Chicken Game (4)
Han Miru stood in the kitchen, telling the guests who had come to the housewarming that he would serve them a meal he had made himself.
The menu, of course, was chicken.
Min Ah-reum asked Lee Dong-ho in a low voice.
“Does Miru know how to cook?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve never seen him cook before.”
He hadn’t used a ready-made kit or anything like that; he had marinated raw chicken in advance.
Everyone watched with uneasy faces as Han Miru got to work.
But then...
He coated the chicken in batter and fried it, then made the sauce with the practiced ease of a chef.
At a glance, it was clear this wasn’t the work of someone who’d only tried cooking for a day or two.
Sung Yoon-ah thought to herself, What if this housewarming was just an excuse, and he’d been practicing to make it for me?
Jung Sojin’s eyes sparkled. He’s even good at cooking. Miru oppa is amazing.
When he fried the chicken and brushed it with sauce before baking it in the oven, a fragrant, spicy aroma soon filled the entire house.
“It smells pretty good.”
“It looks delicious.”
Before they knew it, everyone was swallowing hard.
* * *
I’d wondered what in the world hak-jjon-mat-tang-gu-ri was supposed to mean, but it seemed to just mean insanely delicious.
Han Sena, who tried it first, gave a thumbs-up, and the others began grabbing pieces one by one.
Everyone who tasted the chicken looked startled.
Sung Yoon-ah widened her eyes and said, “This is really good.”
“It is?”
“Yes. It’s much better than the chicken we had last time.”
Of course it was. I’d made it with a future-evolved recipe.
Even Sena, who had supposedly quit chicken while dieting, was happily grabbing pieces with sauce all over her hands.
“Whoa! This is so good.”
“I’m not going to take it away, so eat slowly. You’ll make yourself sick.”
“What if I end up craving it again later? Ah! Then Oppa can make it and deliver it to me. Right?”
“Nope. I’ve given up delivery.”
The reason was that I’d gone back in time after getting hit by a car.
Sitting beside them, I asked Sojin, who was eating neatly and quietly, “Is it good?”
She nodded vigorously.
“Yes. This is the most delicious chicken I’ve ever had. How are you so good at cooking?”
Sung Yoon-ah asked, too.
“Right? It didn’t taste like the work of someone who’d only done this once or twice. Did you practice?”
“Well...”
There was a long story here, one that couldn’t be heard without tears.
If I tried to explain it, I’d have to go all the way back to before my regression. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell them the whole thing, so I was about to brush it off when Sena grinned and said, “Tsk. What, did you secretly practice making it for your cute little sister? That’s kind of touching.”
“...Huh?”
No, what pointless misunderstanding was she making now?
Senior Dong-ho tore into a chicken wing and said to me, “This is seriously good. At this level, you could open your own chicken shop.”
I already had.
Back in my first life, running a chicken restaurant taught me something: when other people enjoyed food I’d made, it was deeply satisfying.
It had been a long time since I’d felt that way.
“Eat slowly. I’ll make the next chicken for you, too.”
At my words, Sung Yoon-ah looked surprised. “There’s more?”
“Of course.”
Did she really think there was only one future hit recipe?
* * *
At present, a single chicken sold in the prepared-food section of S Mart cost 9,900 won.
Min Gijin planned to drop that to 7,000 won for an event.
Following his instructions, S Mart president Yang Jae-ho had used old connections to bring chicken experts into the store and train the staff.
While preparing everything, Min Gijin felt a faint unease.
Based on everything he’d done in business so far, he was confident the half-price chicken event would be a huge success.
What worried him was the sauce Han Miru said he was going to make.
No, seriously, how does he plan to make chicken sauce?
From what he’d found out, Han Miru had never worked in the food service industry.
It would be hard for a complete outsider like that to make a sauce that tasted better than one developed through research by a team of specialists.
Then why is he so confident?
The problem was that, given who the other party was, it would be hard to refuse even if the sauce tasted bad.
If Han Miru had gone to the trouble of researching and developing it, and they simply said they wouldn’t use it...
They might never be able to work with Continue Capital again. No—worse, he might take offense and turn Shinsegi Group into an enemy.
If it tastes awful, what excuse should I use? Should I just say it’s delicious no matter what?
While Min Gijin wrestled with that dilemma, Han Miru came looking for him.
* * *
Yeoksam-dong S Mart.
I met two people there.
“Good to meet you.”
One was Vice President Min Gijin, whom I’d met before, and the other was Yang Jae-ho, the man overseeing S Mart.
He was reportedly the former CEO of a famous franchise before coming to S Mart.
Along with the two of them, I headed to S Mart’s kitchen.
“Oh! So this is what a supermarket kitchen looks like.”
Yang Jae-ho explained, “We make and sell all kinds of fried foods here.”
It was bigger than I’d expected.
Employees in sanitary uniforms and hairnets were busily cooking away. The rich smell of frying oil drifted through the air.
“How much can you produce?”
“If we run every piece of equipment at full capacity, we can make up to a thousand chickens a day.”
“That sounds about right.”
I tried some freshly made chicken there.
Like franchise chicken, supermarket chicken was made from brined chicken rather than raw.
Compared with the big three chicken franchises, it was a little lacking, but it was still good chicken.
The fried chicken base was solid, so the important thing was the sauce.
“Then I’ll make the sauce myself.”
