“What—what is it? Why are you suddenly crying?”
“Sniff… hic……”
Irit was chewing the tangsuyuk in her mouth as tears streamed down her face.
Strange.
There definitely shouldn’t have been any problem with the taste.
There was no chance meat had gotten mixed in, either.
I’d already checked all sorts of things with the test menu beforehand, so why?
“Um… Manager, could something be wrong? Maybe it isn’t to her taste……”
Aris cautiously approached me and whispered.
“There’s no way. You tried it too.”
“O-of course, it really was delicious to me……”
“Then why on earth is she like that?”
I watched Irit with an uneasy heart.
A moment later, after sobbing for quite some time, Irit picked up her fork again and began to eat.
“Munch, munch…… hic…… waaah…… munch, munch……”
She began eating with gusto, rolling the tangsuyuk and dumplings in the sauce.
But her tears still hadn’t stopped.
As I watched her, a certain scene suddenly overlapped with the sight before me.
Right. It was the day I said I would quit being an adventurer and leave the party.
All the other companions had supported my new future,
but one person alone…… Irit, refused to accept me leaving the party.
She had clung to the hem of my pants and bawled, hanging on so I couldn’t leave the inn room.
The way Irit looked now resembled that time.
“Waaah… It’s… delicious…… It’s so delicious……”
At last, Irit gave her evaluation of the food.
As expected, there was no problem with the dish.
Then the reason she was crying was probably……
“Eat slowly and comfortably so you don’t get indigestion. If it isn’t enough, I can make more.”
I spoke gently to Irit as she ate through her tears.
It seemed she would need a little more time to calm down.
* * *
How much time had passed?
Irit, who had been impossible to tell whether she was crying or eating, finally regained her composure.
The plates set before her had been cleaned so thoroughly they showed their bottoms.
I was worried she might not have properly tasted the food because she’d cried so much while eating,
but Irit seemed satisfied with what I had served.
“Crying dulls the taste of food. Next time, savor it properly while you eat.”
“……No, it was plenty delicious.”
“Why did you burst into tears, anyway?”
Once the situation had settled, I asked what I had been curious about.
She had always been the type to cry out of nowhere, but this time, I couldn’t understand why.
“I just…… I don’t know either.”
“I’ll say it again, but I have absolutely no intention of going back to being an adventurer.”
“Yeah, I know that too. I don’t think an archmage like you would have started this with some half-hearted resolve. Wanting you to come back is purely my own selfishness.”
Perhaps because she’d cried her heart out,
Irit spoke to me with a surprisingly calm attitude.
You knew that, and yet you kept coming to the restaurant and pestering me like that?
As I thought that, Irit opened her mouth again.
“I just… felt that you really can’t come back anymore…… Maybe that’s why.”
“If I was going to go back in the first place, I wouldn’t have started this.”
“And I was also disappointed, wondering why you never made me food like this when we were together.”
“That’s……”
I had nothing to say to that.
The life of an adventurer was not one overflowing with leisure.
There were plenty of times when we filled our stomachs on the roadside with ingredients we had hunted and gathered ourselves.
In forests and dungeons crawling with monsters, we couldn’t camp in one place for long,
and since the environment was like that, I simply showed the best cooking I could with whatever ingredients we had.
Since Irit was the only one in the party who didn’t eat meat, naturally, the meals were centered around meat dishes.
At most, I would quickly prepare the main meat dish for the other companions, then set aside vegetable soup or salad for Irit.
She had always been in the position of watching us greedily devour all kinds of meat dishes right in front of her.
From my perspective, it wasn’t that I hadn’t looked after her,
but rather, that at the time, the situation simply couldn’t be helped.
Even so…… looking back, I did feel sorry that I hadn’t taken better care of Irit.
Back then, I had been too preoccupied with thinking about my future as an adventurer.
Since Irit was an elf, I’d vaguely assumed she wouldn’t think much of getting by on vegetable soup and salad.
In truth, she must have wanted to eat the same food as us and feel the same satisfaction.
But back in my adventurer days, I had too many things to worry about to consider her feelings that deeply.
“……Come here anytime. If you do, I’ll make whatever dish you want.”
I spoke sincerely to my old companion, Irit.
“Yeah……. By the way, does this restaurant really get customers?”
She suddenly struck where it hurt.
Irit had already completely regained her composure and returned to her usual self.
“Of course they come. How could I run a restaurant without customers?”
“For that to be true, I’ve never once seen a customer whenever I came.”
“Urk……”
In truth, she was right.
It was a restaurant operated mainly for regulars…… That was the concept I’d settled on, but there were far too few customers.
It was probably because I’d opened a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, far from the city, with dangerous monster-infested zones on both sides.
