Fled for My Life and Opened a Knight Restaurant
Fled for My Life and Opened a Knight Restaurant
Far to the south of the imperial heartland lay Viscount Britten's territory.
If you were to make a list of the most forgettable backwaters in the entire empire, this place would probably make the cut without any real competition. It was that poor, that rural, that thoroughly irrelevant.
The viscountcy boasted five knights and thirty soldiers in total. Beyond that, it had scenic mountains and cramped land—nothing more.
No notable specialty goods, no fertile soil to speak of, and certainly no mines to dig wealth out of. Just a genuinely small territory. Unlike the north, where barbarians invaded the empire with the regularity of an annual festival, or the western front, where wars flared up exactly on schedule, or the eastern front locked in constant battle with heteromorphic tribes and monsters, this land had no enemies baring their teeth at the empire. No monster swarms, either.
"If nothing invades you, that's a selling point."
The fact that thirty territorial soldiers could keep the peace said plenty.
Viscount Britten's household prioritized holding this land over expanding it, so the place didn't even see territorial skirmishes. Peaceful, start to finish.
Its one redeeming feature was the good weather, and that was the place I chose to settle.
It wasn't my hometown.
So why pick a nowhere town I had no roots in?
"When Diana becomes a tyrant, this land will sit safely outside her reach. And if rebellion breaks out, the fighting won't touch this place at all."
Safety.
I chose it because it was one hundred percent safe from the tragedies ahead.
I'd already told Commander Luke I was headed back to my hometown, so there was no chance of getting dragged back into the reserve forces. It's not like the empire had a resident registry tracking my current address or anything. How exactly were they going to find me?
The empire's bureaucratic black holes—jackpot.
"Diana turning into a tyrant and the empire erupting into rebellion—that's not a future one random knight can stop."
Getting swept up in that massive storm was way more likely.
If I can't fix it with my own hands, I run to the safest place available.
That was the plan.
"This counts as a success."
I was absolutely certain the tyrant's reign of terror would never stretch this far.
-Knight Restaurant.
I looked up at the sign I'd hung on the building's outer wall and nodded.
Damn, I loved that name.
I'd made the sign myself.
The four characters I'd carved—not in the empire's common script, but in Hangul—sent a pang of longing through my chest that hit in exactly the right way.
Just looking at the name filled me up.
"What does that say?"
A female administrator dispatched from the viscount's household stood beside me. Her name was Liana.
She'd been the official who vetted me the moment I arrived in Viscount Britten's territory.
—An outsider coming here—that's a rare sight. As you can see, there's truly nothing worth looking at. It's the backwoods of backwoods... What brings you this way?
She'd grilled me on every last detail, top to bottom, and I'd cringed through the whole thing.
Word that a knight from the imperial capital had pulled a rural relocation had prompted the viscount's house to dispatch an administrator just to run a background check on me.
Where I'd lived, what I'd done before arriving, my name, whether I had a criminal record.
I'd figured a countryside posting would mean they'd wave most of it through. Instead, they were tighter about it than I'd expected.
It was a more thorough vetting than I'd ever faced in the capital. Only later did I confirm that Liana took the territory's administrative system more seriously than anyone else around.
When I told her I was a retired knight, she latched on and practically offered to buy me a house.
"I think she wanted to recruit me as a formal knight."
I got the sentiment, but I had zero interest in joining Viscount Britten's knight order.
If I signed a contract here, Commander Luke would absolutely come after me. If he found out I was stationed in this territory, he'd demand I return to the Princess's Knight Order immediately.
You should've seen how disappointed she was when she later learned I'd come not to serve as a knight, but to open a shop.
—If you ever change your mind, do let us know. Viscount Britten's house will be waiting for Sir Lucas.
Didn't sound like she'd given up, though.
Free of the past, I answered Liana. She stood there with her pink hair neatly tied back and her bright blue eyes fixed on me.
"In the homeland I come from, we call this a knight restaurant."
"A knight restaurant? Oh, how curious. Is it an establishment only knights may use? If so, it does look rather humble."
Humble.
I'd scraped together every last coin of my severance pay to build this place.
A corner of my chest twinged.
"It's not knights-only. It just means it's a place with seriously good food."
"Good food... is it? I'm afraid I don't follow. Should I think of it as the sort of meal knights in the capital eat often?"
How was I supposed to explain this?
In my past life, whenever someone said "good food," the first image that popped into my head was always a knight restaurant.
The name had started with the Bulgogi Baekban from a knight restaurant that got featured on a famous TV program.
I had never in my life seen food on a screen look as good as that Bulbaek.
The celebrities eating it—I'd been hypnotized by the sight and gone out to find a knight restaurant for myself.
The taste of that Bulbaek.
I could still picture it in vivid detail.
"If words can't do it, I've got no choice but to make her eat it."
I looked at her.
"Would you like to try some?"
"It isn't expensive, is it? If it's knights' food..."
"It's not especially pricey. Ten silver will cover it."
Ten silver per meal—that was the price point I'd set for the restaurant.
