Chapter 66: Kitchen of Liao Zhai Tavern [4K]
At 5:40 AM, there were no more customers in Liao Zhai Tavern.
Luxianbei had thought that several waitresses, including Ying Ningning, lived in some part of the tavern.
But to her surprise, after cleaning up the tavern and securing the doors and windows, they actually left the tavern, not knowing where they went.
Watching the few young ladies, each with distinct styles and more or less having some non-human features, walk away, Luxianbei looked at Hu Boss and asked seriously, “Boss, I see my sisters all have animal ears, tails, and such. With my ordinary appearance, am I going to feel a bit out of place?”
“How about I go look for something to wear too?”
Hu Boss didn’t expect Luxianbei to be so “enthusiastic” about this work. He was taken aback for a moment, then smiled, “Actually, there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’d like, you can.”
Before he could finish speaking, Luxianbei said, “What do you think about me getting some magpie feathers to wear on my head?” As she spoke, she raised her hands above her head, roughly sketching the shape of an Indian feather headdress.
After all the waitresses left, Hu Boss led Luxianbei towards the back kitchen.
On the south side of Liao Zhai Tavern, in a corner beside the food serving area, there was a side door leading to the back kitchen, covered partially by a light blue floral cloth curtain. From the exposed part below, it was seen to be a wooden folding door, brownish in color, shiny with a layer of patina, suggesting it had been around for quite some time.
“Our Liao Zhai Tavern’s back kitchen has two employees, one is the head chef, Mr. Hei, and the other is Bai Laomu, who is in charge of cold dishes and the side preparations. If I don’t have time to teach you, you can consult them for culinary skills.”
“As for the other helpers’ urban legends, you don’t need to pay attention to those.” Hu Boss introduced Luxianbei while walking ahead. Luxianbei listened intently, nodding repeatedly.
“By the way, Mr. Hei doesn’t like others touching his kitchen utensils, and, well, the stove is also off-limits, so when you practice, it’s best to stay away from his tools and the stove.”
Upon hearing this, Luxianbei tilted her head in confusion, asking, “If I can’t touch the stove, where am I supposed to cook? Is there another stove?”
“Right!” Hu Boss nodded and while lifting the cloth curtain and fetching a key to unlock the door, he explained with a smile, “Our Liao Zhai Tavern has more than one stove. Back in the good old days, the back kitchen had over three hundred chefs!”
“Huh?” Luxianbei was shocked, “More than three hundred? What kind of scale is that? And now there are only two left? Is business that hard nowadays?”
Hu Boss shrugged, smiling wryly, “Business is alright, but it’s just that hiring chefs is quite tough. Anyway, let’s go inside?”
With that, Hu Boss lifted the curtain and pushed the door open, and Luxianbei followed closely behind.
After crossing the entrance, Luxianbei was momentarily stunned by the scene behind the door. What the heck? Behind that shabby wooden door in Liao Zhai Tavern was actually hiding an industrial heavy metal-style elevator?!
This setting felt a bit off, like a character with a guitar had sneaked into a Dunhuang mural. Luxianbei thought.
Hu Boss, standing next to her, noticing her expression change, patiently explained, “There isn’t enough space above, so the kitchen had to be built below.”
“This elevator was only installed over fifty years ago.” Over fifty years ago?
Though she had known for a long time that Liao Zhai Tavern had a very long history, catching the details in Hu Boss’s words made Luxianbei unable to help but secretly click her tongue in amazement.
In silence, the elevator doors closed.
As Hu Boss pressed the control chain to send the elevator down, a slight feeling of weightlessness swept over them, and through the gaps of the rugged steel railings, the scenery began to change.
Suddenly, shadows flowed past obliquely, like flocks of flying birds, and waves shimmering with faint light rippled, sketching indescribable shapes.
Everything became erratic, like a dream.
This somehow felt like the sensation of entering the God Realm Prototype? A thought inexplicably sprang to Luxianbei’s mind. Would the kitchen of Liao Zhai Tavern be a God Realm Prototype, or even a complete God Realm?
Then wouldn’t I have the chance to observe others’ God Realms up close while learning culinary skills, preparing for the fusion of the God Realm Prototype with Ling Tai Purification? Luxianbei pondered—
—
The elevator descended for about three minutes, its speed beginning to slow, eventually coming to a gentle halt.
