Chương 130: Foresight Online, Chris Runs the Pass

At seven o'clock sharp, the restaurant doors opened on time. Twenty-five of New York's top food-world figures took their seats in a steady stream. They talked as they went, running critical eyes over the menu and the room. In the back, the war was formally on.

"Team B, first ticket, two-top, two appetizers!" The runner at the pass called out the first order.

"Heard!" Chris answered coolly, and pressed the timer in the same motion.

"Kira, sauce."

"Cold station, plate up." Chris's voice wasn't loud, but it reached every member's ear with total clarity. Kira handed the cold cook the bright, clean yuzu-scented dressing she'd mixed ahead of time. Following the plating diagram she'd drawn out in advance, the teammate laid the sliced tuna sashimi, avocado purée, and sea grapes into place, one by one, with great care. The whole thing ran quiet and orderly. Chris stood at the pass like a commander, surveying the near-finished work.

"One more ring of sauce. Watch the rim," he noted. The cold cook did it at once.

"That's it — away!" Two orders of Kira's Japanese-French fusion sashimi, named "Summer Coast," went out steady. From ticket to pickup: under three minutes. Feedback came back from the front of house fast.

"This appetizer's really interesting — the yuzu's so bright and fresh, and the tuna's beautiful quality."

"Full of ideas. Great opener." Team B had started beautifully. Kira's creativity, held up by the stable frame Chris had provided, came through in perfect form. Then the tickets began flying in like snow.

"Team A, first ticket, four-top, four appetizers!" At the far end of the kitchen, Team A began their service too. Ethan's dish was a technically brutal spherified olive juice with Ibérico ham. Ethan worked his molecular tools with composure, turning olive juice into gleaming, translucent "caviar." His movements were precise as a robot's. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. But his teammates looked tense.

The one carving the ham, under the pressure, had a faint tremor in his hands, and the slices came out uneven, thick and thin.

"Recut!" Ethan ordered without turning his head, his tone ice. The cook's face flushed scarlet in an instant. Team A's first appetizer, stumbling all the way, took nearly seven minutes to leave the pass. As time wore on, the gap between the two teams grew more and more obvious. Under Chris's direction, Team B ran like a smooth assembly line. Everyone knew their task; the commands were clear, the execution clean. Appetizers went out fast and steady, without fail. Team A, meanwhile, began to fray.

Ethan's individual ability was overwhelming — but out of habit he shouldered every ounce of pressure himself, and his demands on his teammates were so exacting that the mood on the team went taut as wire. Under his high-pressure command, the other three grew stiffer and stiffer, terrified of a mistake. Soon service moved into the main courses. This was the hardest test of the kitchen's pressure.

"Team B, main, two duck breasts, medium!"

"Team B, main, one duck breast, medium-well!" The tickets began to stack. Chris shifted into full throttle. Three sauté pans in front of him, all lit at once. His left hand governed the cook of the duck, his right built the sauce, and his eyes had to stay on the temperature of the purée and the rhythm of the pass all at the same time. His brain was running at full speed. Just then, a prep teammate, handing him a garnish, slipped — and the plate looked about to hit the floor.

If that garnish went down, it wouldn't just wreck the ticket rhythm; it could leave them short on an ingredient, with consequences too ugly to weigh. In a flash, Chris's [Short-Range Foresight] activated on its own. Into his mind came the next two seconds, crisp and clear: the plate hitting the floor, garnish scattering everywhere, the panicked face of the teammate.

"Left hand!" Chris nearly roared it. On reflex, the teammate caught the sliding plate with his left hand. Disaster, dodged. Still shaken, he looked at Chris, gratitude flooding his eyes. Chris had no time for him. He threw himself straight into searing the next duck breast. He picked up a portion, about to lay it in the pan — and [Short-Range Foresight] fired its second warning. He saw it: this breast, once it hit the pan, would char black within five seconds, the skin scorched by too-high heat.

"Pan's too hot!" He dropped the flame half a notch at once, waited two seconds, felt the pan's temperature fall into a perfect band, and only then laid the duck in, skin-side down, steady." Sssss —" The sound of a flawless Maillard rose up. Two crucial reads had let him sidestep two potentially fatal errors. And all of it happened inside barely a dozen seconds. No one else in the kitchen caught the slightest anomaly.

They saw only Chris — like a machine that never erred — handling every ticket with calm, precision, and speed. At the far end of the kitchen, Team A's mains had collapsed into outright disaster. Beef Wellington, a dish that punishes any lapse in process control. The wrap of the pastry, the moisture of the duxelles, the doneness of the beef — not one link could go wrong. Ethan tried to control every core step alone, but as the tickets piled up, even he began to run short of hands.

"Pastry's overbaked! Get it out!"

"The duxelles is too wet! It'll turn the pastry to mush!"

"Doneness is off! Who told you to pull those early?!" Ethan's roars rose and fell across the kitchen. Under his fury, his teammates lost their judgment entirely, scattering like headless flies. At the judges' table, Marcella and the other two watched everything unfold in the back through the monitors. They saw it: Team B's pickup times ran, on average, nearly three minutes faster than Team A's. And Team B's kitchen, busy as it was, held a taut, orderly rhythm throughout.

Team A's was chaos you could see with the naked eye.

"That Chris White…" the anonymous Michelin inspector said slowly, watching the screen.

"He doesn't act like a contestant. He acts like a real executive chef. He's running his kitchen."