"Send it back and bring the dessert. I thought your hotel hired a Michelin star chef? I guess his standards are only so-so," Kai mused as he pushed his barely-touched plate of foie gras towards the gormless waiter. The waiter simply bowed obediently and removed the plate, hurriedly leaving the room before Kai could throw him yet another demand.
This is only the beginning. Global Hotel doesn't know what it means to have a difficult customer yet... Kai thought to himself with a smirk.
He picked himself up and walked over to the balcony, which had a view overlooking the river and the city skyline. Other than the presidential suite, this room probably had the best view in the entire hotel and Kai fully intended on enjoying it to the fullest during his stay here.
He didn't actually need to move into Global Hotel to put any of his plans in action, but he just felt like doing it for fun. Since he was fully intending on tearing down Global Group from the inside out, he reckoned it would be an even greater mockery if he did all of that while living at Global Hotel. Kai enjoyed flamboyance and he wouldn't have been his style to have completed the entire acquisition while remaining hidden in the shadows.
They won't even know what hit them.
Within fifteen minutes, the doorbell rang again and the same waiter returned with the dessert.
Prior to this, Kai had already sent the main course back down to the kitchen a grand total of five times, each time finding some trivial fault with the dish and barely eating a mouthful. He figured the head chef was probably throwing a fit back down in the kitchen right now and the thought of that brought a chuckle to his lips. He didn't really need to create trouble for the poor chef, but he was just in a mood for creating some drama today. His entrance at the hotel lobby had already been dramatic enough, sending the concierge into a flurry. He recalled seeing a familiar-looking young lady seated at the concierge, staring at him strangely as though she recognised him from somewhere. He tried to search his memory, but couldn't quite recall where he had seen her before.
"Your dessert sir," the waiter said, timidly lifiting the lid on the dessert plate. "It's chocolate truffle cake with peppermint. We hope you will enjoy it."
"I'm sure I will," Kai gave the waiter a crooked smile. "Wait here for a minute." He didn't want the waiter to scurry off before he had a chance to send him back down with the barely-eaten slice of cake.
Kai lifted his knife and fork, cutting a tiny piece of cake and putting it into his mouth. His mind told him that he should immediately spit it out and send it back down the kitchen, but something stopped him from doing that.
This taste...
As he slowly let the cake melt in his mouth, something familiar about the mixture of dark chocolate and mint left a confused sensation in his heart. Even after he had swallowed the piece of cake, its aftertaste sent chills crawling down his spine.
I know this taste... I've had it before...
He couldn't resist taking a second bite, and then a third. Before he knew it, he had finished the entire slice of cake, much to the glee of the tortured waiter.
"I am glad the dessert was to your liking, sir," the waiter said politely as he picked up the empty plate.
"Yes..." Kai said slowly, still confused about what he had just eaten. "Who is the chef that made this?"
"I'm not sure sir, but the head chef at our restaurant is D.O.. He's a world-renowned Michelin star chef who has won numerous culinary competitions worldwide."
"I see... Send my compliments to the chef. This cake was... extraordinary." With a wave of his hand, Kai quickly dismissed the waiter, who was only more than happy to have finally completed this tiring round of room service.
The cake was excellent, but extraordinary was definitely an exaggeration. To him, it had been nothing short of extraordinary though. Kai had not tasted cake like this for the past three years. The last time he had cake of this quality, it had been baked by her.
Eunjung.
I didn't know that there was another person on this planet who could bake the way you did.
On hindsight, the chococlate mint cake he had just eaten wasn't entirely the same as Eunjung's version had been. Objectively speaking, it was better. The flavours were more well-balanced, and the taste of mint didn't overpower the chocolate. He remembered clearly the first time Eunjung baked a chocolate mint cake and fed it to him. It was the first day of his university exams, and she baked it as a form of encouragement to him. Back then, the taste of the mint was so strong that he could only taste mint and barely the chocolate. At the sight of his scrounged up face, Eunjung had been so disappointed that he insisted on finishing the entire cake on his own just so she would smile again.
He stood up and walked over to the balcony once more, placing his hands along the railing and gazing into the distance.
I hope you're somewhere out there, baking chocolate mint cake for someone who deserves it more...
#
"Who the hell does he think he is!"
