"Good afternoon!" Hunter pushed open the door to the restaurant and came striding in, greeting the buffet owner with great familiarity, "I booked a private room earlier."
"Okay!" As a regular customer, the owner naturally knew Hal, and stepped out from behind the cashier's counter, leading the seven of them to a private room on the left side of the lobby.
"You're in luck today, we have your favorite fried dried frog legs." The owner placed two bottles of beer on the table and gave Hal the good news.
Hal smiled happily, he liked the bullfrog the best, it was very good and the meat was very tender. It was a pity it was so hard to get anywhere else, but only here.
Several people got up and went to the aisle to pick up the food.
WORK66 has a simple layout, with a large room in the center of which is a cafeteria-style table with a variety of dishes in square stainless steel pots. Hot water runs underneath the sinks to keep the dishes warm.
Next to the tables is an empty area where the owner has a teppanyaki. There are several cabinets and an open kitchen where customers can bring their fresh food and have the chef prepare it for them in front of the stove on a steaming hot teppanyaki.
Hal was a regular customer, so he went straight to the table, grabbed a plate and scarfed down his favorite meal. Mr. Granger stood next to him with his plate, watching in disbelief as his old friend deftly used tongs and large spoons to scoop up a bunch of unfamiliar food.
Evidently, this was not the first time Mr. Hal's students had come here, and they headed for the teppanyaki area first.
Hermione, who had never eaten at a Chinese buffet before, merely pulled a plate out from under the counter, puzzled, and carefully examined the dishes on it.
"What's this?" she asked pointing to a plate, "It looks good."
"Calamari," Tom said, coming over to look at it and discovering it was fried calamari rolls, "green peppers, carrots, round onions and reshaped calamari." He took two spoonfuls, but deliberately shook the peppers.
Hermione did the same and took a spoonful as well.
Next, Tom grabbed steak and fried onions, fried chicken wings, chicken thighs, and a few small skewers, and Hermione followed, taking everything Tom grabbed. Finally, Tom grabbed another plate, took some fried rice and topped it with some spring rolls and fried shrimp balls.
At that moment, Hal waved his hand toward the door, and Tom looked in the direction he had waved and saw six young men enter.
They approached Hal, and a scholarly-looking young man with gold-rimmed glasses came forward.
"Is that Professor Hunter? The boss sent us here as assistants."
Hal held out his hand, shook it, and then looked at the five men behind him: they were all dressed much alike, with a seersucker shirt over top, khaki slacks underneath, and a pair of Adidas sneakers on their feet. The man at the head of the group was as fit as a grizzly bear, was undoubtedly over six feet tall, and wore a large gold chain around his neck.
"Alyosha and his squad," began the man with the glasses, introducing the group.
The six men, all of them Yuri's men, had been assigned to the expedition to ensure their safety. The man with the glasses, Peter, was the team's interpreter, fluent in a dozen languages, including English, Arabic, French, Russian and Ukrainian, and well versed in Egyptian customs. He was a former member of the North African region of the Soviet Interior Ministry who had jumped ship to work for Yuri after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The remaining five were elite members of the military, recruited by Yuri after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In reality, Yuri did not keep too many of these men, barely a hundred in all; if he needed men to fight, he could always recruit them from the Ukrainian army, where he had an uncle, a Ukrainian general, who had nearly 10,000 men under his command.
By getting rid of the weapons, Yuri helped him perfectly to solve the problem of feeding these soldiers.
He was led by Alyosha, a machine gunner, along with an assault man, a demolition man, a medic and an engineer, six men who could deal with most emergencies.
After introductions, Alyosha reached out his big hairy hand and shook Hal's, who was a strong man in his own right, but looked like a child in front of Alyosha, and shook his big hand.
"It's a pleasure." Alyosha greeted Hal in heavily accented English, voice deep and strong, though the accent had a strong Maoist flavor, but it was reassuring to hear.
Reliable. This was the first impression everyone had of Alyosha.
The second impression is that he knows how to eat.
WORK66's plates, one about thirty centimeters in diameter, were a bit full after two plates of food - the food here was generally high in sugar and salt and oil, and although it was very good, he needed to eat it with water, and after two plates he felt he couldn't eat.
Alyosha, for his part, took three plates, each stacked like a hill, and after eating another three, he drank a bottle of beer and a bottle of white wine. His companions were not as good eaters as he was, but they were generally in top form, even the doctor.
They emptied the owner's inventory, and by the time they filled up, the restaurant was empty of fried chicken and barbecue pots, and there were a dozen empty bottles on the table.
Luckily, the owner of WORK66 was a cheerful man and didn't give them a hard time just because they could eat. In fact, it is rare for a buffet owner to give his customers a hard time for being foodies: the heart of the buffet is the reduction of labor costs thanks to the "buffet" format, and the cost of ingredients is absolutely minimal for an affordable buffet. If you can eat a kilo of meat quickly, it's not a loss for the owner, as the price of frozen meat is incredibly cheap.
Eating together is the quickest way to bond and, of course, if you massage each other afterwards, you will probably bond even more. Over the course of the meal, they became acquaintances. During the meal, Alyosha seemed to talk a lot more, with his big tongue he chatted with Hal, and the two got along very well.
After a loud laugh, Alyosha seemed to remember something, "By the way, Davari, to be frank with you, the boss told me that I would have to listen to Tom on this trip," he pointed to Tom....
It was clear that his boss, Yuri, held his head so high that his word was gold to him.
After lunch, the men left drunk and Mr. Granger drove Tom and Hermione home. Three days later, the expedition would set out on its adventure to Egypt.