With a slight “creak,” the metal doors on one side of the elevator slid open, revealing a dimly lit passageway illuminated by weak candlelight.
Looking down the passageway, she saw light coming from about fifty meters away.
“Follow me! From here forward is the kitchen of Liao Zhai Tavern,” Hu Boss said to Luxianbei while leading the way toward the illuminated area.
After exiting the elevator and walking down the passage for about twenty to thirty meters, Luxianbei suddenly caught a whiff of an odd smell. It smelled like seafood being deep-fried, like shrimp or crab, but it was also mixed with an unpleasant odor reminiscent of machine oil.
Luxianbei thought, “What the heck? Is the kitchen up ahead or a factory? How can there be a smell of machine oil? Are they deep-frying things in machine oil? Can that even be eaten? Is this place the dark culinary headquarters?”
For anyone who loves cooking, one of the most loathed things often involves ruining ingredients. Though she considered herself only a half-baked cook, she still felt offended by that strange smell.
The fifty-meter distance wasn’t long, and as Luxianbei pondered, she unconsciously followed Hu Boss through the passage, entering a kitchen that was a dozen times larger than the tavern above.
Standing at the entrance of the passage and looking into the kitchen, two thoughts flashed through her mind.
The first thought was: this kitchen is more than a dozen times bigger than the dining area, with many more chefs than waitstaff. Looking at Hu Boss, he clearly doesn’t know how to run a business! No wonder there were hundreds of chefs, and now only two are left!
The second thought was: wait, hold on! You tell me this is a kitchen? This clearly looks like a factory workshop combined with urban legends and advanced technology!
At the entrance of the passage, what she saw was a myriad of display racks filled with all kinds of alchemical materials for ingredients. The entire space had a drop of over ten meters, and on the ceiling, there were giant mice dressed in coarse cloth tunics, carrying small bamboo baskets, running upright on their hind legs, swiftly organizing boxes of various sizes filled with ingredients, seasonings, or other items, placing them where they belonged.
In the distance, Luxianbei noticed some urban legends with spirit energy fluctuations ranked from C+ to A busily working in different areas.
In front of a large water tank with a diameter of over five meters, a small, hunchbacked old woman with a broom-like head of white hair sat cross-legged on a stone platform that was as high as the water tank, opening her exaggeratedly large mouth and continuously spitting clean water into the tank.
Above the tank, several metal pipes connected to it, branching out like lush tree limbs, dispersing clean water to every corner of the kitchen.
On one side of the tank, a thick green bamboo pipe drew the nearly full clean water away, pouring it into a massive, semi-transparent container not far away. Within that container swam several bug-like creatures, completely red, about two inches long, with human faces.
As they swam around, the clear water in the semi-transparent container visibly transformed into amber-colored rice wine, and soon after, a swarm of flowery bugs surged up, carrying wine jars that were larger than their bodies, pouring into ceramic jars.
In front of a two to three-meter high stove, a giant, completely black, large-shouldered figure with a cubic head wore an apron and chef’s hat, skillfully flipping dishes with a spatula as big as a shovel in one hand and holding the handle of a massive pot in the other.
The smell of deep-fried seafood mixed with machine oil that Luxianbei had noticed earlier came from that giant pot.
With each flip, the unidentifiable viscous substance in the pot leaped into the air, twisting and writhing into various shapes, while tiny hands about the size of fingers emerged from the surface as if trying to grab something, clawing violently in every direction before crashing back down into the pot with a dull thud, emitting an unpleasant odor.
Besides that, Luxianbei also saw a few other figures, busy doing who knows what—a giant chicken dressed like a knight, a two-headed ferret, and a strange person whose upper body resembled an ancient scholar while the lower half was a sea serpent tail as thick as a barrel.
Further away, there were a few isolated spaces, and through giant glass windows, Luxianbei could vaguely see intricate machinery, gears, and conveyor belts whirling rapidly, producing bursts of noise, with a massive steel furnace glowing red-hot, occasionally expelling pale steam and emitting terrifying heat.
