Chương 194: Ethan's New Beginning

After a few days in the New York noise and the necessary interviews, Ethan was going back to Boston. Before he left he asked Chris out for a drink. Not to anything upmarket — a completely ordinary, slightly too loud sports bar on a corner. There was a baseball game on the television and everyone around them was talking at volume over beer. It was Ethan's favorite kind of room. It had life in it.

"Hey! My championship partner!" Ethan spotted him from across the room and waved hard. He was in a plain T-shirt and jeans and looked like any young guy from down the street, with nothing of a world champion about him. Chris went over grinning, high-fived him hard, and then hugged him.

"How is it? How does home feel?" Chris ordered two pints and handed one over.

"Incredible. Genuinely incredible." Ethan took a large swallow and got foam all over his mouth.

"You know my dad's little rotisserie? The queue goes around three blocks now. The old man walks like he's got a tailwind. He tells everyone he meets, that's my son, world champion." Watching the pride on Ethan's face — real, and slightly stupid — Chris was honestly happy for him. He knew what that title meant to Ethan, and that it wasn't money or fame. It was that his father had said it out loud. They touched glasses and talked.

About the idiotic things that had happened during the competition, about Kira's mysterious tea expedition. It was easy. And then Ethan put his glass down and his face changed.

"Chris. There's something I need to tell you."

"That serious?" Chris sat up.

"I… I quit Aethel." Ethan's eyes were bright saying it, like a man who'd finally set down something heavy. That genuinely surprised Chris.

"You quit? Why? I thought Aethel was the dream. Best kitchen and best equipment on earth."

"Yeah. It was." Ethan's gaze went somewhere further off. He turned the glass in his hand.

"I used to think the end point of cooking was perfection. The most precise temperature, the most stable molecular structure, the most exact geometry on the plate. Aethel gave me the conditions to do all of that. I thought it was my holy site." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. He drank.

"And then in Paris, making that father's fish soup, I got it. My dad's soup — no technique, no plating, he probably didn't even measure the salt. So why is it the deepest flavor in that judge's memory? Because there was something else in it."

"What?" Chris asked quietly.

"Imperfection." Ethan looked up, clear and completely certain.

"It's a man who never smiled, at the end of his life, clumsily trying to leave his son something. It's Kira's pie with the pastry slightly over-baked and a girl's whole heart in it. It's our main course, forced through a pressure machine, full of risk and full of things that could have gone wrong."

"I suddenly realized that the things that actually move people are almost never perfect. Perfect things are machines. Cold, exact, and with nothing in them. Imperfection is where the human part lives." Chris listened. He understood it completely; this was the turn Ethan had to make after taking technique as far as it goes.

"So." Ethan's trademark grin came back across his whole face.

"I've decided. I'm opening my own restaurant."

"Whoa." Chris whistled.

"That's news. Where? What kind?"

"Boston. Near my family. Small — maybe five or six tables small." His eyes were lit like a man describing a newborn child.

"I'm using the prize money. My dad says he's designing the kitchen himself and moving all those ovens he's had for thirty years into it."

"That sounds fantastic. What's it called?" That was the question Chris cared about. Ethan smiled mysteriously and said it a word at a time." The Imperfect." Chris blinked, and then broke into a laugh that came out of the floor of him. He hammered Ethan's shoulder, doubled over with it.

"Genius. Ethan, you are a genius. That's the best restaurant name I've ever heard." The name summed up his entire arc — from a technical obsessive chasing perfection to a cook grown up enough to take imperfection in his arms on purpose.

"My place won't have expensive ingredients and complicated machines." Ethan was gesturing with both hands now.

"I want to make honest food. Bread with a slightly burnt edge. Vegetables cut to different sizes. But every mouthful will taste like the food itself and like how the person cooking it felt. I want people to know life isn't perfect, and an imperfect, warm dinner can fix a lot of that." Looking at him, lit up like that, Chris knew his friend had found his actual new beginning.

"So." Ethan raised his glass and looked at him seriously.

"The day The Imperfect opens, you're coming. You, Kira, Sarah, all of you. Your seats are permanently table one, the best in the house." Chris lifted his glass and knocked it hard against Ethan's, and the ring of it carried through the noise.

"I promise. For your imperfection I'd cross the entire country." Two young cooks, in a New York night, made a perfect promise about a restaurant called The Imperfect that didn't exist yet.