Gyo-iku-sang Lands
Emergency.
Total—emergency.
"Steak!"
"One steak, please!"
They were selling steak.
Hankuk University's festival street was packed with people walking around eating steak. Happy faces, mouths full of meat, chewing away. All for a mere five thousand won.
And right next door, another booth was selling the exact same dish.
"Damn, theirs looks insanely good."
"Hey!"
"What? It's true."
The ETSD club.
PTSD was practically guaranteed. With that many people strolling around eating steak—
Even I'd rather have that than this cube steak with gristly tendons you have to chew forever.
Myeong-hun, who was running the kitchen, knew it too. The meat they were selling was hanging by a thread, quality-wise. Their rivals, on the other hand, delivered a flavor so overwhelming it more than filled the fantasy the word steak conjured in your head.
He swallowed hard. The taste still lingered on his tongue. When they'd snuck a club member over to grab one of those steaks, the shock had been real. It was a flavor he'd tasted at specialty places in Gangnam. But the price wasn't even a fifth of that—not even a tenth.
Being festival street food was the only thing saving them. Customers out here didn't have time to properly savor a steak.
"That good?"
"That's aged meat, ten to one."
"Aged meat? For real?"
"Yeah."
"What's that even mean?"
"…"
If you'd sat down for a proper meal at a proper restaurant, the atmosphere alone would have multiplied the pleasure several times over. As someone who took cooking seriously, he had no choice but to admit it. The fact that their cube steak wasn't selling was inevitable.
"Myeong-hun!"
Crisis mode. Club president Yu-jun strode straight into the kitchen. You could see the problem from outside—but inside, the severity hit even harder.
"W-we're not just standing around—"
"There's no customers, so…"
"I know that! I'm not here to chew you out. It's not your fault."
It wasn't just the storefront that was dead. The ingredients they'd pulled from the fridge were in rough shape too—spread out, exposed to room temperature for so long that the flavor was already starting to go.
And we've still got dozens more boxes sitting in the warehouse.
For years running, they'd been the biggest draw at the Grand Festival. That kind of streak made demand forecasting easy. You knew in advance how much product you'd need. Bulk buying drove the unit cost down and gave you a price edge. That had been the secret to locking down first place every single time.
"At this rate, how much do you think we'll have left? Be honest, Myeong-hun."
"Honestly?"
"Yeah."
"We won't even burn through a quarter of it… not like this."
He glanced around, uneasy. Inside and out, more than ten tables—and only a couple of pairs were sitting at any of them. Even those were friend-favors. Business had gotten so bad they'd started calling people they knew just to pad the sales numbers.
"We might still move about half the pajeon, though."
"A-and the steak?"
He could only shake his head. Right next door, they were selling the real thing.
Who's going to eat cube steak?
Through the afternoon it had sold decently enough. But once word of mouth spread and the line next door got longer, everyone knew. That place was the real restaurant. And it was true. Tomorrow—and the day after—would only get worse, not better.
They'd ridden volume and thin margins to the top for years. But Yu-jun had never experienced what happened when the business simply didn't move. It was a lot like stocks. Go all-in. Dump your entire fortune into a position and the upside can be enormous—but when it goes against you, the pain scales the same way. The ingredients they'd bought expecting a huge payday…
"Oppa!"
"Wh-what is it, Juha?"
"Why are you talking to me like that? Where's the consideration?"
The girlfriend who'd always looked so cute now just felt irritating in every way.
She can be clueless, but there's a limit.
This was an emergency. Club-wide losses. It would hit next year's budget. Once word got out, people might start quitting. They wouldn't be able to mess around the way they always had.
"Juha, I'm seriously busy right now."
"So I'm not even on your radar, is that it? Fine. Just you wait."
"…"
It was partly about her too—but this was no time for a pride fight. He needed some kind of gambit to flip the situation.
Wait. That was it!
Yu-jun remembered the Grand Festival schedule. A distinctive celebrity was coming, and he'd been keeping an eye on it. Normally it would have been the usual empty chatter—which singer's showing up?—but this time it actually concerned them.
A food show.
Hankuk University's festival was big and well-known enough that broadcast crews regularly came to cover it. This year's theme was street food. From the moment the schedule locked in, the student council had been on their case.
ETSD is №1 in sales — make sure you stop by!
Be fully prepared and waiting, they'd been told. And above all, do not get on the main host's bad side.
He's famous, after all.
A food expert. If you looked closely, there was even a connection. He was half the reason they'd started making that damn food in the first place. If they'd never seen Cheon Jong-won's food truck, they never would have copied the idea. Of course the man himself wasn't coming. He was too popular—there wasn't a person in Korea who didn't know him. Someone of that caliber showing up would turn the whole campus upside down.
And at this point, him showing up would be a problem anyway.