In front of the two of them, I put the ingredients into a pot and made the sauce.
The first one I made was red sauce.
After brushing the finished sauce evenly over the fried chicken, I baked it again and set it in front of them.
“Go ahead and try it.”
Vice President Min Gijin and President Yang Jae-ho tasted the chicken and were shocked.
“Th-this taste...”
“How can chicken taste like this?”
Vice President Min Gijin asked in a hurry, “What in the world is this sauce?”
“It’s a red sauce I developed myself. So I named it Red King Chicken.”
But that wasn’t all.
I immediately made the other sauces, too.
This time, I made gold sauce and black sauce.
I brought out golden and black chicken.
“These are Gold Castle Chicken and Black Knight Chicken.”
Gold Castle Chicken was sweet and fragrant, almost like it had been brushed with honey, while Black Knight Chicken had a savory saltiness to it.
Along with Red King, those three became the so-called three signature limited-edition chicken menus.
Vice President Min Gijin looked as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“D-did you really develop these yourself?”
“Not on my own. I got some help.”
The recipes for the chicken I made originally came from limited-edition chicken.
If I thought about it strictly, I was stealing someone else’s recipe. But I didn’t feel even a speck of guilt.
If they hadn’t jacked chicken up to 20,000 won, I wouldn’t have gone this far either.
“The best thing about these chickens is that they still taste good even after they’ve cooled down and been reheated.”
Unlike franchise chicken, which is made fresh and delivered straight to your door, supermarket chicken takes time between preparation and eating.
It’s only natural for that to make it taste a little worse than chicken straight out of the fryer.
So I deliberately made the batter thin and let the sauce soak deep in.
I asked the two of them, “What do you think? Doesn’t this look like something S Mart could sell?”
At my question, President Yang Jae-ho spoke first.
“Absolutely. It’s good enough to stand beside the signature menus of Limited Chicken or BQQ Chicken.”
Then Vice President Min Gijin nodded with a look of certainty.
“This is definitely going to be a hit. If you put it out, the franchise companies are going to be shocked.”
* * *
BQQ Chicken.
Unlike Limited Chicken, which had grown steadily with support from one of the top ten conglomerates, BQQ Chicken had started as a neighborhood shop.
Its founder, Hong In-gyun, was born the eldest son of a poor family and had worked at anything he could get his hands on just to survive when he was young.
He saved up money by doing all sorts of grueling work at the market and opened a tiny chicken shop.
That was the beginning of BQQ Chicken.
Even while running the shop, he stayed up nights researching recipes, thinking about how to make the chicken taste better.
As word spread that it was delicious, customers began lining up outside his store.
From there, he expanded one branch at a time, and now it had grown into a major franchise with no fewer than 1,800 franchises under its belt.
Last year’s sales came to 560 billion won, only slightly below Limited Chicken’s.
Not long ago, he had even built an impressive new headquarters in Gangnam with the money he’d earned selling chicken. He had become the chairman of a mid-sized company, but he never let himself slack off.
Even now, he personally developed new products with researchers at the Chicken Academy and actively communicated with the media and the public.
For years, he had been pushing BQQ Chicken toward the high-end market.
He hired top stars as advertising models and poured enormous sums into marketing.
If the chicken sold well that way, franchise owners would profit too, so the marketing costs were naturally pushed onto them.
What he called premiumization really meant raising prices.
He used all kinds of methods to do it.
He’d launch an expensive new menu and then discontinue the existing one, or remove the cola that had originally come free and then add it back in while charging for “cola-vi,” or raise prices by 2,000 won and then run a promotion that handed out 2,000-won discount coupons for a while.
Bit by bit, 2,000 won here and 3,000 won there, until before anyone knew it, the price of a single chicken had passed 20,000 won.
But he didn’t stop there. He said chicken should cost 30,000 won, and the public backlash came down on him hard.
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
He already knew criticism would pour in. He said it anyway to gain momentum for the price hike.
Chairman Hong In-gyun defended himself in the press.
“Chicken is not an essential item, and it’s not like there are no substitutes. If you look around, there are plenty of cheap chickens out there. If you like that kind of chicken, then buy that. But if you want better-tasting, higher-quality chicken, then of course you should pay what it costs.”
After all, even if people complained, those who wanted to order chicken would still order it.
In fact, after his 30,000-won chicken comment, public outrage had flared up, but sales hadn’t changed much.
Just as I thought.
Fueled by confidence, he spoke even more forcefully.
“K-chicken became famous because the premiumization strategy worked. Thanks to premium chicken made with top-quality ingredients and plenty of care, we won over foreign customers’ taste buds. Any food becomes more expensive when it’s high-end. A takeaway sushi box sold on the street might cost 10,000 won, while omakase goes over 100,000 or even 200,000 won. Chicken is no different. Chicken fried in a market can cost 5,000 or 7,000 won, but carefully made premium chicken can fetch 30,000 won—no, even more.”
As if to prove his point, he suddenly raised the price of every BQQ Chicken menu item by 2,000 won.
At the same time, he also raised the price of ingredients supplied to franchisees, using rising costs and logistics expenses as his excuse.
And then, at the very moment BQQ Chicken announced the price hike...
Something completely unexpected happened.
Seeing that, Chairman Hong In-gyun shouted in shock.
“No, those bastards! What are they thinking, selling chicken that cheap?”