Back down in the kitchen, head chef D.O. was throwing a fit. The rest of his staff were cowering behind the kitchen counters, fearing that another pan might come flying towards their heads in the next instant.
The new VIP guest in the VIP suite had not only demanded that the head chef personally cook his meals, but had already sent back the main course five times, each time citing a different reason for rejecting it. Everyone tasted the food and concluded that the quality was excellent. In fact, it was beyond excellent. No one had any idea why the guest was being so difficult.
"Head chef, don't get so agitated... He's probably just being difficult on purpose, it's got nothing to do with your food," one of the sous chefs tried to do his part to calm their boss down.
"Of course it's got nothing to do with my food! My food is perfectly fine!" D.O. bellowed angrily. He never had reason to doubt the quality of his own cooking, but for someone to have rejected his food five times in a row was something that he had never experienced before. The worst part was that headquarters had specifically instructed for the hotel to cater to every single whim and fancy of this special VIP guest, so he couldn't even refuse to cook him another meal.
If he had things his way, he would now be standing in the VIP suite, and the troublesome guest would be standing there drenched from head to toe with caramel sauce.
Ryu, the waiter who had been sent to look after the VIP suite, entered the kitchen quietly. The minute he stepped in, everyone's attentions landed on him.
"Did he send it back?" chief pattisiere Dok asked ruefully. "I'll get the others to start preparing another one..." If D.O.'s food had been sent back five times, then Dok was pretty certain that the dessert would be sent back at least six.
To everyone's surprise, Ryu shook his head and stretched out his hands, revealing the empty plate. "He finished it all," the boy said, looking completely stunned.
Dok heaved a huge sigh of relief and D.O. simply stared at the empty plate in disbelief.
"What? Are you telling me that he finished the dessert without a single complaint?" D.O. exclaimed incredulously.
Ryu nodded. "He said to send his compliments to the chef because the cake was extraordinary..."
"Extraordinary... The cake was extraordinary..." D.O. didn't know how else to respond. His main courses had been rejected five times, yet the dessert had apparently passed with flying colours. He wasn't the one who made the dessert. "Well done Dok, looks like your skills have pleased our most difficult customer, unlike mine," he remarked bitterly.
Dok quickly shook his head. "No no, this wasn't my handiwork. The cake was baked by Eunjung!"
Everyone immediately looked around for Eunjung in wonderment. Eunjung was only a trainee, yet somehow the cake she baked had won such high praise from one of the most picky guests they had ever come across. She was nowhere to be seen.
"Where's Eunjung?" D.O. asked.
No one had any idea.
"I think I last saw her in the dessert kitchen but after she finished baking the cake she said she needed to grab some new ingredients. Maybe she's gone to the store?" Misoon suggested helpfully.
D.O. rolled his eyes. Whatever, it was probably better that she was not here. His mood was absolutely down in the dumps right now. First, his ego had been crushed by some stupid guest who seemed to find flaws in his food where there was none. Next, he had apparently been beaten by a trainee and everyone in the kitchen was here to witness his failings. All his credibility as head chef was completely gone.
He glanced at the clock. The time was half nine, well past everyone's working hours. The only reason why they were still here working overtime was because it had taken so long to finally please the idiot in the VIP suite.
"Go home everyone, it's been a long day," D.O. said emotionlessly. He turned around and started packing up his work area, ignoring the judgmental looks that he was certain everyone was giving him.
#
"Mango and vanilla with a hint of hazelnut?" Eunjung studied the ingredients that she had pulled out from the store. "Chanyeol loves mangoes, so he should like this..." She nodded with approval, before rubbing her hands together gleefully in anticipation of the new cake that she would be baking.
It was Chanyeol's birthday today and it was tradition for her to bake him a birthday cake every year. Chanyeol didn't like celebrating his birthday because it reminded him of his parents, so the most he would let her do was to bake him a small cake each year. He would also typically stay the night at her place on his birthday, because it gave him more of a feeling of being at home. Even though he would have to squeeze in the same tiny room as her little brother, Chanyeol insisted that he felt happier that way. His own home was far too cold, and the people who lived there weren't his family.
She had only just finished mixing all the ingredients together and filling up the cake pan when she heard the sound of glass smashing from the next room.
"Someone hasn't gone home yet?" Eunjung mused to herself, scratching her head in puzzlement. She had thought she was the only one left in the kitchen, since it was already past ten at night.
