#which is to say: choosing chan was INTENTIONAL for the dynamics that will play out lol

[studioeisa]

hi hi! im so excited for ur kingsmen series it sounds so cool!!! (never seen the series before tho lol) just a qq, how come it says that chan is deceased in the image of all the kingsmen? is this something to be revealed in the series or mayhaps would you be able to tell us now 👀👀👀👀 no stress to write for the series tho, take care of yourself ❤️

ahhh hello, lovely! thank you so much for the love on manners maketh man, it's my babyyy (˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧ chan (agent poktanju) was killed during service, and the people i'll be writing about— minghao, jihoon, soonyoung, and vernon— are all impacted by his death. the details of how will come out in the each fic, which i'm slowly but surely working through 🥲 i really appreciate this ask, though, and i hope the series will live up to your expectations! <3

[stayndays]

𝐊𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐑 𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆'𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐄 𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐄𝐒 & 𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃

time to dive into this hellhole of a series once again

if you haven’t read killer king, there are MAJOR spoilers in this post! you have been warned.

So! This was highly requested in the final survey of Killer King: to reveal the other routes if you didn’t choose the Escape Route. To start off, though, I first have to talk about something that was brought up multiple times throughout the voting boxes of Killer King, which is:

“Why is Jisung helping Minho/Is Jisung aware that Minho’s the killer/What is Jisung and Minho’s dynamic?”

Minho and Jisung, to say the least, is probably the most interesting duo in the series. They didn’t met before the party, but rather, at the party before the mansion owner was killed, and quickly formed a strong bond. You could infer that Minho wanted to pull in a party guest that would most likely stay and solve the murder, just so he has a puppet to control if things go haywire. Minho was also inspired by Jisung’s poem, which results in how his killing techniques were put into place. 

Because Jisung is kind of naive in this story, he ends up being manipulated by the killer himself, and accidentally becomes Minho’s #1 ally for the entire series. Minho grabbed the key from the mansion owner’s coat, and gave it to Jisung for him to protect, saying something along the lines of “If anybody tries to flee the mansion like a coward, they won’t be able to because you have the key.” 

Oh, also, Minho attempted to frame Jisung by leaving the white glove in Jisung’s bag. I’m like.. slowly recovering info from this series because I already forgot most of the plot.. October was a fever dream guys wheeze

But now, this duo leads us to our first route I’ll cover today! The duos all have a certain goal: Hyunin wanted to escape, another group wanted to kill the killer themselves, and another group simply wanted to solve the murder. This duo is different, however, because Minho is literally the killer. 

So the route would’ve played out somewhat like this:

You choose to align with Minho and Jisung, regardless of whether you lie or not

When the house fight occurs and everybody is split off into groups, you have the option to stay with Chan, Changbin, and Minho. If you choose this, you would get an additional chapter where you have the decision to come with Minho upstairs, or to stay behind with Chan and Changbin.

If you choose to come with Minho, you would be forced by him to throw a knife at Jeongin, who’s alone on the stairs. (this would’ve been REALLY fun to write)

Even if you chose not to follow Minho, as long as you prove that you’re truly loyal to him, he’ll eventually reveal to both you and Jisung that he’s the killer, and urge the both of you to work with him to eliminate the rest of the house members.

THIS IS THE FUN PART

Basically: Jisung doesn’t want to team up with Minho. Instead, he wants to try and kill Minho (I assume that Jisung has multiple reasons as to why he doesn’t want to tell the other members, probably because he has no evidence). As a result, since Jisung also trusts you, he tells you his plan, and now you have to choose between the two.

And according to my notes, no matter if you team up with Jisung or go solo, if you choose to betray Minho, you will die. It is impossible to succeed in this scenario. You have to team up with a murderer in order to win.

You could also try and convince Jisung to come with you and Minho’s side. Knowing me, I’d probably spin a wheel to see whether Jisung would agree with you or not LOL. If he doesn’t though, he’s gonna die. That’s that. 

So if you team up with Minho (regardless if Jisung is still alive or not) and the two/three of you are able to successfully eliminate the rest of the members, you win! And you get the ending “The Killer’s Sidekick” (even better: if you identity as a female and/or use she/her pronouns, you could be “The Killer Queen” :D)

The other two routes don’t have nearly as much info as Minsung’s route, though. One of them wasn’t even planned at all. Let’s talk about them!

Changlix’s Route: Kill the Killer

Basically, if you openly state to either Felix or Changbin that you’re also interested in killing the killer, you’d be put into this route!

In this route, you’ll tend to make more impulsive decisions without thinking straight (aka your choices will be pretty dumb) because you’re after blood, not justice.

If you kill the wrong person, that’s an automatic game over.

If you hesitate to kill Minho, he’ll kill you first, and that’s a game over.

And if you successfully kill Minho, you’ll get one of those “You won.. but at what cost?” endings, kinda like the ending you guys got! (it’s because you killed somebody, that’s why.)

Chanmin’s Route: Catch the Killer

I have nothing written down for this route. It’s pretty self explanatory. Find the killer, and trap him in a room until the police come. That’s pretty much the route, along with trying not to get killed yourself.

If you chose this route, it would probably be even more stressful than the escape route, and would probably be the most boring route to write.

If you have any questions, let me know! But now let’s dive into the questions you guys put in for the survey.

1. Was Hyunjin super suspicious in the beginning as a red herring?

I think they were all super suspicious in the beginning just so the reader jumps into the story completely blind. It wasn’t intended as a red herring, but it definitely could be to you!

2. Why does Felix and Changbin want to kill the murderer? 

Simple: bloodlust. I just needed that violent duo, y’know? 

3. Were Jisung and Minho conspiring together? If not, was Minho going to pin it on Jisung?

No and yes, that was his intention!

4. Why does Minho have a hankering for murder?

He wants revenge on his step father, the mansion owner, for neglecting him all those years. Also the dude has anger issues. Bad temper.