A newly opened place that sets its prices too high right out of the gate has no competitive edge. First, I needed to win people over with a reasonable price.
They'd learn how it tasted once they ate it, and if it was good, they'd come back.
"Ten silver doesn't sound burdensome."
"You helped me a great deal while I was getting this restaurant ready to open, so for my first customer, Liana, it's on the house."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely. In exchange, spread the word for me—tell everyone a new knight restaurant has opened up."
"Understood."
The interior resembled a typical Korean eatery.
I'd bought up an abandoned building and hired carpenters to do the interior work exactly how I wanted it.
The amount of sweat I poured into getting this place set up with those carpenters—you have no idea.
Half the tables were standard chair seating, and the other half were floor seating where you took your shoes off before stepping up.
Why bother with that setup?
Partly it was my personal way of staying connected to my homeland, but it was also a weapon—a way to give the people who came here something distinctive.
"Building this thing chewed through a hefty chunk of my severance pay."
How much was a knight's severance pay going to be, anyway?
Open one shop and the money evaporates. There was hardly anything left.
Factoring in ingredient sourcing and operating costs, I'd maybe last a year.
"Then, if you'll excuse me."
Liana seated herself at the table closest to the kitchen.
From where she sat, the entire kitchen interior was visible.
"How unusual. You can see straight into the kitchen."
"Watching how the chef cooks—that's another way to enjoy the pleasures of the table."
"Can you really enjoy food by watching? I thought the pleasures of the table were strictly about eating."
I smiled at her.
That was exactly what most imperial citizens thought.
That narrow-minded notion that eating was the entirety of gastronomic pleasure.
Today, I was going to peel away her limited view of what food could be.
The pleasures of the table aren't confined to your mouth.
"You'll see."
"But are you quite sure about this?"
"About what?"
"I feel as though I'm intruding..."
In the empire, keeping the kitchen fully concealed was considered proper manners toward the chef.
The same way a mage had their own secret spells, and a knight had their house's secret sword techniques.
Chefs, naturally, had their own secret recipes.
Maybe it was the empire's culture of guarding individual secrets so fiercely, but restaurants and their kitchens were all run in sealed-off spaces, shrouded in secrecy.
No matter how honored the guest, the imperial rule was that you did not enter the kitchen without the chef's permission.
In that context, opening the kitchen up was, to an imperial citizen, nothing short of shocking.
"You're welcome to watch. In fact, I left it open precisely so you could."
"Pardon?"
"It lets me show people that our restaurant's food is made in a clean environment. And as you watch, you'll understand why I set it up this way."
I held out a menu to her.
"Our house menu."
-MENU
-Bulgogi Baekban - 10 Silver
"There's only one item on the menu. Bulgogi? Baekban? What is that? Does it mean you sear the meat with fire?"
"It's one of our signature dishes. A popular menu item we used to enjoy back in the knight order."
For now, a lack of ingredients meant I only had the one item.
I'd add more later, once I secured a broader supply chain.
"Not much choice, is there? I'll take the Bulgogi Baekban, then."
"Coming right up."
I tied a bandana over my head for hygiene.
I washed my hands clean in water, and as I was laying out the ingredients, Liana spoke up.
"Are you truly all right with this, though? For someone who once held a knight's post in the capital, this territory must seem shabby indeed."
"Come to think of it, I wasn't really a knight."
"What do you mean by that...?"
"I was a cook."
Every single day—two hundred servings for the Princess's Knight Order, three hundred for the Imperial Knight Order, and occasionally thirty more for guests who dropped in for training.
A total of 530 meals, all handled by me. The invincible cook-knight. That was who I was.
I'd swung a ladle bigger than a hammer into a cauldron far more often than I'd ever swung a sword.
Not that being a cook was all bad.
Exempt from training. Exempt from morning roll call. Exempt from evening roll call. Personal maintenance time was reliably guaranteed, and unless something special came up during duty hours, I was mostly exempt from work assignments too.
Some guys gave me shit for coasting. So what? You want to spin the ladle until your arms fall off instead?
The problem was that I woke up earlier than anyone else, and while everyone else rested, I worked alone.
"Be that as it may, the fact that you are a knight does not change."
Her voice was so gentle, so practiced at smoothing people over, that I had to fight to keep the corners of my mouth from drifting upward.
"A knight doesn't need to live in a glamorous place."
"I see."
Before I touched the meat, I washed the rice first.
It wasn't identical to the rice grown in Korea, but I'd found a similar grain back in my homeland.
Rice grown in my homeland, Rohan.
That rice was the catalyst that let me start cooking Korean food in this new world.
"I can cook the food from my past life."
Knowing I didn't have to forget my old memories completely—I remember throwing myself into Korean cooking because of that.
I lit the fire under a mini rice cooker I'd made by modifying a standard pot, and set the washed rice inside.
Shhhhrk.
I pulled the frozen meat out of the mana refrigerator and laid it on the cutting board.
THUNK!
Then I drove a heavy Chinese chef's knife straight down into it.
Thwock!
"Now, then. Let's begin."
I gripped the handle of the knife lodged in the frozen block of meat.