Reflection Meeting
Using the loudspeaker, I announced to all participants that they should only pack away any tools that would be troublesome if stolen and leave the rest for tomorrow, effectively ending the day’s activities.
Honestly, once I get back to the estate and soak in the hot spring, I just want to go straight to bed. I’m exhausted.
The next day, I held a personal reflection meeting while eating some of the food from the stalls.
The newcomers had gone off to clean up each of their assigned venues, but apparently, I didn’t need to go. Instead, I was asked to make a list of potential shops to be confirmed for the exhibition.
I’d instructed the newcomers to hand out survey forms to the participants, asking for their preferences for the Eminira event, and to collect them tomorrow.
At first, I only planned to include original dishes, but everyone kept saying how delicious everything was, and I found myself wanting to try them all—so I had the cooks prepare them.
I only took a single bite from each stall’s dish, but although some had similar seasonings, there wasn’t a single miss. Every one of them was tasty.
If the customers felt the same, then no one should have any complaints about the food.
Even taking just a bite, there were moments of, “This one’s it!”—so it was a lot of work, but definitely worth doing.
Still, I had imagined families and friends leisurely walking from stall to stall, enjoying the festival atmosphere. In reality, it was total chaos—people grabbed their food and hurried out of the venue.
It seemed the street market was in the same situation.
What should we do for Eminira, then?
If we had gone straight to the main exhibition without this trial run, it probably would’ve been even more confusing—a complete mess.
I really learned how important rehearsals are.
My parents had also been sampling the food stalls since yesterday afternoon—they were apparently trying to taste everything.
When I looked over at them thinking, “Ah, so they joined in too,” they met my eyes and said, “Of course we did—we’re judges, after all.”
Oh, right. I’d added them to the judging panel myself. I’d been so busy, I forgot.
But if my parents tried every dish, I’ll probably have to send some to my brothers, Chris and Gerald, too.
I’ll need to have some of the food prepared in advance in Eminira and shipped to the royal capital.
If I don’t, who knows what those two will say to me.
That went straight onto my to-do list.
When the newcomers returned from cleaning up the venues, I headed to the office meeting room.
“Good work, everyone. We still have the preliminaries in Eminira ahead of us, but I’m glad this one ended safely,” I said, thanking the four of them.
They looked relieved too, clearly glad to have made it through.
“Let’s have our reflection meeting right away,” I continued. “We don’t have much time before the Eminira preliminaries, so I want to fix whatever we can.”
At my words, Damien pulled out a stack of papers—it was the participant survey I’d ordered.
Since there wasn’t much time before the Eminira event, they’d asked people in the plaza and the street market to jot down their feedback quickly.
The five of us began tallying up the results.
We’d forward the areas for improvement to the respective guilds, but the most common request was: “We want to start preparing our dishes the day before.”
Since many had borrowed time-stopping Magic Bags, that should be doable.
The long cooking times had also contributed to the crowding, most likely.
Another frequent note came from stalls using local specialty ingredients: they’d completely run out and urgently needed resupplies, or they wouldn’t be able to open their stalls again.
Wow… well, considering yesterday’s chaos, I suppose it’s no surprise they used everything up.
I instructed Damien and Kamuela to go to the Adventurers’ Guild with the participants to handle that.
There were also many requests from the participants themselves—they wanted to taste other stalls’ dishes too.
If we had each stall prepare one serving for all the others, that would make 125 portions. Add the sets for Chris and Gerald, the Eminira guild staff, and ourselves—that’d be about 200 portions total.
In Eminira, we’ll definitely need to start preparing the day before.
I asked Rosetta and Fred to verify the quantities and prices of the additional ingredients we’d purchased, check whether the requested changes were feasible, and prepare the materials for the upcoming meeting with both guilds—then I left the meeting room.
What do you think about this chapter?