Yu-jun wasn't blind to the quality gap between the Stock Club's steak and their own cube steak. On pure taste, they were getting crushed. But the guest wasn't Cheon Jong-won. It was the man said to stand as his equal. If they could hit that man's preferences, they could still win. A plan took shape: use the power of television to reverse the whole situation.
Day one, over.
Plop.
But the real work was only starting now. Confit radically shortened the cooking process—but only if you prepared ahead.
"From here, a trained assistant will demonstrate."
"Um."
"Yeah?"
"It's not hard, right? I'm kind of scared I'll mess it up."
You had to do the prep the day before service. Make the confit in advance.
Honestly, the process is pretty simple.
What even is confit? In practice, nothing fancy. You just cook it in oil. Not frying—simmering. Low-temperature cooking for a long time, under 85 degrees Celsius.
Plop.
Doing it the classic way took a ridiculous amount of oil, and storage was a pain. So the method was a little shady, but—
You put the oil in a zip bag like this.
—and boil it in water. The contents of the bag are effectively cooking in oil, so it becomes confit, and because it's sealed, it keeps for a long time.
"See? Simple. Just like I did—bay leaf, rosemary, minced garlic, pepper, salt, recipe amounts into the zip bag, and you're done. Squeeze out as much air as you can, seal it, and like this."
"Ooooh…"
"Toss them in and leave them. The rest runs itself."
Well—manually. He was teaching the club members so they could handle it on their own. Confit-ing hundreds of portions of meat alone had been pure hell.
Physical labor is not my department.
Now he could sit back and rest. Just in case, he watched a little—settled into a plastic chair, eyes half-lidded—when—
"Is that really all there is to it?"
"Hm?"
"It's just… it seems too simple."
Like the whole problem had been solved too easily. Sora sat down neatly beside him. First time she'd spoken to him since puffing out her cheeks.
Yeah. That would do it.
All that effort, bleeding herself dry—then one power play from ETSD had knocked it all down, and now he'd flipped the board again like it was nothing. Of course she'd feel drained. What had any of her work even been for? The emptiness of it all hit her fresh.
"Systemize it and it gets simple."
"It looks that way."
"But the work that goes into building that system is anything but simple."
Confit. Chefs used it to amplify the flavor of meat and to make advance prep a little easier.
But looking at it, I realized you could specialize it for mass production.
He was an investor. Same object, different eyes. The first time he'd tasted it in a restaurant, he'd shouted eureka. You could make steak with an ultra-simple recipe. Applying it in the real world, of course, had been anything but easy.
"I took the fact that confit started as a preservation method and turned it into an inventory-management advantage, jury-rigged a large sous-vide setup to slash the initial capital outlay, and built a recipe so foolproof a monkey could—"
"Sunbae?"
Anyway, the point is I suffered plenty too.
Half a year of trial and error. A year for the system to settle. After that it had been smooth sailing.
That's why Wall Street had a steak franchise with my name on it. Not sure I'll manage to build one again in this life.
People said simple is best—but that was a consumer slogan. From the maker's side, simple was several times harder.
"I think I get it."
A little of the labor of the people who carved out capitalist society. She seemed to understand, just a fraction. Head bowed, she wore a gentle smile.
Can I touch her?
After a full day of work, the underside of her chest was soaked through. He wanted to rest a hand on that sweat-slick, smooth skin.
"Sunbae."
"…"
"Sunbae?"
"Wh-what—what was it?"
"There's one last part I don't understand."
That particular desire looked hard to indulge right now. Swallowing the regret, he took his annoying underclassman's question.
Right. One question. Can't be two.
The content was straightforward enough. The cooking method was genuinely impressive. But did that actually solve the cost problem?
"Ah. That."
"Is it really twelve hundred won? Six hundred won per hundred grams—that doesn't make sense."
"Making it make sense is—"
"Yes, yes~ ability, right? So hurry up and teach me what that ability is."
A cooking method was one-dimensional. Actually running a restaurant meant clearing all kinds of hurdles.
And if you turn those hurdles around and use them, that's the real jackpot.
Take dirt-cheap meat and pass it off as premium steak. Throw in inventory-management advantages for free.
"Really?"
"Why would I lie?"
"If that's true, I wonder how he would react."
"He? Who?"
"You don't know? A very famous person is coming to this festival."
A real expert would recognize it.
Day two.
A somewhat special guest arrived.
"What is it? What's going on?"
"They said CBS is here."
"What are they filming?"
The crowd had every reason to buzz. Broadcast cameras. Unfamiliar gear. Anyone could tell at a glance that a network had come to shoot.
"Welcome!"
Even the street-food stalls suddenly found their manners. And no wonder—looking at the man who seemed to be hosting—
"Mmm~ that's good."
"Ah, thank you, sir!"
"Not bad for university students. But did you know?"
"Pardon?"
A face everyone had seen on TV. A name known as a pioneer of the gourmet world. A professional food critic tasting university students' cooking. That was the concept of the content.
"Pajeon actually came from Japan, you know~."
Gyo-iku-sang had made landfall.