5. Why could Minho pass the mattress but not 5 guys?

He is immortal. He is god. He is- just kidding. He was probably doing something stupid and unplanned, like using the bathroom on the downstairs floor. That’s the best answer I can give you for now.

6. Why did Jisung decided to team up with Minho? I mean what benefit will he get from it if there is a chance Minho might even kill him too? and also did Jisung know that Minho is the killer king in the first place?

He didn’t realize he was teaming up with the killer, and if Minho did reveal that he was the killer, Jisung would most likely try to turn on him (and fail). Nope!

7. What was Minho's motive (was it just him hating the victim or was there something deeper)?

Both that, and probably bloodlust as well.

8. How did Minho get the white glove to blame Jisung later when he wasn't with us while we were searching the room?

He bought a fresh pair of white gloves before the party started. He also, most likely, placed it in Jisung’s bag before committing the murder without him noticing.

9. If we were to just body search everybody at once, would we find the throwing knives on Minho and just end the whole thing? (this was on my mind the whole time lmao, like why didn't we search OURSELVES too??)

yeah true ngl i can’t argue with that Knowing Minho, he probably has a bunch of knives hidden all around the house, secretly planting them here and there while mingling with party guests.

10. Were really 2 killer kings? 

Nope! Only Minho. There would only be more than one killer king if you ended up choosing the Minsung route. However, good idea! I should’ve thought of that.

11. Why in the hell was jisung helping minho like how did they end up as a team?

e x p l a i n e d  a l r e a d y. see i told you guys a lot of people were asking this

12. I still don't understand changbins fascination with the blood type.

This was an easter egg I was proud of but nobody caught!! The same blood type mentioned by Changbin (I think it was A?) is the same type Seungmin has! After a google search or two, I learned that blood types were passed down by family members, so if you arrange Seungmin’s family tree correctly, you’d learn that him and the mansion owner shared the same blood type, meaning that Seungmin is related to the mansion owner. Far stretch, I know, but I think it works out! If you figured this out, you would realize how smart Changbin really is as a scientist.

13. Why did jeongin light two matches?

Extra precaution! Also, he’s the youngest. He thinks fire is cool.

14. Was Minsung a team for the ~ Minsung Vibes? ~

It was not intentional at first, but then I realized the rest of the duos were popular ships in SKZ (minus Chanmin) so that was interesting!

15. Just in general why were the teams aligned the way they were?

Minsung - They’re good pals Changlix - For the bloodlust similarity Hyunin - They were both emotional enough in this story to want to escape Chanmin - It’s literally Chan and Seungmin, and Seungmin is close with the mansion owner

16. Which one was your favorite route?

MINSUNG’S ROUTE!! I wanted you guys to choose this one because it would so different from other murder mysteries!! But the escape route was my second choice, thank god.

17. Will you be doing another series similar to this next year?

90% no because of how physically and mentally draining this series was to write, but you can get a sequel if the finale somehow gets 50 notes! That won’t happen for a while. Just FYI. 

18. Did the knife in y/n’s hand ever come out or was it just stuck in there the entire time?

It was there the entire time until Hyunjin pulled it out at his house. I actually still don’t know if this is medically accurate or not, I literally had to ask my mom what to do in this situation. Our text messages went something like:

Me: If a knife goes through your hand, should you pull it out or leave it in? Asking because of a TV show  Mom: Leave it in and go to the hospital... Me: Ok thanks mom

I think that’s it? I still have a lot I want to talk about, but that information will only come out if people ask me! So come ask me hehe have fun. Thank you, so incredibly much, for following Killer King. It is my pride and joy, literally.

taglist: @desertofdessert @crscendoforsung @cotccotc @leggomylino @skzctnightnight @freckledberries @nizhonimoon @hanniiesuckle17 @binniesbabybear @tsuki-moons @lbxgsunshine @csbverse @mangoisawesome @peachyhan @worldtriiiip @golden–rain @bubblyjisunq @kimpchi @loey-letters @pokyloky @wherevermyway @avrea-tt @bossuns @sunoo-luvs @katherineee19 @ph0ebevix @qt-k1mb @444scb @grandmasterslickfox @k-pop-valda (now we can all abandon this series for good!)

[hqprotectionsquad]

What about domestic headcanons for our best captains, Daichi, Kuroo, Bokuto and Oikawa? Just lie how they’d be as a husband and dad and stuff...

thank you for this request! on with the HCs :) hope you enjoy!

fun fact: i actually worked in backwards order for these so i started with oikawa and i tried to match the same amount for everyone else hehe (i also put this in a perspective of a female reader!)

Sawamura Daichi

Daichi—model citizen, model son, but when it comes to you, y’all might as well call him a goner because he doesn’t really know what the heck to do with his feelings.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s an awesome boyfriend, but that’s after you get over the hump of mutual crushes and “what do we call ourselves?” talk.

He definitely took his time in proposing to you. After like, what, six years of dating? He seems like the type. He knew that you were the end game for him, but he wanted to make sure you knew he was the end game for you. (If you catch my drift.)

He doesn’t like to attract attention, so he proposes to you in a really lax way, which you prefer actually.

You’re probably cooking breakfast one day, and this man has had this ring in his immediate vicinity for weeks, but this is the moment he wanted.

You turn around and he’s on one knee and you start crying before he can even say anything.

“Yes.”

“(Y/N), I haven’t said anything yet.”

“I know.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

It’s a beautiful ceremony and a beautiful reception held at a small park. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

He is, of course, the textbook companion. If you had to nitpick, you’d say that you wish you had your honeymoon at a destination, but hanging out in your new home, something just for yourselves, is pretty special.

Well, your home didn’t stay for just two people and you purchased it for that specific intention. You both are the type that knew you wanted children. It takes you a while to conceive, but it’s not a big deal because eventually, your daughter is born!

