With the Bibimbap, I'll Throw in Beef Bulgogi and Serve Brisket Doenjang Jjigae Too
With the Bibimbap, I'll Throw in Beef Bulgogi and Serve Brisket Doenjang Jjigae Too
Most elves are vegetarians.
Life was sacred, needless slaughter to be avoided—that was the elven creed. Whether it stemmed from the myth that the first High Elves were spirits born from nature itself, or from their long millennia spent beside the World Tree, no one could say.
Those first High Elves had long since returned to the natural world, and every elf who had first chosen vegetarianism had become one with it.
By now, it was simply the elven way.
Living in harmony with the forest, embracing peace, holding nature as their companion.
Maybe that was why.
Elves despised other races that ate meat.
Curs lower than beasts.
Savages.
And so they looked down on other races all the more, finding their own happiness deep in the woods.
Most elves, anyway.
Preferring vegetables, loving nature, shunning outsiders.
But Andrea, an elf, had never been able to stomach her people's dietary habits.
Don't eat meat because you love nature?
Why the hell not?
Aren't plants living things of the natural world?
Wasn't plucking and eating plants also an act of damaging nature?
And the animals we didn't kill—didn't they all eat plants?
What about carnivores, then?
Were they somehow not part of nature?
It didn't track.
So why exactly did elves have to be vegetarians?
What were they protecting?
While she was still tangled in questions, she saw a rabbit hopping through the forest.
It was an accident.
It had been bounding along, slipped from a high spot, and cracked its skull open. Dead.
At first, it was just curiosity.
She built a fire and roasted the rabbit just as she'd seen it described in a book called The Cruel Carnivorism of Man. She didn't know how to cook an animal, so she cooked it skin and all.
Chiiiiik!
The first bite of rabbit she ever tore into was burnt on the outside and raw inside—hardly meat at all, by any reasonable standard. The sort of thing that, by definition, couldn't possibly taste good.
But to Andrea, who had known nothing but greens her whole life, even that was delicious.
Charred on the surface, undercooked beneath—yet the exquisitely done sliver between them held a rich, savory depth that was an assault of sensation on a tongue raised solely on plants.
She never forgot that day. From then on, Andrea ate meat in secret.
After tasting flesh even once, most vegetables felt tasteless.
Elven cuisine had evolved specifically to make vegetables as flavorful as possible.
They roasted woody stalks and fresh shoots, pan-fried them, stir-fried them in plant-extracted oils—strained every nerve chasing diversity of flavor.
Yet all that desperate effort couldn't match what she threw together by roughly skinning an animal and tossing it over a fire.
Once, twice, and then over and over—and she began to feel herself diverging from other elves. Her slender limbs, her slender frame, thickened. Her thighs and chest grew far fuller than any elf's should be.
Color rose in her cheeks, a sheen came to her skin, and the other elves started to eye her with suspicion.
—How is Andrea so sturdy? I'd believe she was human.
—Her muscle is incredibly dense. Is she secretly taking elixirs?
—Or is it something else she's been eating?
Andrea, who'd been poaching game in secret, fled the Elven Forest the very day the whispers began.
She understood, afterward.
Why some elves had left the forest before her.
They, too, had grown sick to death of an elven society that ate only plants—and run.
She loved a life of traveling freely, hunting beasts. Cooking what she caught suited her, too.
Her skills were clumsy, but it was still better than the scraps of leaf she'd endured in the Elven Forest.
Learning to cook alongside fellow elves was enjoyable, too.
The journey with them had been short, but far happier than her time among the kin back home.
The hunt. And the meal.
Those were the two things that made Andrea feel truly free.
Her favorite, above all else, was hunting Tuu.
A peculiar beast: the faster you took it down, the deeper the flavor of its meat became. A quarry that tested a hunter's skill, and one that rewarded greater skill with greater taste.
It was among her favorite meats.
Because it let her feel she was something special.
She'd heard that humans were fools who liked to force down Tuu meat after it had gone completely tough and chewy.
That's not how you eat it.
She knew the real way.
Hunt it as fast as physically possible, carve out the most tender cuts, and roast them over a flame.
A creature whose very texture let you measure your own sharpening skill. That was why they called it the true knight's meat.
Though humans seemed to use the phrase in an entirely different sense.
The Tuu this restaurant's cook had hunted down had originally been her prey.
Taming it as a familiar didn't help much—the beast was sharp, sensitive to any killing intent aimed its way. It had hidden in the forest and refused to come out, and just luring it into the open had taken an age.
After drawing it out, she'd planned to finish it in one blow with a trap she'd set ahead of time for a perfect kill, but—
The damn thing smashed her trap and bolted, and chasing it down had been a nightmare.
