Chapter 147: The Nation of Cuisine, Girvante (5) Contrary to Jinseo's expectation that there would be at most three or four people, the restaurant became full in an instant due to the additional customers who came in.
"Th-then please give me what you're eating."
"Me too! Can you do a single serving?"
After ordering, the customers craned their necks and examined the unidentified dish the employees were eating with hawk-like eyes.
Counting the number of customers, Jinseo began calculating in his head how much more gamjatang ingredients he needed to take out.
"Huh? It looked like a meat dish, but is this a different dish from earlier? Can we eat that too?"
The young man who had entered first spotted the employees eating stir-fried rice instead of gamjatang and leaned his head forward.
"Th-this won't do!"
Maybe they were afraid the customers might take their precious stir-fried rice, because the employees eating it hurriedly huddled around the pot.
"Everyone, please stay seated. Like earlier, you only need to put it in the pot and boil it. There's plenty, so don't worry."
Only after Jinseo stepped in did the situation calm down.
The employees kept their guard up while practically inhaling the stir-fried rice, and the customers only watched from a distance.
In the end, they succeeded in finishing it without having it taken by the customers.
Even so, their hunger did not subside, and the employees cautiously read the room as they started scraping the bottom of the pot with their spoons.
Even though the scorched rice had already completely disappeared.
"Can we eat more too?"
"Haha, of course."
"At my table, we didn't get to eat stir-fried rice. Could you at least make us stir-fried rice too?"
"I'll just boil you another pot of gamjatang. Isn't this the Kingdom of Girvante, the Nation of Cuisine? Why are you all tiptoeing around food like that? Please wait a moment."
When the employees saw Jinseo head into the Additional Trailer to fetch more gamjatang ingredients, their faces brightened.
The employees at the table that had thrown away their chance to eat stir-fried rice were especially delighted.
"Um, excuse me… are you the owner of that strange carriage outside?"
The young man who had entered first asked Jinseo as he returned carrying gamjatang ingredients in both hands.
"Yes, I'm the owner of the food truck."
"Food truck? Is that the Mobile Cooking Facility everyone's been talking about lately?"¹
"The famed food truck from Falstead Castle, the one that's shown such culinary prowess it's threatening the pride of our Girvante—did it come here?"
"So that's why the restaurant staff were eating like they'd lost their minds. It was because it was food truck cooking!"
The customers who realized late that the food truck had arrived murmured among themselves, but once Jinseo started boiling the gamjatang, the restaurant quickly fell quiet.
Staring at the pot as it began to bubble, the customers kept swallowing. Meanwhile, the employees who had already eaten gamjatang waited with ease for it to finish cooking.
"Mr. Jinseo, we can open it now, right?"
"Yes, eat."
The moment Jinseo allowed it, the employees each picked up a bone and began eating, and the customers followed after watching them.
Then silence settled over the restaurant again.
To the customers, the fact that it was a first-time dish brought out from the food truck no longer mattered.
The greatest praise one could show while eating delicious food was to focus on nothing but eating.
Pork back bones with not a scrap of meat left piled up beside the pot, and even without Jinseo teaching them, customers began appearing one after another who pressed their mouths to the holes between the bones and sucked at them.
*They really eat well. It'd be a waste to keep it to myself.*²
Jinseo took out his smartphone and walked up to the customers at the nearest table.
"May I record a video?"
"A video?"
"First, take a look at this. Just think of it as a simple kind of magic from the continent where I live."
After asking permission table by table, Jinseo filmed the scenes of them eating gamjatang.
"All right, you've all eaten enough, right? Let's help Mr. Jinseo."
The wandering chefs who had finished eating stood up and began serving, handing beer mugs filled to the brim to the customers.
"Huh? This beer tastes completely different from what I usually drink. The flavor is much deeper! And it tastes great!"
"It's dwarf-made beer that Mr. Jinseo brought out specially."
"What? Th-that… the legendary beer you can only taste in Dwarf Town of the Kingdom of Doren?"³
When alcohol was added to the previously quiet gamjatang atmosphere, the customers grew excited and started chattering noisily.
"Make stir-fried rice here!"
"Us too! Us first!"
Customers who had already finished all their gamjatang raised their hands at once, and in the end, Jinseo had to boil all one hundred servings of gamjatang he had prepared in advance.
The next morning, Jinseo served the employees bone hangover soup for breakfast, boiled in single portions after removing the potatoes from the original gamjatang ingredients.
After tasting the essence of Korean cuisine two times in a row—last night and this morning—the employees begged to buy the gamjatang recipe, but Jinseo showed reluctance and said it would be difficult for now.
With only ingredients from the Francia Continent, it was difficult in many ways to recreate gamjatang, so only after he promised he would definitely tell them when the time came could he prepare to leave.
After presenting the dishes that captivated so many—gamjatang and stir-fried rice—Jinseo left the village, seeing off the restaurant employees and the village residents who had tasted gamjatang.
Passing between rice paddies shimmering in golden waves, and watching fishermen catching fish with nets in a vast lake through the window, Jinseo drove the food truck north.
As he continued driving the food truck across the plains, he could reach the castle around 3 p.m., after noon had passed. While waiting for permission to enter, Jinseo looked up at the massive gate leading into the castle.
"We're finally going in."
The capital of Girvante Castle, Selfier.
A place so serious about food that seventy-five percent of the buildings inside the castle were restaurants, street stalls, and shops selling ingredients.
A castle where people who loved cooking gathered to the point that they even used "Selfier," the Kingdom of Girvante's traditional cuisine, as the name of their capital.⁴
In a nation proud of its food, having a restaurant in the capital, Selfier, was something to puff out one's chest and boast about.