Again, literally the best dad from the get go. Your daughter is such a daddy’s girl, but hey, she loves him just as much as you do and you couldn’t ask for anything more. She’s a little spoiled, but she gets it from you. You’ve been spoiled by the best.

“(Y/N), can we get a dog?”

“Who’s asking, you or your daughter?”

With the largest eyes ever, “Both of us.”

How could you say no?

He’ll do anything for his children (assuming you’ll have more in the future).

The Karasuno boys come over often, with their own kids or without. Their lives aren’t complete without the other crows and their kiddos.

Kuroo Tetsurou

Kuroo and you meet in college. Although you are in the same year, he already places in courses meant for third year college students.

You probably swooned the first time you met him. Like c'mon, a guy who is tall, hot, athletic, and has a brain? Signing you up since yesterday.

You found your ways to him and he eventually brought you on a date!

One date turned into hanging out, being there for his intramural volleyball games (because let’s face it, he’d probably want to focus more on school rather than playing professional college volleyball), and definitely study sessions where you don’t necessarily talk, but you like to keep each other company!

He wants the proposal to be more private, so he’ll do it at a family party! He picks this mostly because your parents are a large part of your life and he wouldn’t want them to miss this for the world! (To be honest, you don’t quite realize that this party is technically for you. Your parents suggested that he hold it on an important date, so that you wouldn’t have any suspicions. I’d probably do the same thing.)

Kuroo literally chooses the moment to surprise you with his proposal right as you’re about to dip into some chips lololol

“You can finish your chips later, but can I ask now if you’ll marry me?”

Probably a really shit way of asking you to marry him but it’s endearing, you know? Of course you say yes, how could you not? You’re so in love with the dude that even the dumbest things that come out of his mouth are adorable.

It’s also a small wedding because how will you be paying for a 100+ reception in Tokyo? No thank you! The list is cut down to about 50 people and it’s a lot more intimate and your style.

Your honeymoon…let’s not talk about it right now. Let’s just say that even though the two of you planned for kids down the road, you had one nine months after those days of the two of you by your lonesome.

It’s a girl! Kuroo hoped for a boy, but he literally falls in love with her from the moment she’s born.

“(Y/N), she’s so beautiful. You did that, you gave birth to her.”

Two years later, a son comes along. He treats his children the same and he has a lot to teach them about everything! Of course, volleyball is an important thing in your household, so don’t be surprised if you hear the three of them yelling over a volleyball match on the TV. (One of them has a different favorite team than the others and it is not the boys.)

“Are you kidding me? How is that out?!”

“Dad, what do you mean, that was out by a long shot!”

“Yeah, dad, you know I don’t like this team as much as you guys, but that was out for sure.”

He’s domestic by the definition and he loves to take care of you and his family.

Bokuto Koutarou

Bokuto’s plans for proposing to you are simple: dinner at your favorite restaurant and propose at the end.

Most of his schemes are sweat-proof, but he couldn’t shake the idea of you potentially declining his proposal.

“Akaashi, I love her so much—”

“She’ll say yes, you don’t have to worry.”

When he arrived to pick you up, the sun is beginning to set so you are literally shimmering as you step outside.

“(Y/N)…you look so beautiful. Like a goddess! I look so, agh, I don’t know—”

“Don’t finish that, you look handsome, Koutarou,” you seal his lips with a kiss.

As the dinner progresses, his fidgeting is more prominent.

“Koutarou, are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be? I’m doing just fine! Maybe you’re the one that’s a little off!”

Dessert has you living in bliss and when he rattles off things he loves about you, you can’t help but to grin at your love.

This all makes you more surprised when he gets down on one knee and proclaims, “I love you, (Y/N)! I want to be your husband and the father to all of your babies. Please let me be that to you, so will you marry me?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

An eventful wedding and honeymoon go by and you’re back home, living your lives together.

He actually wants to wait to have children until he establishes a career after his professional volleyball days are over. He just doesn’t want to spend all of his time away and have that hurt the family dynamic.

It’s rough when he’s away for long periods of time, but your alone time is something you cherish, as well as a clean house, because once he takes one step in, the house is dirty.

You two raise three children: a boy and a set of twins, a boy and a girl.

While Bokuto attempts to raise the boys on volleyball, it is actually the girl who gets hooked on the game.

“I can’t believe my little princess is playing the game I love so much!”

Bokuto tries to defend his daughter from the boys of the guys he used to play against. (In other words, Oikawa and Kuroo’s sons.)

Oikawa Tooru

To me, Oikawa is the type to propose after an important college game of theirs, after you’ve been dating since high school.

“We’ve been together for the longest time, so will you do me the honors of being mine for the rest of our lives?”

This is the one moment you’ve seen him at his most vulnerable.

Your wedding day is a big production, and after you are off to the honeymoon, it’s just a good time to relax and be in each other’s arms and company.

Even though he’s gone for some business trips, he likes to make the most of the days he’s with you—breakfast in bed, beach days (with volleyballs in stow), candlelit dinners.

Scratch only one moment. His second was when your son is born two years after you are married. It is a brutal birth, but you two came out healthy and happy.

With the birth scare, he is nowhere to be found because he’s off crying at the prospect of losing his wife and his son in one go.

“Iwa-chan, w-what if they both die?!”

“They won’t.”

When your son becomes old enough, Oikawa definitely teaches him how to play volleyball.

Oikawa also brings back little souvenirs from every business trip he returns from.

Upon looking back on old photos, “Dad, where is this one from?”

“This one is from our high school volleyball games. See, that’s your uncle, Iwa-chan, but don’t call him that. He’ll be upset at me.”

“And that one?”

“A business trip! That’s where me and mom went for our honeymoon too, but we don’t have any photos for you to look at from that.”

“How come?”

Oikawa chuckles and pats his son on the back. “Secret!” He exclaims as he winks at you.