When I was first agonizing over where to open the restaurant, I’d been brimming with confidence.
With my cooking skills, I thought I’d get regulars even if I opened shop right in front of the gates of hell.
“Ever since that customer came here before, made a reservation, and left, not a single person has come by yet~”
While I failed to think of anything to say in rebuttal,
Aris, the tactless soggy-seaweed ghost, butted in and said that to Irit.
Irit looked at me with questioning eyes and asked,
“A restaurant with no customers…… The location was too bad from the start. Who would come all the way out here?”
“……It was intentional. I don’t want too many customers.”
“For someone saying that, every time I come, you spring to your feet with a face full of expectation and then get disappointed.”
“……”
No, she even noticed that?
“As expected, want to come back? To the adventurer party.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Hmm……”
Irit slowly looked around the inside of the restaurant as if inspecting it.
“Do you have something you want to say?”
“You’ve always been a little clumsy when it came to things like this.”
“What do you mean?”
Irit smiled faintly.
“Even back when we were adventurers, you’d get so absorbed in other things that you missed the easy stuff and ended up taking huge detours.”
At those words, a memory from my adventurer days came to mind.
Once, we had entered a dungeon where the door to the final room was locked by magic.
We had to open that door somehow and find the relic inside,
so as an archmage, I analyzed the magic placed on the door and used a method of reversing the flow of mana.
The process was extremely profound and difficult, so it ended up taking a full three days just to open one door.
When I finally managed to open the door, there was another identical door inside.
At that time, Irit investigated the area nearby and found a key in another room that could open the doors easily.
I had naturally assumed that we had to directly dispel the magic to open the door,
but with that key, we could unlock every door in the dungeon in an instant. I remembered how empty I had felt then.
Back then, Irit had said the same thing.
—When you get fixated on one thing, you get so absorbed in it that you miss the easy stuff.
“Then what are you saying I’m missing?”
I asked Irit.
When it came to experience running a restaurant, including my past life, I had overwhelmingly more of it.
But all my experience had been aimed at “a restaurant that does good business.”
I didn’t expect much, but Irit’s words might become some kind of hint.
“There’s a saying. If you’re going to cross the line, cross it all the way.”
“……Huh?”
“I’m saying your restaurant has crossed the line, but only in a half-baked way.”
Irit got up from her seat and picked up the restaurant’s menu board.
“You opened a restaurant in a place this hard to reach, but the menu is ordinary. The way you run it is ordinary too. Honestly, it feels neither here nor there.”
“Then do you have some good idea?”
“If you want to be a special restaurant, wouldn’t it be better to go truly special? For example……”
Irit raised her index finger and continued.
“Get rid of this meaningless menu board, and make it the finest restaurant that not just anyone can visit. Once someone does come, you’ll satisfyingly make any dish they desire! Reservations required! That kind of feeling…… How about it? Like how you made me the ‘ultimate meat dish.’”
A restaurant that gets rid of the menu board and doesn’t accept ordinary customers at all……
A restaurant that, in exchange for being difficult to reach, serves whatever food one wants once they arrive.
There was logic to it.
At this rate, even if I operated like an ordinary restaurant, no customers would come.
Then I had to stimulate people’s curiosity and desire for challenge enough for them to come all the way out here.
An adventurer with gourmet tendencies.
A local lord seeking a special dining experience.
If word spread that this place was not an ordinary restaurant, but a special restaurant, customers might start coming.
“I’m surprised you gave unexpectedly sound advice.”
“Unexpectedly? I’m speaking from experience, you know.”
Irit said that with a slightly smug expression.
“But if you really want to serve ‘anything,’ your skills will have to be that incredible. If someone comes all this way and isn’t satisfied, the restaurant will go under in an instant. When that time comes, I’ll accept you back. Klaus.”
“Who says I’m going under? I’m confident in my skills.”
“……I know. You know I was just saying it. So stiff-necked.”
The elven knight Irit gathered the sword and small amount of luggage she had brought and prepared to leave.
We were no longer companions.
But I could still feel from her the closeness of the days when we had been.
Should I try completely changing the restaurant’s method of operation, just as she said?
The current way was going nowhere anyway.
A special restaurant, the only one on the continent, that did not accept ordinary customers.
With a concept like that, couldn’t the fact that I was a former archmage become a merit as well?
And Aris, the ghost employee over there with the seaweed-like hair, blankly zoning out, too.
“Come again anytime you miss my cooking. You can bring the other companions too.”
“Yeah. Even if you don’t say it, I’ll come again. Don’t go under before then, okay?”
With that, Irit stepped out of the restaurant.
After she left, I quietly split the restaurant’s menu board in two and threw it in the trash.
* * *