Chương 72: Three-Man Team, an Assembly-Line Menu

The whole place was in an uproar. Ethan's choice had blindsided everyone, including his own teammates. A flicker of shock crossed David's and Amelia's faces too—clearly they'd also expected him to take Jack, the one flawless at meat. Jack's fists clenched on reflex—not from nerves, but from a humiliation laced with fury and the sting of being underrated. He glared at Ethan, the look saying: You think you're better than me?

Marcus, by contrast, seemed to let out a huge breath, going slack all over—only to be seized at once by fresh panic. Sarah was gone. The one person on the team who could most calm everyone's nerves was gone. Sarah herself stood completely stunned, looking at Chris, then at Ethan, her face full of helplessness.

"I... why me?" Ethan's expression didn't change, his voice cold as the stainless steel of his station.

"Your overall ability is the most consistent. My team needs someone who won't drop the ball at any stage." It sounded high-minded enough, but who in the room couldn't hear the real intent behind it? He wasn't reinforcing. He was dismantling. What he wanted wasn't Sarah's technique—it was to draw out the soul of Chris's team. Not a steady all-rounder, but to rob Chris of his most trusted comrade, to make this newly built team begin to crumble from the inside.

Gareth Vane watched it all, a faint, hard-to-catch smile at the corner of his mouth. This was the competition he wanted to see—not just a contest of cooking, but an all-out war of psychology, strategy, and will.

"Sarah, go." Vane jerked his chin toward Ethan's team. Sarah gave Chris one last look, her eyes full of apology and helplessness. With heavy steps she walked to stand behind Ethan. Four against three. The numerical advantage had flipped in an instant—and more lethal still was the blow to morale.

"All right. Teams are set." Vane clapped his hands and announced in a booming voice.

"You have twenty-four hours to design your five-course menus and finish all your prep. After twenty-four hours, Ethan will announce his final decision here—no, at the Hollywood charity gala itself. Now, to your meeting rooms!" The two squads walked off into wholly different moods. On Ethan's team, David and Amelia went out of their way to greet Sarah, trying to ease the tension, but Sarah only managed a strained smile, distracted. Ethan said nothing, already building his grand, exacting menu in his head.

In Chris's room, the mood could only be called grim. The moment they were inside, Jack slammed his apron down on the table with a dull thud.

"Damn it!" he snarled, pacing back and forth, agitated.

"That son of a bitch! He did it on purpose! Isn't it obvious he's just messing with our heads? He'd rather take Sarah, whose style doesn't even fit, than take me? Who the hell does he think he's looking down on!" Marcus huddled in the corner, his face white, gnawing nervously at his nails.

"We're done... there's only three of us now. A two-hundred-guest dinner, five courses... how is that even possible? And... and Sarah's gone, she could do everything..." Jack's temper flared higher. He glared at Marcus.

"Can you cut the doom talk? We haven't even started and you've already lost?"

"I... I just..." Marcus, shouted down, went red around the eyes and couldn't get a word out. The whole team was on the verge of collapse before the competition had even formally begun. Chris had stayed silent the entire time. He watched the furious Jack and the panicked Marcus quietly, and only when Jack's anger and Marcus's fear had each swelled like balloons to their peak did he finally speak. His voice was calm, smooth as a lake, not a single ripple in it.

"You've both got it wrong." If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Jack stopped pacing and turned to look at him.

"Got it wrong? Wrong how? They poached our steadiest person!"

"He took Sarah—not because Sarah's the most skilled." Chris's gaze moved between them.

"But because he knew that taking Sarah would get exactly this reaction out of you." Jack froze. Chris went on.

"This is what he wanted from you—rage, losing your head. This is what he wanted from Marcus—fear, losing your nerve. He wants to break us before the battle even starts. If he'd taken you, Jack," Chris looked at him, "he'd have gotten a top-tier meat specialist—but you're a double-edged sword. Your mindset is your biggest problem, and he had no guarantee he could control you. On top of that, he'd have handed me a chance to settle Sarah and Marcus and rebuild a steadier team."

"And if he'd taken me," Chris's tone carried a thread of self-mockery, "even better—the two of you, leaderless, would surrender outright. So poaching Sarah is, tactically, the highest-value choice. He's not reinforcing himself. He's weakening us. He's breaking us down psychologically." Jack and Marcus both fell silent. Chris's words were a bucket of cold water, dousing their anger and their fear, making them actually think about the situation in front of them.