In fact, Greg operated five restaurants in Selfier alone.
"It is an honor to see the sacred relic of the Heirem Order, the food truck. And I am truly pleased to meet Lord Lee Jinseo, the founder of bunsik. I sincerely welcome you to Selfier."
The captain of the Selfier castle guard personally came out with his subordinates to welcome Jinseo.
"All procedures are complete, so you may proceed into the royal palace as you are."
"Thank you."
"Jinseo, give these men something simple to eat. When entering Selfier, it's a local custom to give the guards a small treat, you see."
"Yes."
Following Greg's advice, Jinseo opened the storage compartment and took out a carton of colored milk for each, handing them to the captain.
Naturally, the captain—seeing a milk carton for the first time—was flustered, and Jinseo used gestures to show him how to open it.
"Huh? This is milk? I've never tasted milk like this!"
"Mine tastes different from the captain's, doesn't it? It's sweet, but I can taste a bitter note too!"
"Captain! Just let me have one sip!"
Leaving behind the captain and guards who had become distracted by the colored milk, Jinseo drove the food truck into the castle.
At that very moment—
"It's the food truck!"
"So we finally get to taste bunsik, the foreign cuisine!"
"Give us that dish called Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim! No—let us eat it all!"
Jinseo flinched at the enormous cheers from citizens filling the street.
"Don't tell me everyone inside the castle came out?"
"Looks like it."
"Seriously?"
"Ah, maybe not. It seems people from outside gathered too."
Hoping Greg would deny it, Jinseo asked, but Greg calmly gave the exact opposite answer.
The entire castle shook with a roar that could not even be compared to the cheers and applause that had poured onto Fedora, the Cardinal, when they first visited Colses Castle, capital of the Kingdom of Doren.⁵
"Still, it's fortunate it looks like we can reach the royal palace."
The soldiers lined up along both sides of the road to the palace stared sternly at their counterparts across from them.
"No, but how did they know and gather like this?"
"Because rumors about bunsik and the food truck spread, that's why. And rumors naturally get exaggerated the more they spread, so the expectations placed on you will be enormous."
"I'm worried I might disappoint them."
"There's no need to worry at all. If it's a taste that satisfied my mouth—Greg's—then anyone in the Kingdom of Girvante will be satisfied. If someone isn't pleased with your bunsik and cooking, they should give up being a Kingdom of Girvante citizen."⁶
Jinseo gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands and slowly drove the food truck toward the royal palace.
"Bunsik! Bunsik! Bunsik!"
"Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim! Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim! Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim!"
The citizens' chants for Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim, the representative bunsik, only grew louder, and the soldiers' formation holding them back began to be pushed backward little by little.
In the end, one side of the soldiers' formation collapsed under the pressure, and citizens began spilling onto the road.
"Uh…"
Stopping the food truck, Jinseo fell silent at the sight of the citizens' blazing eyes fixed on him.
It was momentum no less intense than the citizens of Falstead Castle, who had lost their reason after being unable to eat bunsik for months while traveling back and forth from Colses Castle before the branch system was introduced.
"Heh, so it came to this. Once they heard the rumor about the food truck, they couldn't endure any longer."
"Even so, we can't just stop in the middle and cook."
"You can, though?"
"Huh? Isn't His Majesty waiting?"
"Where do you think you are? Even if His Majesty gives any order at all, if someone is in the middle of a meal, it's perfectly fine to carry it out after the meal is finished. That's the Kingdom of Girvante. It's more generous about food than anywhere else, so there's nothing to worry about."
"…Understood. Let's sell bunsik first and wait for things to calm down."
As Jinseo got out of the driver's seat, the five wandering chefs who had been riding on top of the food truck also hurried down and went into the cooking area.
"Bunsik! Bunsik! Bunsik!"
"Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim! Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim!"
Listening to the citizens' chants, Jinseo hurriedly began making and selling bunsik.
So many people had gathered that it was impossible to sell every menu item, so he decided to sell only Tteok-twig-sun-ra-gim.
Because Jinseo was too busy processing the flood of orders to even think about calculating the meal cost, he told customers to put the money into the box themselves, then focused solely on cooking.
If anything, in the Kingdom of Girvante, there was no crime as dishonorable as eating without paying, so at least he did not need to worry about being cheated out of money.
Even after bunsik sales continued for over an hour, the number of people surrounding the food truck was not decreasing, but increasing.
Eventually, even the soldiers who were supposed to block the citizens joined the line to order bunsik.
"Everyone, move aside!"
At someone's booming voice, the citizens eating bunsik flinched and quickly retreated.
Even then, they did not let go of the food bowls in their hands, and they slurped down the noodles they had been holding in their mouths.
"As expected… His Majesty came in person."
Greg, who had been leisurely eating sweet potato fries at the counter, wiped his mouth with a roll of tissue and straightened his appearance.
"Huh? Really?"
"That's right."
"Good grief…"
Jinseo rubbed his throbbing temples and stepped out of the cooking area.
There had been a time when a national leader personally came out to meet them before, back in the land of the centaurs, the Crudian Continent.
However, he had not anticipated that he would push through such a massive crowd.
"Craid, it has been a long time."
Recognized by Lanster II, Craid knelt on one knee and paid his respects.
"Because you were there, I could protect the kingdom, and I could grant fullness to the people who suffered from hunger once again. You are a benefactor who gifted Girvante so much."
Lanster II, the king of the Kingdom of Girvante, swept his eyes across the food truck's menu board with a grave gaze.⁷
"And now that you have come together with the food truck, you grant us another precious gift."
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