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: ‘We’re Not Educated.’ The Untold Story of Lung King Heen, the World’s First Michelin Three-Star Chinese Restaurant

A three-star Michelin chef is going out for dinner. Chef Chan Yan-tak and his four work buddies push through plastic door flaps and squeeze into a fluorescent-lit, Cantonese diner in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The five middle-aged men keep their puffy winter jackets over their graphic tees to shield them from the city’s wet winter chill, but their cheeks redden as the whiskey gets flowing from the bottle kept for them on the shelf. Pictures of them hang on the wall near a bunch of plastic yellow tulips, and when another regular recognizes Chan, he comes over and greets him with a shot of rice wine.

Until Chan flashes his watch—a simple black timepiece with the goofy Michelin Man on its face—you would have no idea that this ragtag crew powers Lung King Heen, which in 2008 became the first Chinese restaurant in the world to receive three Michelin stars.

“A gift,” the 67-year-old executive chef says with his chest puffed out, mimicking the Michelin Man. “They don’t make them anymore.”

The Michelin Guide gave the watch to Chan when it bestowed haute cuisine’s ultimate accolade on his restaurant. Located on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons Hong Kong, it has held onto those stars tightly now for a decade.

By day, these guys polish the plaque—stoking the BBQ pit, wrestling with enormous woks, shuffling towers of bamboo dim sum steamers. But once the whites are hung up, they’re just your ordinary guys trying to make a living and get their kids through school. After a long day at work, Chan gnaws on fried pork and glances at the soap opera on TV. This is exactly what he likes. “Simple,” he says. “Very simple.”

In an age when chefs are lauded for their indomitable passion and commanding personalities—for the doppio zero flour and grandmotherly lore that supposedly sprinkled their heads as children and sowed the seeds of culinary genius—Chan and his crew are guffawing, plain spoken, back-slapping anomalies. They came to the job simply through economic necessity as adolescents, then inadvertently fell into a celebrity that doesn’t concern them. Like an arranged marriage, it’s a love that came to be, but wasn’t necessarily meant to.

“We’re not educated, we don’t get to choose.” says Chef Ling Yung-cheong, Chan’s second in command, who has worked with him for over 10 years. All around the table nod in agreement. “When you have very little education, you don’t have dreams.”

Photo by Aria Hangyu Chen for TIME Executive Chinese Chef Chan Yan-tak at Lung King Heen, Hong Kong

Becoming a chef was certainly never Chan’s dream. He grew up in the tough, impoverished Hong Kong of the 1960s. His father passed away young, forcing him to drop school and start working at 13. With no formal education in English, Chan used a dictionary to cross-check words he heard from American music and films. Today, he loves Indiana Jones but not Star Wars (unless you’re talking about the first one). His Spotify playlists feature lots of Simon and Garfunkel and Abba, his phone’s ring tone is “We Will Rock You,” and he’ll spontaneously start singing “Unchained Melody.”

“Oh my love, oh my darling,” he croaks.

He never received a formal culinary education either. In a time predating laws against child labor, he spent his early teenage years at the Dai Sam Yuen—a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong’s red light district of Wanchai. For seven years, he cleaned and prepped ingredients to support his family in Kowloon. He eventually made it to stove number five, where he got to fry noodles and rice. During his little free time, he would go the movies, a hobby he maintains today.

In 1975, he landed a similar position at Fook Lam Moon—one of the city’s most prestigious eateries, and a favorite of tycoons and celebrities—before rising to the post of sous-chef at Lai Ching Heen at the luxurious Regent Hotel in 1984. Things were going well. After just one year, Chan became Lai Ching Heen’s executive chef, a job he held for the next 15 years, during which he helped give the restaurant an international reputation. In 2000, however, everything came to a tragic halt with the death of his wife. His son was 20 years old at the time, but his daughter just 12. With only him to care for her, Chan quit and became a stay-at-home dad.

He was fully retired when the Four Seasons approached him to help build its own Cantonese restaurant in 2002. Chan initially demurred. But an old Regent friend, Alan Tsui, was tapped as general manager of the Four Seasons, and wouldn’t relent.

“I was begging him, kind of,” says Tsui. “It’s not about money. It was mainly about friendship and for him to come up and help me.”

Money, discipline, and numbing hard work

Over a century ago, two French tire manufacturers accidentally created the world’s preeminent food guide. In 1895, Édouard and André Michelin designed the first detachable car tires. To get more wheels on the road (Michelin wheels, of course), the well-to-do brothers of Clermont-Ferrand published a guidebook of hotels and fuel stops in the French countryside in 1900. Restaurant recommendations increasingly came into play, ushering in a ranking system that prevails to this day: One star—“a very good restaurant in its category”—two stars—“worth a detour”—and three— “worth a special journey.”

Soon enough, the Michelin pivoted from motorists to gourmands, and today it is the world’s gastronomic atlas. Of course there’s Zagat or the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. But Michelin, with its secret inspections and romantic, open-road inception, resonates deeper with public imagination. And its global reach is incomparable. After its 20th century conquest of Europe, the guide ventured across the Atlantic to the United States in 2006, and then to Japan in 2007. It now covers 25 countries worldwide.

“We remain true to our roots with the intention of helping travelers and localists get around to find people to find a place to eat and sleep,” says Michael Ellis, international director of the Michelin Guide. “We’re going to continue to plant the Michelin flag around the globe. Asia is of particular interest. It’s really economically dynamic, with very strong and deep food culture that is sometimes centuries old.”

Photo by Aria Hangyu Chen for TIME.Dim sum at Lung King Heen, Hong Kong

For many in the restaurant biz, landing a Michelin ranking is the ultimate triumph. It lifts the red velvet rope and ushers a restaurateur into the vaunted club of Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. It can also springboard a chef into a full-blown celebrity. “Those three stars that you can get, they can give you a platform,” says Juliette Rossant, author of Super Chef: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires. “Some chefs reject that because they’re passionate about cooking. But some are tantalized by the power and profit that’s inherent in the whole machine that gets created by the celebrity of a chef.”