Didn't expect it to take weeks to find...
For a creature that size, it was infuriatingly quick.
And the reason she'd lost its trail for so long was not because she was directionally challenged.
Ab-so-lutely. Not.
In any case, she'd been the one who did all the work luring and flushing out the Tuu, and this human had merely landed the final blow—so by her reckoning, she had a claim to ownership.
If he refused, she was prepared to settle it knight to knight.
She'd already gripped the sword at her hip, but he agreed to cook it for her far more easily than she'd expected.
For a human, the man's got manners.
Though part of her was also curious to see just how pathetic a human's attempt at Tuu meat would be.
After all, by the time humans got their hands on Tuu, it was usually about as tender as ogre sinew.
She meant to savor a certain sense of superiority with this meal.
To confirm she was nothing like those strange humans who ate manure soup.
She had been looking forward to a Tuu dish.
But what was set before her was—
"A perfectly balanced vegetarian menu for an elf."
A plant-heavy meal. The very thing she loathed most.
To serve her this garbage.
As expected from a human who ate manure soup.
And he didn't even hesitate to offer her that very same manure soup.
"Owner. Are you a racist?"
"What are you—"
"I'm asking if you're one of those backwards Imperial types with the stereotype lodged solidly in your skull that all elves eat nothing but plants."
"..."
"Why isn't there a single piece of meat in this food? That's what I requested, and that's what I was expecting."
The owner looked at her as though he'd never heard such a thing in his life.
Ha. Discrimination against elves was still this rampant.
"So you think dwarves all love strong drink and beards, elves all adore nature and gag at the sight of meat, dragons are greedy treasure-hoarders, beastkin are permanently in heat, and humans are backwards savages who think of nothing but stabbing each other in the back? Is that it?"
"..."
Andrea watched the owner's mouth snap shut, silenced by her flawless logic.
Yes. Now how do you plan to respond, you racist?
If he dared tell her elves shouldn't eat meat, she was fully prepared to draw her blade that instant.
She was an elf who held a reasonably fair opinion of humans—but even she didn't extend mercy to bigots.
"You eat meat? You should have mentioned that sooner."
But the human's response was nothing like what she'd anticipated.
"I'll add meat for you right away."
Looking almost apologetic, he hurriedly snatched up the bowl and retreated into the kitchen.
So he was capable of admitting fault after all.
Mistakes could be forgiven.
She was generous like that.
"And if possible, I'd prefer you cook the Tuu."
"Ah—it was Tuu you wanted?"
"Yes."
"In the future, please make your specifications clear when you order. That way the food comes out with no mistakes."
"I'll keep it in mind."
Arms folded, she watched the owner cook.
His eyes were kind, and his muscles were tightly packed. As he tossed meat into the frying pan and began to stir-fry it at speed, the muscles in his arm rippled in real time.
The pan looked heavy enough, but not a flicker of strain crossed his face—he just smiled and kept at it.
A human who hasn't forgotten to eat meat—and hasn't forgotten to train his body either.
If you set aside the manure soup and the narrow-minded assumptions, he wasn't a bad sort of human.
She found herself a little curious what the Tuu this man had hunted would taste like.
***
A meat-eating elf.
Honestly, I was thrown. Completely blindsided.
I'd heard there were some elves who ate meat, but every single elf I'd ever seen in the Imperial capital had been a zealot for vegetables.
—How typical of filthy humans, eating meat like savages.
—If I were human I'd have bitten my own disgusting tongue off and killed myself already. It would've been more helpful to nature.
Add in a pointless excess of pride and a firm conviction that they were superior to everyone else, and you had the species.
Her tone wasn't much different from the other elves I'd met in the capital—but to think she ate meat.
She'd even asked for Tuu specifically.
Yeah, that pretty much confirmed the Tuu had come down here because of her.
Not protecting it. Hunting it.
The sudden complaint caught me off guard. More specifically, being branded a racist caught me off guard.
Me—with my famously open mind.
There wasn't a fairer person alive than me, a man who'd lived in both this world and the other.
Ever possessed the accumulated knowledge of two worlds, lady?
I swallowed the urge to say it out loud.
Regardless, sending out the wrong menu was the chef's fault.
Whatever her race, the moment she walked through the door, she was a customer.
Serving customers the best possible food—that was my business motto.
Of course, I'd be collecting my due compensation in full.
I hurriedly tossed chunks of chadol brisket into the Doenjang-jjigae and brought it back to a boil. I worked in a touch more gochujang to rein in any greasy heaviness from the meat.