"So... so what do we do now?" Marcus asked in a small voice, still trembling.

"What do we do?" Chris walked to the strategy board and picked up a marker.

"There are three of us, so we do what three people can do. We don't try to out-refine them. We don't try to out-complicate them. We out-efficiency them, out-steady them, out-fewer-mistakes them." He drew a deep breath, his eyes turning sharp.

"I'm going to design a menu—a menu as precise as an industrial assembly line. Each of us is one gear on that line. No wasted motion, no complicated choices, only execution. Absolute execution." He fired up the Dish Simulation module in his mind. [Task: design a five-course menu for a 200-guest charity dinner.] [Team configuration: 3 people (Chris, Jack, Marcus).] [Constraints: high output volume, tight timeline, severe shortage of manpower.] [Optimization goals: maximize efficiency, minimize error rate, guarantee flavor consistency.] On the system interface, countless dishes began to combine, break apart, recompose. Appetizer... had to be a cold dish, batch-prepped in advance. Smoked salmon with lemon-dill cream cheese, set in little tartlet shells. Simple, elegant, almost no on-site work. Marcus could finish ninety percent of it a day ahead. Soup... had to be a big-pot soup, made all at once, flavor consistent.

Lobster Bisque—the base simmered ahead of time, and at service all you'd need is to heat it, portion it, and drip on a little basil oil. Chris would handle this himself, to lock the flavor. Fish course... no complicated sauce or garnish. Uniform fillets of Mediterranean sea bass, seasoned with only salt and pepper, seared fast. A simple lemon butter sauce, made ahead and spooned on in batches. This baton went to Jack—his sear was a strength. Main course...

absolutely not something time-and-labor-intensive like Wellington. Pan-seared filet mignon, heat control on which was second nature to Jack. The sides: mashed potatoes and asparagus, roasted ahead and reheated. The sauce, a classic black pepper—again, Chris's to control. Dessert... Marcus's strength, but nothing à la minute like soufflé. It had to be made ahead and easy to portion. Chocolate mousse cups with berries. Marcus could make the mousse bases in advance; at service, only unmold and decorate.

Chris wrote the menu structure and the assignments on the strategy board fast.

"Look here." He rapped on the whiteboard. Jack and Marcus leaned in.

"Marcus, you're on the appetizer and the dessert. Ninety percent of the work on both of those is in the prep stage. Once service starts, all you do is the simplest plating and garnish. Your pressure is mostly up front." Marcus looked at the menu and nodded, his nerves easing considerably. The setup did, to the greatest possible degree, route around his weakness—the mistakes he tended to make under high pressure.

"Jack," Chris turned to him, "you're on the two most important hot dishes—the fish and the steak. I don't want anything fancy from you. I just want every piece of fish skin seared crisp and every steak cooked to a perfect medium-rare. Your job is the heat—absolutely precise heat. The sauces and sides, I'll handle." Jack looked at the clear division of labor on the board and, for the first time, didn't argue. The setup let him focus entirely on the part he was best at, the part he took most pride in.

Chris hadn't written him off over his poor seasoning—he'd put him exactly where he could shine. That was a kind of trust.

"And me?" Jack asked.

"Me," Chris drew three circles—around "soup," "all sauces," and "expediter"—"I connect you two. I'm the soup station, the sauce station, and the final pass. Every dish goes through me before it reaches a guest. I'll be the one who glues all the parts together and keeps the whole machine running." The room went quiet.

Jack looked at the menu, at the assignments, and for the first time felt that what Chris had designed wasn't a menu—it was a system, a high-efficiency combat system built specifically for the three of them, to fight four people, even five. In this system there was no heroism. There was only seamless coordination.

"Well?" Chris asked.

"Any problems?" Jack drew a deep breath, picked his apron back up off the table, and tied it around his waist.

"No problem," he said in a low voice.

"Let's do it this way. I'm going to show that guy across the room exactly what kind of meat cook he gave up." Marcus nodded hard too, the fight rekindled in his eyes.

"I... I can do it too!" Chris looked at his teammates, back on their feet, and felt his own chest loosen. The first gate—morale—was cleared at last. But this was only the beginning. The twenty-four hours of prep ahead would be hell. And the real battlefield was the gala floor. He glanced toward the next room over. Ethan, you tore out my glue. So I'll turn myself into an engine. We'll see.