Of course, there were celebrity chefs before Michelin. They emerged from obscurity in the 1960s, when the likes of James Beard and Julia Child debuted on television, catalyzing America’s emergence from the dark ages of post-war frozen food. But Michelin helped egomania reach new levels. From the fiery f-bomber Gordon Ramsay, to plate-throwing empire-builders like Joël Robuchon, who has racked up an unparalleled 31 Michelin stars internationally, chefs find that one star can explode into a galaxy. “It creates chefs that have huge egos—sometimes way too big,” Rossant says.

“I think they all have healthy egos at the top. You kind of have to to say, ‘Okay we’re gonna be the best restaurant in New York,’” says Pete Wells, restaurant critic for The New York Times. At the same time, a lot of the pot-slamming perfectionism that shapes public perception of upscale kitchens comes from television. Holding on to three stars, as Lung King Heen has done for ten years, takes tremendous amounts of money, discipline, and numbing hard work, and doesn’t always take the form of the expletives thrown around on the Food Network.

“Honestly a real show that was just behind the scenes, it would be so boring,” says Wells. “It would be the worst television show ever.”

‘It’s not a prestigious profession’

Prior to winning three Michelin stars, Chan had barely heard of the guide. “We didn’t know that it was something awesome. We had no knowledge,” he recalls. “When we first learned about it, our manager got so happy he teared up. You could see all the tears—happy tears.”

As for Chan: “I just kept doing my job.”

That modesty is typical of the Chinese food world, where there’s a big difference between the gourmets (culinary scholars who propose recipes) and the cooks (the guys who actually execute those recipes). The latter are typically uneducated and looked down upon as mere mechanics.

“In China, most parents wouldn’t want their children to become chefs,” says Fuchsia Dunlop, a cook and food-writer specializing in Chinese cuisine. “It’s not a prestigious profession. You don’t get educated young people from privileged backgrounds going into cooking for idealistic reasons because they love it.”

Even at the Parnassus that is Lung King Heen, that notion prevails. The chefs say that if they could have chosen another profession they would have—an inconceivable heresy in Le Cinq or Alain Ducasse. Even today, some of don’t tell their kids what they do. Would anything change their minds?

“Maybe if Michelin gave out four stars,” says Ling, Chan’s No. 2, to roars of laughter.

Photo by Aria Hangyu Chen for TIMELung King Heen, Hong Kong

Even if celebrity chefs were a fad in China, Chan would not fit the profile. The stout sexagenarian lives in Sham Shui Po, a seedy, working-class neighborhood where grimy highrises drip AC runoff onto the market stalls, methadone clinics and brothels below. From here Chan commutes 40 minutes to the Four Seasons by subway, wobbling into the staff canteen around 9 am for rice porridge and news. Next, the clowning begins. He’ll shake a steel bowl of scaly, chopped flesh too close to your nostrils, and implore you to try and identify the alligator claw. Then he’ll slap his belly, cackling over how much he likes meat. “I don’t like animals,” he jokes. “That’s why I kill them!”

Front of house, however, Lung King Heen is meticulously Michelin. For lunch, an average meal per head is about $90, and dinner is $190. Reservations need to be made weeks in advance, and the highly coveted window seats overlooking the famous Victoria Harbour and the Nine Dragon Hills are for VIPs only (Lung King Heen means “View of the Dragon”). The staff of 34 is trained to follow over 150 service steps from the start to the finish of your meal. If serving a western table, for instance, women are served first. But at a Chinese or Japanese one, the guests of the host are served first, irrespective of whether they are male or female. Shoulders should never twist too fast when presenting a dish. If a glass breaks on the floor, the first problem that’s addressed is whether or not any shards have scattered over the nearest woman’s designer handbag.

“Sometimes I joked that I had nothing to do,” says Simpson Yeung, Lung King Heen’s former director. “It’s so smooth.”

The same applies in the kitchen. At the crack of dawn, Chef Leung Ming-chiu, head barbecue chef, and his team are down in the pit handling sticky slabs of honey-roasted pork and turning spit-mounted piglets above a furnace of 100 degrees. Three floors above, Chef Lo Kin-ming and his dim sum team prepare siu mai. Packing the dumplings with pork, shrimp, and mushrooms, Ming pleats the yellow rice-flour pastry, paints it with alkaline water—it keeps the dough chewy—and readies it for a steaming on a translucently thin slice of carrot.

Chan drifts around, occasionally consulting the others in huddled whispers. As lunch nears, the cutting boards patter, the steamers wheeze, but nothing ever roars above the woks. The way the kitchen moves is like watching a highway from an airplane—hundreds of machines rev with explosive energy around turnpikes, but from 30,000 feet, they flow with direction, poise, and silence.

“Sometimes he has to be a little tough, but I’ve never seen him screaming at people,” says Tsui. “He’s mild and calm but he’s firm. His team respects him.”

‘He inspires me, we inspire him’

In Cantonese, Hong Kong means “fragrant harbor.” Some say the name was inspired by Hong Kong’s incense exports, others say it’s from the freshwater influx that streams in from the Pearl River. Whatever the reason, “fragrant harbor” takes on a whole new meaning strolling through any of the city’s seafood markets. At the Nelson Street Market in the blue-collar district of Mongkok, water overflows from the tubs of prawns and lobsters as they wiggle about next to floating styrofoam blocks bearing their price. An old fishwife sees a lobster try to escape and whacks it back in with her net. With his stubby hands, Chan point to a tank of coral trout, a supply of which arrived at Lung King Heen that morning.

“Red is lucky and happy,” he says.

Fresh seafood is the crux of Cantonese cuisine. Once upon a time, before the skyscrapers and stock market, Hong Kong was just a collection of fishing villages and salt pans. But with plentiful access to flavor and seafood, the provincial style developed as one of the most prominent of the eight major Chinese cuisines. Today, it the best known Chinese cuisine around the world. It has also given the Western dining table one of its daily staples—ketchup originated as a Cantonese condiment, its name deriving from the Cantonese word for tomato (kair) and sauce (tsup).

