevitably crawling with cockroaches and rats. You might think a grand, luxurious renovation meant the shop was clean, but that just meant you hadn't seen the filth in the back kitchen; the restaurant area was just cleaned in time.
Anyone who has run a catering business or worked in a back kitchen knows how many parasites are in the guts of the fish you kill, or how much the oil you use actually costs per pound. The chef might wear a mask, but what about the lady whose only job is to wash the vegetables—couldn't she sneeze? The Ganges River stretches 2,525 kilometers across India and Bangladesh; it is the mother river of India, a holy river of Hinduism, recorded in many Buddhist scriptures, and connected to the lifeblood of generations of Indian ethnic groups. Since ancient times, people have swum there, washed clothes, dumped filth, excreted waste, and held funerals.
The question then arises: where did the bottled water they sell in their shops come from?
Cheap food couldn't be trusted: domestic milk powder, hormone-filled chickens, contraceptive-pill fish, parasite-ridden seafood, pesticide-laden produce. Expensive things were unaffordable: prices rose every year. Kobe Wagyu, Nagoya river eels, Ise lobsters, Tottori snow crab, French foie gras, Russian caviar—these were either impossible to farm, limited to annual catch quotas, or impossible to mass-produce, meaning they never reached the mouths of ordinary people earning below the city's average wage.
There were also rare items like matsutake mushrooms, Yubari melons, and gooseneck barnacles. Even more prestigious were Wuyi Mountains' Da Hong Pao tea or exclusive wines brewed from grapes in European royal vineyards. Even if you were rich, you weren't guaranteed to enjoy them.
The wealthy gained health, while the poor could only laugh and say they were "challenging the strength of their stomachs with Bear Grylls." Where on earth is there a "clean" organism? The human body itself is teeming with countless bacteria. You could even say that with every breath, a person inhales the corpses of flying insects, dust, and PM2.5.
But in this world, all those problems had been solved. The food safety management system was perfect, and the various inconveniences had been addressed. In agriculture, there were cultivation experts, experts in breeding new ingredients, and "gourmet hunters" who discovered new ingredients in nature. Within less than twenty years of entering this new century, there were dozens of people as brilliant as Yuan Longping, pioneers who made breakthroughs for the world. Every country, much like real estate development, was vigorously developing agriculture, sweeping away the decline caused by food trust crises. And the chefs emerged to turn this bounty into perfect dishes.
"Don't you think there's a romance in being a chef who finds cheap, affordable ingredients by hunting through discount flyers, only to turn them into delicious and inexpensive meals?" Shirou asked, arms crossed. He made a tonkatsu set meal that cost 1,000 yen and filled you up, tasting no worse than a roast suckling pig that started at 20,000 yen in a hotel, while giving customers a sense of home-cooked warmth. Where was the fault in that?
Erina marched forward angrily, shouting directly at Shirou: "I don't understand what you're talking about at all! When it comes down to it, what is so good about those cheap things?"
"My interest lies in making food that makes more people feel happy. I'm not really interested in overly high-end, expensive cuisine that only a handful of people can eat," Shirou shook his head.
Research over the years had taught him that "expensive" didn't necessarily mean "best." Take seafood, for instance: much of it was high in heavy metals. A tuna costing millions of yen did more harm than good. And things like shark fin—they were all slightly toxic. The mercury content in shark fins was extremely high; eating too much could literally kill you. Yet, the ones wantonly consuming these things were never the common folk, but the wealthy.
Then there was the superstition about seasoning being harmful. Many wealthy kitchens had nothing but salt and a bit of oil; they blanched greens and meat and ate them plain, thinking it was healthy. Yet, when they went out to eat fine dining, they'd consume all those harmful, expensive luxury goods.
Erina looked at the simple, modest decor and shook her head in anger, scanning the room left and right, seemingly looking for something to criticize.
Just then, tap—the office worker, who had been silent, stood up.
"What's wrong?" the drinking man asked, puzzled.
"Ah... I smell the stench of romance. Since I'm full and satisfied, I'll head back. I'll leave the space for the young ones to sort out," the savvy office worker said, adjusting his glasses as he rose.
In this world, aside from an "iron-clad" straight man who was destined to be single and had no desire for other women, only someone who had already "succeeded" could talk to a delicate beauty with such an attitude. Was Boss Shirou an iron-clad straight man? Look at him—every
day he skillfully had the young ladies who came here order cup after cup of his homemade fruit wine. Not only were they not annoyed, they often turned their heads to the kitchen to shoot him a wink. Recalling the looks from those "white-bone spirits" (sirens), even he felt his whole body tremble.
The dignified office worker was a man of his word; he never arrived late to work, and if he said he was leaving, he left immediately. He left behind only a wise and inscrutable silhouette, walking out the door with a steady pace.
"Hey, hey, you didn't pay the bill!" the man sitting next to him complained.
"...Well, let it be," Shirou said, waving his hand carelessly.
Erina exploded, shouting: "Honestly! Honestly! This, that—it's enough! Anyway, what is so good about this short, cramped, raggedy shop!"
"Setting aside 'short and cramped,' what's this about 'raggedy'? I clean this place thoroughly every day—the floor, the tatami, even the tables are wiped until they shine," Shirou said, refuting Erina's unfair assessment of his shop.
"That's right. As someone who visits many izakayas drinking with colleagues at night, little brother Shirou's place is the cleanest I've seen," the drinking man chimed in to help.
"Shut up! A shop like this should just go out of business!" Erina scolded, like a bristling kitten. She then glanced at the man next to her, looking down like a haughty tigress: "I wasn't talking to you, please be quiet!"
"Ah, ah. This uncle feels like he's been scolded by his own daughter again. I'm so depressed, I'm leaving," the man said, clutching his heart.
"Ah, my apologies. This meal is on me today; come again next time," Shirou said to him.
"Wait! Shirou, you... even if you bought the shop, the scale is small and the clientele is stable! But if you keep giving things away like this, you'll have management problems sooner or later! Have you even been keeping the books properly?!" Erina watched the man hurry out, then turned back, slapped the table, and lectured Shirou.
Shirou looked at the young lady with amusement, not saying a word, just examining her playfully from head to toe.
"Wh... what is it?!" Erina's pretty face flushed, but she refused to yield, standing on tiptoe as she shouted.
Only then did Shirou ask: "You drove all the way here, Erina—one moment you're saying you wish my shop would close, the next you're worried about my revenue—what exactly are you trying to say? Also... would you like to stay the night here?"
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