God of Cooking

Having said that, Bruce sneaked up to Jemma standing on the veranda, waiting for Min-joon.

Embarrassed by his sudden appearance, she looked at him and nodded awkwardly.

“It looks like he has lots of things to talk about with his friend,” she replied.

“You know Min-joon is a good person. If someone is struggling, he wants to help him out, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” Jemma nodded.

To be honest, she didn’t spend much time with Min-joon, but she soon found out that Min-joon was a good person. Besides, she heard a lot of stories about him from Kaya.

Bruce carefully leaned his arm against the railing next to Jemma. The streets he looked down from the high-rise apartment were cozier than he thought.

“It’s too late, but I still want to be a good person to my family.”

“I’m cheering for you.”

“I want to be a good husband and a good daddy to Kaya and you.”

She turned to him blankly when he said that.

He continued with a serious look, “I often think that you might have been confused a lot because of me, but if you allow me, I’m always ready to be a daddy to you, too”

“Why?”

“Uh?”

“Why are you trying to be a daddy to me?”

At that moment, Bruce looked at her as if he was embarrassed.

She squeezed the railing with a depressed expression.

“If you want to because of Kaya, you don’t have to. I’m not a bonus member of our family. So, I don’t want it if you give me love as something like a bonus.”

“Jemma, it’s not a bonus. Of course, I’ve met you thanks to Kaya. But I think you are my daughter. And that’s my duty.”

“You can’t love somebody against your will. You can give love when you love someone genuinely.”

When she said that, Bruce couldn’t say anything. She looked at Bruce with a confused gaze, then lowered her head.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to pretend to be happy when I am not. I’m not fake.”

And that was the only pride that Jemma could show to others. Shortly after she slowly left the veranda, somebody opened the window on one side of the veranda.

Bruce turned his head and laughed in embarrassment.

“You must have overheard our conversation.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Kaya replied in a calm voice.

As if he couldn’t bring himself to look at her, he cast a glance at the street down there again.

“It’s hard. I didn’t think that I could wash away my accumulated faults in an instant, but it’s still hard.”

“Don’t complain. I won’t accept your complaints.”

“You look cold-hearted like me,” he said, shaking his head with a bitter smile.

Leaning against the window, she opened her mouth.

“Thank you anyway for being kind-hearted to Jemma.”

“But I think I have to fix my attitude. Like you said, I can’t love anybody out of obligation. That can’t be true love.”

“I can promise you one thing.”

“What?”

“If you can truly love Jemma and if she can comfortably call you daddy...”

Kaya paused for a moment because what she had to say next was very serious.

“If you can do that, I will love you as a daughter.”

When she said that, he looked at her blankly. With tears welling in his eyes, he was about to say something with his lips trembling when Ara jumped into the room suddenly.

“Kaya, Kaya!”

“Ah, what’s up?”

“I have something to show you. Look at this.”

Then she opened her smartphone. Kaya frowned immediately because everything on the screen was Korean alphabets. Recently, she began to study Korean characters, but she could not read them at all.

As if she read her disappointed expression, Ara cleared her throat and opened her mouth slowly, “You know that restaurant specializing in Pyongyang cold noodles, right.”

“Yeah. What happened?”

“A gourmet once criticized the restaurant in his cuisine blog, but it seems lots of people are now blaming him for his wrong feedback and questioned him about how he could give a poor review to the restaurant that Min-joon with a perfect palate praised. They even criticized his qualification as a gourmet, saying he didn’t know what the taste was.”

“Well, even those blaming the gourmet are the same. They don’t know the taste, either.”

“It doesn’t matter now. Do you know what they said about my brother?”

“What did they say?”

Kaya suddenly looked so tense and anxious that Ara was startled instantly by her sharp look. At that moment, Ara recalled a story about Kaya that she heard before. To the best of her memory, Kaya struck down a stalker, who was sent to the hospital for treatment later.

Ara said with a tense voice, “That guy said something like this, ‘It doesn’t matter whether Min-joon has a perfect palate or not. How much does he know about the taste of Korean food when he is young and he had been abroad until now? You should not be deceived by the exaggerated media accolade about you. He is famous, but his fame can’t make him right.”