“Cantonese cuisine really plays on subtly and a diverse spectrum of flavor,” says Adele Wong, author of Hong Kong Food & Culture: From Dim Sum to Dried Abalone. “That’s how it really stands apart.”

Lung King Heen’s menu boasts just such an array. While infused occasionally and subtly with rich Western ingredients like truffles and foie gras, simplicity and freshness remains of utmost importance, and adulterating dishes with too many flavors is frowned upon. In its kitchen, there are several live fish tanks replenished daily, a customary feature at most waterside Cantonese restaurants, where you can select your entree while it still swims.

For all of the freshness of Cantonese cuisine, it remains underrepresented in the Michelin Guide. Lung King Heen is one of two Cantonese restaurants to hold three Michelin stars in Hong Kong and one of just five in the world. Altogether, there are just 127 restaurants with three Michelin stars worldwide. Lung King Heen’s victory was a milestone. But it also raised questions about comparative cuisine.

“I don’t think you can apply a universal standard of gastronomic pleasure” says Dunlop, citing appreciation for texture, which is far more developed in China. For example, take sea cucumber, “A slithery, bouncy piece of textural food which in itself has no flavor,” she says Dunlop. And yet it is one of the great delicacies of Cantonese cuisine, with “the kind of texture that a lot of westerners find repellent.”

Equally baffling to Western gourmands would be Chan’s lack of airs and graces. He maintains that he has no philosophy or grand vision. He doesn’t give interviews about his “passion” to worshipful food writers, or produce beautifully photographed cookbooks, or take part in lavishly shot documentaries about the pressures of genius. He doesn’t even lie awake at night struggling to bring forth great recipes.

“How do you compose a song?” he shrugs, while relaxing after work at his favorite hole-in-the-wall.

It’s almost 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. Everyone dumps their leftover scallop shells and pork bones onto the big platter at the center of the table, but the whiskey isn’t done yet and there’s some prawns left to go. Chan plops an extra prawn onto the plate of his neighbor and tells TIME to add The Graduate to his list of favorite films.

Then he gets the bill and the toothpicks circulate, but there’s no rush to go. The chefs only do this once a month.

“It’s hard to find a good boss,” says Ling.

“He inspires me,” adds Lo. “We inspire him.”

“Maybe if I leave the table,” jokes Chan, still chewing some pork, “They’ll start telling you the truth.”

Metal chairs skid across the floor as Chan wiggles out of the corner table, which is flanked by boxes of Tsingtao beer. The world’s greatest Cantonese chef then bums a cigarette from chef Leung, twists his colleague’s ear with a smile, and heads out on to the crowded Kowloon streets, unnoticed and unremarked.

— With reporting and video by Aria Hangyu Chen / Hong Kong

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: ‘We’re Not Educated.’ The Untold Story of Lung King Heen, the World’s First Michelin Three-Star Chinese Restaurant

A three-star Michelin chef is going out for dinner. Chef Chan Yan-tak and his four work buddies push through plastic door flaps and squeeze into a fluorescent-lit, Cantonese diner in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The five middle-aged men keep their puffy winter jackets over their graphic tees to shield them from the city’s wet winter chill, but their cheeks redden as the whiskey gets flowing from the bottle kept for them on the shelf. Pictures of them hang on the wall near a bunch of plastic yellow tulips, and when another regular recognizes Chan, he comes over and greets him with a shot of rice wine.

Until Chan flashes his watch—a simple black timepiece with the goofy Michelin Man on its face—you would have no idea that this ragtag crew powers Lung King Heen, which in 2008 became the first Chinese restaurant in the world to receive three Michelin stars.

“A gift,” the 67-year-old executive chef says with his chest puffed out, mimicking the Michelin Man. “They don’t make them anymore.”

The Michelin Guide gave the watch to Chan when it bestowed haute cuisine’s ultimate accolade on his restaurant. Located on the fourth floor of the Four Seasons Hong Kong, it has held onto those stars tightly now for a decade.

By day, these guys polish the plaque—stoking the BBQ pit, wrestling with enormous woks, shuffling towers of bamboo dim sum steamers. But once the whites are hung up, they’re just your ordinary guys trying to make a living and get their kids through school. After a long day at work, Chan gnaws on fried pork and glances at the soap opera on TV. This is exactly what he likes. “Simple,” he says. “Very simple.”

In an age when chefs are lauded for their indomitable passion and commanding personalities—for the doppio zero flour and grandmotherly lore that supposedly sprinkled their heads as children and sowed the seeds of culinary genius—Chan and his crew are guffawing, plain spoken, back-slapping anomalies. They came to the job simply through economic necessity as adolescents, then inadvertently fell into a celebrity that doesn’t concern them. Like an arranged marriage, it’s a love that came to be, but wasn’t necessarily meant to.

“We’re not educated, we don’t get to choose.” says Chef Ling Yung-cheong, Chan’s second in command, who has worked with him for over 10 years. All around the table nod in agreement. “When you have very little education, you don’t have dreams.”

Photo by Aria Hangyu Chen for TIME Executive Chinese Chef Chan Yan-tak at Lung King Heen, Hong Kong

Becoming a chef was certainly never Chan’s dream. He grew up in the tough, impoverished Hong Kong of the 1960s. His father passed away young, forcing him to drop school and start working at 13. With no formal education in English, Chan used a dictionary to cross-check words he heard from American music and films. Today, he loves Indiana Jones but not Star Wars (unless you’re talking about the first one). His Spotify playlists feature lots of Simon and Garfunkel and Abba, his phone’s ring tone is “We Will Rock You,” and he’ll spontaneously start singing “Unchained Melody.”

“Oh my love, oh my darling,” he croaks.