Eunjung quickly popped her cake into the oven, before heading back out to the main kitchen to find out what the commotion was about.
To her surprise, there was someone still in the kitchen, seated on the floor with his back against the wall and his head leaning against the kitchen counter. Next to him were two bottles of wine, one empty and one half-drunk. Beside them lay the debris of a broken glass that had been the source of the commotion she had heard earlier.
"D.O.? Are you ok?" Eunjung rushed over and squatted down in front of the man, who looked as though he was barely sober.
D.O. didn't reply her. Instead, he simply picked up the bottle of wine and started drinking straight from it, seeing that he no longer had a glass.
"Stop drinking so much, you're already drunk!" Eunjung forcefully removed the bottle from his hand and placed it on the kitchen counter where he couldn't reach. "What's wrong with you!" Something was dreadfully wrong with the man today. She had never ever seen him in such a dire state before.
D.O. slowly opened his eyes and stared at her. "Jin Eunjung?"
"Are you ok? What happened? Why are you drinking so much?"
He laughed. "What happened? You tell me... I have spent half my life perfecting my culinary skills, up till a point where I felt that I finally had something I deserved to be proud of... Apparently not. I still get trashed by a mere trainee..."
"What?" Eunjung was confused.
"He liked your cake. He liked it so much that he finished every single crumb, and said that it was extraordinary... Me? He barely took a single bite out of everything I made..." D.O. mumbled, running his fingers through his hair in frustration.
A sense of knowing finally dawned on Eunjung. D.O. had been drinking because he was upset over the events of the day, at the fact that his culinary art which he took so much pride in had been simply thrown into the dustbin like trash. "Don't take it to heart. The guest was just being difficult on purpose, it wasn't anything to do with your food. He would have done the same if it had been any other chef..."
"He didn't do it to you, did he? He didn't do it to you..." D.O. shook his head. "I'm not good enough, I never was, never will be. He never thought I was good enough, so I ran away... I thought that I finally made a name for myself, so maybe he would be proud, but I guess not... I'll never be good enough..."
"What are you talking about? Who doesn't think you're good enough?"
D.O. wasn't about to answer her question, because by now he was too far gone. He was simply collapsed against counter, still murmuring about not being good enough.
Eunjung shook her head. "What am I going to do with you now?" she asked herself. "Come on, you can't just lie here all night." With all her might, she helped D.O. off the floor, supporting him towards the staff lounge. Once there, she set him down on the sofa, exhausted at the amount of effort it had taken to get him here.
Just then, she noticed that there was a large gash on his right hand from the shards of broken glass earlier, and blood was flowing from the open wound.
"How on earth did you manage to get yourself into such a state!" she exclaimed, immediately rushing to get the first-aid box. Sitting by his side, she carefully washed the wound and applied antiseptic to it before bandaging it up with some first-aid tape. "There we go, all sorted," she said as she admired her handiwork.
By now, D.O. had settled into an alcohol-induced slumber, his chest moving up and down in a steady rhythm as he slept. Eunjung grabbed a blanket from one of the lockers and laid it over him, watching for a while as a peaceful expression now took over his once agitated face.
"See, you look so much less intimidating if you didn't frown all the time," she said quietly, gently touching the space between his brows that was usually tightly furrowed. With a slight smile, she stood up and turned around to leave.
Before she could take a step away, a hand grabbed onto her wrist, yanking her back down.
"What the..."
Eunjung found herself lying on the sofa beside D.O., his arm now wrapped tightly round her waist.
"Let go!" she exclaimed, trying to free herself from his grasp, but the more she struggled, the tighter he held on. "Don't go..." she heard him murmur. "Don't leave me... Please don't..." As she turned to look at his face, she realised that D.O. hadn't woken up. His lips were moving, but his eyes were still firmly shut. Everything he had just done was simply a reflex action in his dream-like state.
"Wake up! You need to let go!" she said once more, this time a little more gently. None of what she was saying was getting through to him, because D.O.'s arm remained planted firmly round her waist, refusing to let her budge an inch.
Eunjung sighed.
Maybe after a while he'll let go...
The only thing she could do now, short of giving him a blow to his head to wake him up, was to wait.
Back in the kitchen, a birthday cake was still baking in the oven.