- Breakfast
As the saying went, when the city gates caught fire, the fish in the moat suffered too. If the monks were going to die, their fellow monks would have to die with them. No one was getting away.
The neighboring kitchens reacted in different ways. The Arab kitchen was slaughtering camels, and its towering ovens had become volcanoes.
The Japanese kitchen was sharpening small knives. The mournful notes of a shamisen echoed in their ears. Expecting delicate kaiseki cuisine to fill their stomachs was asking the impossible. They might as well take their own lives sooner rather than later.
The Turkish and Indian kitchens were fighting over the sheep. Their cooks were already brawling, clanging and banging away. Where the hell were they supposed to get more ingredients in the middle of the night? There was one fewer live sheep in the hotel's backyard with every one they used. Even the cleverest cook was helpless without ingredients. How could they possibly hand them over without a fight? There was no avoiding a showdown.
In the Chinese kitchen, the knife-wielders stood ready, holding their position and waiting for the signal to strike...
The Korean kitchen simply put out its fires. They secretly left a resignation letter, and the head chef led his team in a quiet escape. They fled. If they couldn't afford to provoke them, couldn't they at least avoid them?
That night, the King's Hall went through at least thirty thousand standard round dinner plates.
In other words, a full thousand large white plates cycled through six stages between the dining room and the kitchen: plating, serving, being emptied, clearing, washing, and sanitizing before being used again. Each plate went through the process at least thirty times.
Chef Mark, with his annual salary of five hundred