He never received a formal culinary education either. In a time predating laws against child labor, he spent his early teenage years at the Dai Sam Yuen—a Cantonese restaurant in Hong Kong’s red light district of Wanchai. For seven years, he cleaned and prepped ingredients to support his family in Kowloon. He eventually made it to stove number five, where he got to fry noodles and rice. During his little free time, he would go the movies, a hobby he maintains today.

In 1975, he landed a similar position at Fook Lam Moon—one of the city’s most prestigious eateries, and a favorite of tycoons and celebrities—before rising to the post of sous-chef at Lai Ching Heen at the luxurious Regent Hotel in 1984. Things were going well. After just one year, Chan became Lai Ching Heen’s executive chef, a job he held for the next 15 years, during which he helped give the restaurant an international reputation. In 2000, however, everything came to a tragic halt with the death of his wife. His son was 20 years old at the time, but his daughter just 12. With only him to care for her, Chan quit and became a stay-at-home dad.

He was fully retired when the Four Seasons approached him to help build its own Cantonese restaurant in 2002. Chan initially demurred. But an old Regent friend, Alan Tsui, was tapped as general manager of the Four Seasons, and wouldn’t relent.

“I was begging him, kind of,” says Tsui. “It’s not about money. It was mainly about friendship and for him to come up and help me.”

Money, discipline, and numbing hard work

Over a century ago, two French tire manufacturers accidentally created the world’s preeminent food guide. In 1895, Édouard and André Michelin designed the first detachable car tires. To get more wheels on the road (Michelin wheels, of course), the well-to-do brothers of Clermont-Ferrand published a guidebook of hotels and fuel stops in the French countryside in 1900. Restaurant recommendations increasingly came into play, ushering in a ranking system that prevails to this day: One star—“a very good restaurant in its category”—two stars—“worth a detour”—and three— “worth a special journey.”

Soon enough, the Michelin pivoted from motorists to gourmands, and today it is the world’s gastronomic atlas. Of course there’s Zagat or the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. But Michelin, with its secret inspections and romantic, open-road inception, resonates deeper with public imagination. And its global reach is incomparable. After its 20th century conquest of Europe, the guide ventured across the Atlantic to the United States in 2006, and then to Japan in 2007. It now covers 25 countries worldwide.

“We remain true to our roots with the intention of helping travelers and localists get around to find people to find a place to eat and sleep,” says Michael Ellis, international director of the Michelin Guide. “We’re going to continue to plant the Michelin flag around the globe. Asia is of particular interest. It’s really economically dynamic, with very strong and deep food culture that is sometimes centuries old.”

Photo by Aria Hangyu Chen for TIME.Dim sum at Lung King Heen, Hong Kong

For many in the restaurant biz, landing a Michelin ranking is the ultimate triumph. It lifts the red velvet rope and ushers a restaurateur into the vaunted club of Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. It can also springboard a chef into a full-blown celebrity. “Those three stars that you can get, they can give you a platform,” says Juliette Rossant, author of Super Chef: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires. “Some chefs reject that because they’re passionate about cooking. But some are tantalized by the power and profit that’s inherent in the whole machine that gets created by the celebrity of a chef.”

Of course, there were celebrity chefs before Michelin. They emerged from obscurity in the 1960s, when the likes of James Beard and Julia Child debuted on television, catalyzing America’s emergence from the dark ages of post-war frozen food. But Michelin helped egomania reach new levels. From the fiery f-bomber Gordon Ramsay, to plate-throwing empire-builders like Joël Robuchon, who has racked up an unparalleled 31 Michelin stars internationally, chefs find that one star can explode into a galaxy. “It creates chefs that have huge egos—sometimes way too big,” Rossant says.

“I think they all have healthy egos at the top. You kind of have to to say, ‘Okay we’re gonna be the best restaurant in New York,’” says Pete Wells, restaurant critic for The New York Times. At the same time, a lot of the pot-slamming perfectionism that shapes public perception of upscale kitchens comes from television. Holding on to three stars, as Lung King Heen has done for ten years, takes tremendous amounts of money, discipline, and numbing hard work, and doesn’t always take the form of the expletives thrown around on the Food Network.

“Honestly a real show that was just behind the scenes, it would be so boring,” says Wells. “It would be the worst television show ever.”

‘It’s not a prestigious profession’

Prior to winning three Michelin stars, Chan had barely heard of the guide. “We didn’t know that it was something awesome. We had no knowledge,” he recalls. “When we first learned about it, our manager got so happy he teared up. You could see all the tears—happy tears.”

As for Chan: “I just kept doing my job.”

That modesty is typical of the Chinese food world, where there’s a big difference between the gourmets (culinary scholars who propose recipes) and the cooks (the guys who actually execute those recipes). The latter are typically uneducated and looked down upon as mere mechanics.

“In China, most parents wouldn’t want their children to become chefs,” says Fuchsia Dunlop, a cook and food-writer specializing in Chinese cuisine. “It’s not a prestigious profession. You don’t get educated young people from privileged backgrounds going into cooking for idealistic reasons because they love it.”

Even at the Parnassus that is Lung King Heen, that notion prevails. The chefs say that if they could have chosen another profession they would have—an inconceivable heresy in Le Cinq or Alain Ducasse. Even today, some of don’t tell their kids what they do. Would anything change their minds?

“Maybe if Michelin gave out four stars,” says Ling, Chan’s No. 2, to roars of laughter.

Photo by Aria Hangyu Chen for TIMELung King Heen, Hong Kong

Even if celebrity chefs were a fad in China, Chan would not fit the profile. The stout sexagenarian lives in Sham Shui Po, a seedy, working-class neighborhood where grimy highrises drip AC runoff onto the market stalls, methadone clinics and brothels below. From here Chan commutes 40 minutes to the Four Seasons by subway, wobbling into the staff canteen around 9 am for rice porridge and news. Next, the clowning begins. He’ll shake a steel bowl of scaly, chopped flesh too close to your nostrils, and implore you to try and identify the alligator claw. Then he’ll slap his belly, cackling over how much he likes meat. “I don’t like animals,” he jokes. “That’s why I kill them!”

