God of Cooking

June said, “I’d like to hear why you used chicken broth. Can you tell me?”

“I could have used a different broth, but to get the best flavor of chili out of the broth, I thought it would be better to use chicken broth because there’s nothing as good as the clean taste of chicken broth to bring out the spicy taste. ”

“But that’s not all, right?”

“Well, the taste of the shrimp and chicken broth is overlapping. It’s not because the chicken broth goes well with any ingredient. I feel there is a strange link between the taste of the shrimp and that of the chicken. So, I focused on that link. And that was the most impressive thing I felt while watching Daisy’s and other chefs’ dishes.”

She smiled at his explanation. As a matter of fact, what Min-joon just said was something only a head chef like her could feel. It had nothing to do with a chef’s talent, or she thought so. Of course, it was possible for a chef to find the link between the plates, but to fully understand the correlation between the various tastes, the chef needed some experience in devising all kinds of recipes from start to finish while running a restaurant directly.

But Min-joon grasped that know-how simply by visiting the restaurants ran by Rose Island head chefs. June had no choice but to admit he was indeed a genius chef.

“You look like a monster!”

“Are you flattering me now?”

“I don’t know. I just said that because I was annoyed, but I think I praised you.”

She sighed with a weary look. There was also a reason why she recalled Dave whenever she looked at Min-joon because only he could be compared with Dave in cooking talent among all the chefs she had seen so far.

She suddenly recalled what the chefs in the Rose Island local branches complained about. Some of them even questioned her whether she gave out all the information about them to him, and others asked her why she decided to have a chef like him as her sous chef. The way they asked was pretty cynical, something like “Can you really handle him?” And her answer was yes, of course.

Maybe one day, Min-joon would surpass her. But she was certain that he could, but not now. Obviously, he had such a possibility, but he could not yet surpass her for now. In other words, he needed more time to gain more experience. And that was why she could handle him because she could lead him. It didn’t necessarily mean cooking only.

She asked suggestively, “What do you think of this dish, compared with Cho Reggiano?”

“Well, it’s not as good as that.”

“Why?”

“Because nobody has ever tried making the dessert with the concept of Cho Reggiano.”

Not many chefs have tried to bring out two or three flavors from one single ingredient. Furthermore, it was really impossible for him to bring about as many as five flavors from one dish through different aging periods and recipes unless he had talent and luck. The fact that he couldn’t recreate something like Cho Reggiano right now was another evidence.

Some had already begun to say that Cho Reggiano would be the best recipe in his life, and even he thought it could be.

“Why do you think Cho Reggiano hit the jackpot?”

“Wasn’t it attractive enough to be popular?”

“Nope, I don’t think so. It’s because Chloe Chung spread your recipe to her celebrity friends.”

“Oh, that makes sense…”

“You owe her quite a bit more than you think. You have earned lots of recognition and fame thanks to Cho Reggiano more than anything else. I don’t think Chloe or you had appreciated it yet.”

When she pointed it out, he came to think about Cho Reggiano again. Come to think of it, it was just amazing that Cho Reggiano was just a dessert that all Americans know. He wondered whether he had made light of it too much,

June opened her mouth.

“You told me that you didn’t regret you decided to work for me, not Dave, because you could learn my sense of cooking calculations, while you could not learn his intuition.”

“Yes, I did.”

“But you know that? What I can give you is not just calculations or human networking.”

She put the fork down, then started tapping the desk with her finger.

Looking askance at her finger, he said, “What else can you give me?”

“I’m thinking of making you a star chef.”

“Star chef?”

“How many people recognize you when you are walking down the street? Yeah, several people may recognize and greet you per hour. Maybe more people have recognized you, but they might have bothered to speak to you. But are you content with being treated like that?”

He scratched his head with a foolish expression as if he wasn’t sure.

She continued, “I’m going to make everybody who has a TV set at home recognize you.”

“I’m only a chef, not a celebrity.”

“Well, there was a chef who got such wide recognition. You know her, right?”

“I heard that Chef Rachel was such a chef.”

“Everyone looked for Rachel’s recipe book. When it was her airtime, everybody gathered before the TV set to watch her program. And the next day, they could find the ingredients for the dish she made. These days, it’s easy to get access to the recipes, and there are so many chefs that her influence is not as powerful as before. But…”

She looked at him and asked, “Isn’t it our specialty to walk a difficult road?”

He did not answer that for a long time. He didn’t say a chef only needed to be faithful to his cooking, and that gaining popularity was not important because he had never thought about it from the beginning. As a matter of fact, popularity was inseparable from the chef because of the fact that the more regular customers a chef had, the more popular the chef was.

If only she could make every American his regular and his fan.

“But what would you get by making me a star chef?”

“Do you remember I asked you the same thing before? I asked you why you wanted me to be the head of Rose Island? And you quoted me when you gave me the reply. You said the fastest way to get what you want was to support the person around you who had the most potential to do so. Well, I’m now telling you the same logic. Why shouldn’t I?”

She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “By the time I have Rose Island, you have America.”

“America?”

“Yep,” she replied, chuckling at him. “Because you are my chef.”

Without finding the right words to say back to her, he just looked at her blankly.

Of course, he once thought he wanted to become the best chef in the world as well as in the United States. However, he felt his ambitions were more unrealistic and stupid than the dream of becoming a US president, for he didn’t know what the best chef in the world meant. In fact, no one knew it because everybody had a different opinion on who the world chef was. That was the same case with the question of who the best American chef was.

June certainly knew it. But she just told him she would make him a star chef. She said she would help him have America. The chef who had America, namely the best American chef.

Did she really know what it meant?

“Well, aside from the fact that I’m your chef, how are you going to give me America?”

“Well, all you have to do is to be the best chef in America.”

“I’m asking you because I’m not sure what that best chef means.”

“Do you know that Abraham Lincoln is America’s most respected president?”

“Yes, I’ve heard it a few times.”

“What do you think is the criteria for that?”

“Well, something like how many people think so?”

“Yeah, that’s the answer,” she said, smiling at him.

Her smile was fresh like a girl and pure like wild flowers, sparkling with expectations of happiness.

“I’m going to make everybody believe you are the best.”

“Is that easy?”

“If it were me, it wouldn’t be easy. But if it were you, it would be a different story.”

“Why?”

“You probably know why to some extent.”

She gave him a naughty glance because she thought his intentions were childish but cute when he asked that knowingly. He blushed a bit with an embarrassed expression because he thought she read his mind. In some respects, he knew what it was. He had something that she didn’t, something only he had.

“Is it because of my perfect palate?”

“Well, more precisely, your perfect palate, Cho Reggiano, your brilliant performance at the Grand Chef and Rose Island, your victory at the Paris International Culinary Competition, and the people’s perceptions and fantasy about you. Also, their expectations that I will help you move on further, not just stay where you are.”