Then I pulled out the Tuu bulgogi I'd pre-marinated and threw it onto the heat.
It was leftover from the massive amount Camilla had bought from me—part of what I'd set aside as a gift and then kept for myself. I'd meant to eat it for my own dinner tonight.
Well, tonight it was becoming Yangpun Bibimbap—no. Beef Bulgogi Bibimbap.
Damn it.
The soy-marinated beef cooked fast on the griddle. Slicing it thin meant it didn't need long to cook through.
Unlike pork, if you over-grill beef bulgogi, the meat turns tough. The trick wasn't to cook every last trace of pink out of it—it was to sear the marinade onto the surface, to coax out the flavor of both meat and seasoning together.
Normally I'd have minced the beef fine and stir-fried it with gochujang.
But there wasn't time for that kind of prep. The already-finished dishes were cooling—this was a time attack.
Customer satisfaction first.
Sizzle.
The moment the marinade began to char and throw off its rich aroma—
I flipped the thick-cut Pog shoulder I'd been grilling. That was the core ingredient for the stir-fried kimchi that anchored the Dubu Kimchi.
For this dish at least, I can't use Tuu.
Everything else was negotiable, but using beef in Dubu Kimchi was something a chef's pride couldn't stomach.
If she didn't want it because it didn't have Tuu in it, I'd just eat the damn thing myself.
Beef in Dubu Kimchi throws the harmony off—the heavy, oily aroma of beef overwhelms everything. The kimchi and meat end up standing apart instead of singing together.
The smell of searing beef bulgogi and Tuu meat rose on the steam.
Threading between the two was the deeply savory scent of Doenjang.
The signature smell of the Knight Restaurant toyed with my nose.
I glanced at the elf seated at the front table. Her arms were still folded, but her nostrils were twitching.
Pass.
The scent, at least, passed inspection.
She didn't look put off. I could send it out as-is.
I sliced the Pog shoulder into easy-to-eat pieces, then dumped the stir-fried kimchi over top.
Chiiiiik!
The rendered pork fat from the shoulder hit the kimchi and spat. The smell of pork fat and kimchi juices mingling together as they cooked was on an entirely different level from using plain cooking oil.
This is sex.
I could taste it in my mouth without taking a bite.
If Camilla had been watching, she'd have said something about a hero setting out to slay the Demon King meeting a multi-talented mage.
Hero, saintess, and mage, all meeting at once. The Demon King on my tongue has already been slain.
I plated the next-level spicy stir-fried pork and kimchi beside the Dubu. Then set down the Chadol Doenjang-jjigae—evolved from basic Doenjang-jjigae—and the Beef Bulgogi Bibimbap that had evolved from Yangpun Bibimbap.
"Here you are. A meat-eater's set for an elf."
"Simply piling meat on top of a vegetable menu does not a carnivore's meal make."
The elf examined my cooking like she wasn't buying it.
In her eyes, I'd just slapped meat onto an existing vegetarian spread. I understood the feeling—she clearly hated vegetables. But the cuts that are delicious with nothing more than a simple grill are something else entirely.
And Camilla had bought every last one of those expensive cuts.
"Try a bite. I think your opinion might change. I'm confident in this."
Shuffle, shuffle.
"It does contain Tuu, so I'll try it. But if it isn't good..."
Her eyes glinted.
"It'll be good."
Each component was a main dish in its own right. There was no way it wouldn't be delicious.
"But how do I eat this?"
"I'll mix it for you."
I mixed the bibimbap with a spoon and set the bowl before her.
"To reduce meat to... such a state, mangled together with vegetables..."
"Just use the spoon. With the Doenjang-jjigae, scoop up broth and solids together like a soup. If you can't use chopsticks, a fork works fine."
Only after I'd painstakingly walked her through the eating method did she lift her first spoonful.
It was loaded with nothing but meat.
Beef bulgogi laced with gochujang and soy marinade.
Even the pickiest children didn't eat that one-sidedly. But I wasn't about to pick a fight over it.
How a customer ate was the customer's business.
Scooping up the beef bulgogi on her spoon, she frowned as she inspected the stray grains of rice and a single strand of bean sprout that had clung to the meat.
"I'd like to scrape every last bit of this off, but..."
Perhaps out of some vestigial elven pride, she didn't go so far as to flick off the vegetables stuck to the meat.
She hesitated over the Tuu for a long moment, then slipped the spoonful into her mouth.
Chew, chew.
"...What? Th-this can't be right..."
She'd barely chewed a few times before she looked up at me in shock.
Eyes wide, she flicked her gaze between me and the bibimbap.
Well? Good, isn't it?