Front of house, however, Lung King Heen is meticulously Michelin. For lunch, an average meal per head is about $90, and dinner is $190. Reservations need to be made weeks in advance, and the highly coveted window seats overlooking the famous Victoria Harbour and the Nine Dragon Hills are for VIPs only (Lung King Heen means “View of the Dragon”). The staff of 34 is trained to follow over 150 service steps from the start to the finish of your meal. If serving a western table, for instance, women are served first. But at a Chinese or Japanese one, the guests of the host are served first, irrespective of whether they are male or female. Shoulders should never twist too fast when presenting a dish. If a glass breaks on the floor, the first problem that’s addressed is whether or not any shards have scattered over the nearest woman’s designer handbag.

“Sometimes I joked that I had nothing to do,” says Simpson Yeung, Lung King Heen’s former director. “It’s so smooth.”

The same applies in the kitchen. At the crack of dawn, Chef Leung Ming-chiu, head barbecue chef, and his team are down in the pit handling sticky slabs of honey-roasted pork and turning spit-mounted piglets above a furnace of 100 degrees. Three floors above, Chef Lo Kin-ming and his dim sum team prepare siu mai. Packing the dumplings with pork, shrimp, and mushrooms, Ming pleats the yellow rice-flour pastry, paints it with alkaline water—it keeps the dough chewy—and readies it for a steaming on a translucently thin slice of carrot.

Chan drifts around, occasionally consulting the others in huddled whispers. As lunch nears, the cutting boards patter, the steamers wheeze, but nothing ever roars above the woks. The way the kitchen moves is like watching a highway from an airplane—hundreds of machines rev with explosive energy around turnpikes, but from 30,000 feet, they flow with direction, poise, and silence.

“Sometimes he has to be a little tough, but I’ve never seen him screaming at people,” says Tsui. “He’s mild and calm but he’s firm. His team respects him.”

‘He inspires me, we inspire him’

In Cantonese, Hong Kong means “fragrant harbor.” Some say the name was inspired by Hong Kong’s incense exports, others say it’s from the freshwater influx that streams in from the Pearl River. Whatever the reason, “fragrant harbor” takes on a whole new meaning strolling through any of the city’s seafood markets. At the Nelson Street Market in the blue-collar district of Mongkok, water overflows from the tubs of prawns and lobsters as they wiggle about next to floating styrofoam blocks bearing their price. An old fishwife sees a lobster try to escape and whacks it back in with her net. With his stubby hands, Chan point to a tank of coral trout, a supply of which arrived at Lung King Heen that morning.

“Red is lucky and happy,” he says.

Fresh seafood is the crux of Cantonese cuisine. Once upon a time, before the skyscrapers and stock market, Hong Kong was just a collection of fishing villages and salt pans. But with plentiful access to flavor and seafood, the provincial style developed as one of the most prominent of the eight major Chinese cuisines. Today, it the best known Chinese cuisine around the world. It has also given the Western dining table one of its daily staples—ketchup originated as a Cantonese condiment, its name deriving from the Cantonese word for tomato (kair) and sauce (tsup).

“Cantonese cuisine really plays on subtly and a diverse spectrum of flavor,” says Adele Wong, author of Hong Kong Food & Culture: From Dim Sum to Dried Abalone. “That’s how it really stands apart.”

Lung King Heen’s menu boasts just such an array. While infused occasionally and subtly with rich Western ingredients like truffles and foie gras, simplicity and freshness remains of utmost importance, and adulterating dishes with too many flavors is frowned upon. In its kitchen, there are several live fish tanks replenished daily, a customary feature at most waterside Cantonese restaurants, where you can select your entree while it still swims.

For all of the freshness of Cantonese cuisine, it remains underrepresented in the Michelin Guide. Lung King Heen is one of two Cantonese restaurants to hold three Michelin stars in Hong Kong and one of just five in the world. Altogether, there are just 127 restaurants with three Michelin stars worldwide. Lung King Heen’s victory was a milestone. But it also raised questions about comparative cuisine.

“I don’t think you can apply a universal standard of gastronomic pleasure” says Dunlop, citing appreciation for texture, which is far more developed in China. For example, take sea cucumber, “A slithery, bouncy piece of textural food which in itself has no flavor,” she says Dunlop. And yet it is one of the great delicacies of Cantonese cuisine, with “the kind of texture that a lot of westerners find repellent.”

Equally baffling to Western gourmands would be Chan’s lack of airs and graces. He maintains that he has no philosophy or grand vision. He doesn’t give interviews about his “passion” to worshipful food writers, or produce beautifully photographed cookbooks, or take part in lavishly shot documentaries about the pressures of genius. He doesn’t even lie awake at night struggling to bring forth great recipes.

“How do you compose a song?” he shrugs, while relaxing after work at his favorite hole-in-the-wall.

It’s almost 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. Everyone dumps their leftover scallop shells and pork bones onto the big platter at the center of the table, but the whiskey isn’t done yet and there’s some prawns left to go. Chan plops an extra prawn onto the plate of his neighbor and tells TIME to add The Graduate to his list of favorite films.

Then he gets the bill and the toothpicks circulate, but there’s no rush to go. The chefs only do this once a month.

“It’s hard to find a good boss,” says Ling.

“He inspires me,” adds Lo. “We inspire him.”

“Maybe if I leave the table,” jokes Chan, still chewing some pork, “They’ll start telling you the truth.”

Metal chairs skid across the floor as Chan wiggles out of the corner table, which is flanked by boxes of Tsingtao beer. The world’s greatest Cantonese chef then bums a cigarette from chef Leung, twists his colleague’s ear with a smile, and heads out on to the crowded Kowloon streets, unnoticed and unremarked.

— With reporting and video by Aria Hangyu Chen / Hong Kong

July 12, 2018 at 02:01PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com