“What the hell is this idiot talking about?”

“Kaya, watch your language....”

“Hey, where can you find this kind of stupid situation where the guy is taking issue with someone who blamed the gourmet for his inaccurate feedback?”

“Certainly, you can’t in this country.”

“What an idiot this guy is! Damn it, let me post a comment about him.”

“Kaya, calm down, please. If you post a comment, my brother will be in more trouble.”

When Ara said that, Kaya, who was about to post something at the moment, stopped and glared at the smartphone for a while before putting it down with a sigh.

She was faithful to her emotions at the moment, but she couldn’t do it if her comment would get Min-joon into trouble.

Ara gently patted her on the back and said, “Don’t worry. There are more people who disagree with that guy than those who agree.”

“Of course. Min-joon is awesome, as you know.”

“So, take it easy, Kaya. Look, I’m his sister, but I try to stay calm about that guy’s disparaging comment.”

Only then did Kaya take a deep breath and calm down. Right at that moment, a notification rang on her cell phone, which indicated that she had a new message from her Starbook friend. And that friend was none other than Min-joon.

She turned up the corner of her mouth slowly after looking at his text message quietly.

“It looks like Min-joon got mad.”

“Really?”

“Look at this.”

Kaya pointed at the screen. Ara stiffened her face after reading it. Then she let out something like groaning before she knew it. They said that lovers tended to take after each other as time went by. Was it because Min-joon resembled Kaya’s hot temper?

Ara muttered in a low voice, “Oh my God...”

***

Unexpectedly, Min-joon stayed calm. Even though he was upset about the guy’s provocative comment, he didn’t post any comment that revealed his anger. But he expressed it subtly logically and calmly in each word of the sentences in his comment.

<Everyone has his or her own worries. And there are many types of worries as a person, as a man, as a woman, as a child, as an adult, as a cook, sometimes as a lawyer, or as a housewife. Of course, I have worries of my own. I have worries as a human being, as a son, as a cook, as someone drawing the attention of the public, and sometimes as a customer. And I have a deep sense of responsibility every moment I think about such worries because such worries not only change my life but sometimes, it can change other people’s lives too. Therefore, such worries can’t hang over my head shortly, and I can’t take them lightly.>

<However, there are some who take such worries lightly. They don’t even know how their casual comments hurt others. There are people who mistakenly think indulgence is their right in the name of freedom. There are people who don’t feel that anything is wrong with their irresponsible words and actions.”

<I have a friend. To be honest, he is not a close friend of mine. I knew him briefly during my middle school days. When I met him again, I could hardly remember his face or name. When I met him again, I came to realize how it felt to meet someone who was pursuing the same career as mine. I also learned that his worries could be mine. We talked a lot and shared lots of thoughts about cooking.>

<And my friend’s dish was trampled upon by a man’s reckless feedback. Of course, everybody should be allowed to express their opinion about cooking. For example, somebody might think of a certain dish as the best in the field, but there are others who might not agree. But I am not trying to say that the man’s review is wrong. I just want to point out the shallowness of the man who tries to evaluate and disparage a chef’s thoughts and his lifelong career. I would like to examine the scars that his shallow action can cause.”

<Cooking is close to our hearts. So, each of us can be called a gourmet because we have been enjoying all kinds of foods until now, like it or not. The weight of years is heavy. No one can judge which is more valuable, namely the time the gourmets spent in front of the table or the time the chefs spent in front of the kitchen is more valuable. And there should be no such judgment.>

<That is why I am writing this article now. It’s not because the guy posted a bad comment about the cold noodles in which my friend has invested all his time and energy all his life, for it’s his right. It wasn’t because he criticized my comment as if I was an inexperienced gourmet who didn’t know how to appreciate the taste of food. There are many people in the world who swear at me, and I am not free enough to react to them one by one.”

<There is only one reason why I am angry. It is that he just wanted to protect his pride even when he would disparage the gastronomic view of the man that he had never seen or met before in the process. I am now convinced that he didn’t evaluate the Pyongyang cold noodles. He just simply wanted to find fault with it. And I want to ask you how funny it is for a gourmet to deal with cooking using hatred.>

<Mr. Nam-hoon Lee, you are wrong.>