Staring blankly at the scene inside the kitchen of Liao Zhai Tavern for a moment, Luxianbei turned around and looked at Hu Boss beside her, tentatively asking, “Boss, you wouldn’t be the legendary Liu Quan the Immortal, would you?”
Luxianbei had read “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.”
Though she had only read it once and couldn’t recite it all perfectly, her exceptional memory allowed her to have a general impression of the main contents of most chapters.
After looking around, she spotted several urban legends recorded in “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.”
For example, that water-spraying old woman bore a striking resemblance to the tale described in “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio,” and the bug-like creatures in the transparent containers looked like the so-called “wine bugs” mentioned in the text.
“Me?” Hu Boss pointed at the tip of his nose, smiling at Luxianbei. “What are you thinking? I am definitely not! That guy’s surname is Pu, mine is Hu; completely different! But…”
“That guy did indeed work here for a long time.”
“Speaking of which, he’s one of the few apprentices who successfully learned all the culinary skills at Liao Zhai Tavern! By the way, he’s also the only human who learned all the culinary arts!”
So that means Liu Quan the Immortal could cook meals for the mortal realm? Luxianbei’s eyes widened as she asked, “What about now? Where is he now?”
“He’s naturally already passed away!” Hu Boss shrugged, saying, “After all, he’s just a human. Lives for just about a hundred years; learning culinary skills cannot extend his life.”
“Alright, let’s talk about this later. First, you should prepare a signature dish!”
“Come, this way. I’ll take you to your cooking station. Although it has been idle for a long time, it should be usable after a little cleaning. I had a helper tidy it up before you came.”
As he spoke, Hu Boss led the way, guiding Luxianbei through the rows of display racks until they arrived at a properly sized cooking station.
The stone cooking station, about 1.5 meters wide and 2 meters long, housed a stove with a large iron pot covered in dark red rust, with thick layers of dust on the surface and a patch of dried, unknown dark green stains, beside a grill piled high with ash.
The entire cooking station looked a bit worn, but as Hu Boss said, with a bit of cleaning, it could barely be used. Notably, on the wall next to the station hung several bunches of garlic, good quality dried chili peppers, and dozens of flower pots.
The flower pots contained herbs like scallions, cilantro, mint, and perilla leaves, which were thriving and particularly fresh compared to the dilapidated cooking station.
When Luxianbei approached the cooking station, several bugs already had cloths, steel wool, and various cleaning supplies, busy at work in front of the station.
After a moment of waiting, the bugs finished cleaning the old cooking station, making a series of strange calls as they ran away, leaving behind a large mouse with a cream-colored coat standing quietly on the countertop, ready and waiting.
Hu Boss, who had unknowingly taken a bamboo stool to sit down, saw Luxianbei standing there in a daze and reminded her, “Get started? Whatever ingredients or tools you need, just tell that helper Yishu; it will help you get them.”
Hearing the voice from behind, Luxianbei finally came to her senses, stepping forward and standing before the cooking station, staring at the large mouse on the countertop, furrowing her brow.
Seeing a mouse in the kitchen felt as uncomfortable as seeing someone shout “I love Dawn!” at a concert.
And what exactly am I supposed to cook? Luxianbei thought.
Initially, she was quite confident about cooking and thought that while she might not impress Hu Boss’s taste buds, she could at least manage a passing grade.
But now, after witnessing the kitchen of Liao Zhai Tavern, she suddenly felt a pang of insecurity.
It felt like having practiced three years of sanda only to be sent to the Siye Association Headquarters to take a spell level assessment. “I can only fight hand-to-hand; how can you ask me to use magic?”
As if sensing Luxianbei’s thoughts, Hu Boss shook a teacup that he had retrieved at some point, reminding her again, “Don’t worry, just ordinary home-style dishes will do, as long as they can showcase your cooking skills.”
“You want to learn culinary skills from me; I’d need to understand your current level to know where to start teaching, right?”
In that case, Luxianbei glanced at Hu Boss and then at the large mouse on the countertop, her lips parting slightly, “Hello, could you please get me a fresh fish, two liang of small chili peppers, a piece of pickled ginger, some cooking wine, and doubanjiang?”
She planned to make a dish of minty fish, which was something she wanted to have at Liao Zhai Tavern but didn’t manage to.
