"If following the steps in a cookbook were enough to rival a master chef, would Totsuki even need to exist?" That was what Sogo Doma said as he watched the second young lady question her entire life.
Totsuki's reputation was simply impossible to refute...
As for the Totsuki Elite Ten—well, let's put it this way: even the least successful graduates could become Michelin head chefs. Those who did even moderately well partnered with others in production and became their own bosses.
As for those cooking guides, most were written by students who had failed to make a name for themselves or had been expelled from Totsuki. The food they produced was not bad, but compared to the Elite Ten...
The simplest example was Utaha Kasumigaoka. Even as a bestselling author, she nearly wept whenever she treated someone to a meal at Kirinoya. Never mind anything else—there was only one word for it: expensive!
But what could anyone do when Kirinoya's head chef, Hinako Inui, was an Elite Ten graduate? Never mind her actual skills; Totsuki's name alone was enough to make people pull out their wallets. The most absurd part was that they still felt it was worth every penny!
Yukinoshita's cooking skills were not bad either, but she had no way of making people empty their wallets and still call it worthwhile. After all, even the cooking textbooks she studied had been written by a former Elite Ten member...
And they were not even lesson plans that had been written with much care!
In any case, the second young lady truly could not resist the temptation of the cat food someone had made for her. Heh, hehehe...
Even so, it could not be denied that Yukinoshita was a capable cook. This was also the one area in which the