Of all the wonderful restaurants that Archie had seen, The Gift was certainly not one of them.

Rowan led them on a long walk down the Trunk, commenting on the countless statues of Ambrosia that they passed as Archie begged to take the tram. They made their way all the way down to the Roots, navigating its winding alleyways until finally arriving at a row of houses.

“And here we are,” Rowan said, pointing at one of the homes. It was a small, rectangular building jammed between two other small, rectangular buildings that were jammed between two other small, rectangular buildings and so on and so on. But while the rest were sheer walls of white stone brick with plain windows, this one had character.

From the street below, the tops of plants and small trees could be seen on the rooftop. Vines stretched from inside the windows and over the walls, making them more green than white. There were no drapes on the ground floor windows. Instead, they offered an open view to a serving room stuffed with tables. In the back of the room, a half-wall separated the dining area from a modest kitchen.

Usually, restaurants advertised their rank—particularly high ranks—with large signs that protruded into the street. But Rowan, despite owning one of the hundred highest ranked restaurants in the world, opted for something smaller.

A small plaque, just a few inches wide, had been bolted into the outside wall near the door. Its black background denoted its rank as a Black Jacket Restaurant, the gold etching on it reading, The Gift.

The ‘closed’ sign that hung above it was bigger.

“Normally I’ll ask you two to help me out during the afternoons,” Rowan said as he led them inside and spun around. He had the natural showmanship and charm of a tour guide. He gestured widely with his hands, clapping a closed fist to an open palm to emphasize his points. “It’s when I open the doors to everyone. I spend the afternoon cooking and serving and meeting new people. Sometimes, I find someone interesting and invite them to come back for a private dinner that night. I’ll handle those myselves.”

Archie would have expected a Black Jacket Restaurant to have priceless artwork hanging on its walls. But The Gift had a map of Ambrosia that had been made almost unrecognizable by countless ink blotches and pins.

Archie would have expected a Red Jacket Restaurant to have a masterclass kitchen. Even a Purple Jacket Restaurant would be stocked with some state-of-the-art stove. But beyond its little half-wall partition, The Gift had a simple setup with room for maybe three Chefs, the oven unengraved, the stove ordinary, the cookware splotched with stains and age.

Archie would have expected a Blue Jacket Restaurant to have mastered a sense of atmosphere. At least a Green Jacket Restaurant would have some ambiance. But The Gift seemed like street food with a roof over it.

Archie would have expected a Yellow Jacket Restaurant to have new furniture. But The Gift had chairs that seemed ready to collapse and tables with splinters sticking out of the legs.

Archie would have expected an Orange Jacket Restaurant to have ample seating. At least The Gift had that in abundance—perhaps too much abundance. The chairs filled every gap between tables, having no rhyme or reason for their placement.

“You’re impressed, I know,” Rowan said as he nodded. He laughed at the shock on Archie’s face. Nori’s tempered politeness and noble upbringing did everything they could to hide her disappointment. Rowan decided to poke at her composure. “So Nori. How does this compare to your dad’s place?”

Nori’s mouth stayed flat and thin, but her breath betrayed her. Little snorts of laughter came out of her nose, crescendoing until she could hold it no longer. She broke into a laughing smile. “If my dad saw me cooking in a place like this, he’d have a heart attack.” She laughed again, harder, pleased at her daydream. “It’s dreadful.”

“Nori!” Archie scolded.

Rowan laughed and held out his hand for Archie to stop. “No, no, it’s fine. She’s right. I’ve known some Yellow Jackets that would be ashamed to call this place theirs. Chefs get it in their mind that presentation is everything. I get it, I was that way at my old restaurant.”

“What was your old restaurant?” Nori asked.

“Oh,” Rowan dismissed her with a wave. “You wouldn’t have heard of it. But I was like a lot of Chefs. Rank obsessed. It worked out for me for a while.” He made a point of tugging at the collar of his black jacket. “Until it didn’t.”

“What happened?” Archie asked.

Rowan scrunched his face into the same expression he had the last time Archie asked about the old restaurant. “A story for another time. Long story short, I realized that food was more about the human connection than prestige. I didn’t want to cook for reviews. I wanted to cook for people that deserved cooking for. So I opened The Gift. And of course, you can’t get demoted, so I got to keep this fancy black jacket.”

Rowan spurred them into motion with a clap and led them to the stairs. “Come on, let me show you the rest.”

As Rowan led them to the rooftops, Archie snuck a glance at the second floor—a single room of chaos with a small bed tucked into the only space not occupied by potted plants or sacks of seeds or tables of books. A swarm of bees buzzed around the flowers near the open windows.

The rooftop was much more organized. Rectangular planters with a variety of crops made rows to walk through. A small fruit tree, just a few feet tall, grew from a large square planter in the middle of the rooftop. Each thin branch bore a different fruit—lemons, apples, plums, pears, oranges, all from the same tree. Archie counted over ten kinds of fruits before moving on to catch up with the others.

The area must have only been twenty feet by thirty feet, but the wheat and corn and bushes obscured their surroundings, making Archie feel like he had stepped into a distant farmland. The plants muted the sounds of the city, replacing them with the gentle whooshing of leaves in the wind.

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“I grow all kinds of stuff up here. Just a little bit of everything so that I can always make what I want. I have a meat guy—a butcher up the street. I tried raising chickens up here once. I lasted two weeks. The clucking drove me crazy.” He laughed. “First I could hear it when I slept. Then I could hear it while I cooked. Soon, I could hear it even when I was halfway up the Trunk.”

He put a hand flat onto the soil. He smiled, satisfied with whatever he felt. “I’ve been traveling the world for these last twenty years. I like to bring back seeds from wherever I go. The memories of these places, their food—they hit me when I least expect it. Sometimes I have to have Khalyan barley, or a Labruscan artichoke, or a Kuutsan squash.”

Archie imagined himself going from kingdom to kingdom with Rowan as his tour guide. “Have you ever followed the Kuutsu?”

“Oh yeah. Twice. First time out of curiosity, second time because I was getting fat. You wouldn’t believe how much weight you can lose walking across those plains for a summer.” They all laughed. “That was one of the best experiences of my life. You two should do it sometime.”

As long as I don’t have to go with her.

Archie entertained the daydream for a moment before wiping it clean and making room for the original daydream—restoring Petrichor and the Kent name. Everything else could wait.

“That sounds fun,” Nori said as she examined a flower. “We used to go on vacations—well, my aunt would take me. My dad always had to work. We went to Khala and The Platter and Labrusca, but never Kuutsu Nuna.”

“Did you live with your dad on the main island?” Rowan asked.

“Yeah. How’d you know he was on the main island?”

“Nori!” Rowan feigned disappointment. “I said I’ve been all around the world and you don’t think I’ve been to Shilkai?”

Nori laughed. “I guess that’d be ridiculous. You probably saw me. My dad always made me wait tables.”

Rowan grinned. “Well, I went just a few years ago. I remember a teenage waitress that mocked me for ordering red wine with my fish.”

“Well, if it was mackerel or herring, you deserved it. Everything ends up tasting like metal when you have those with red wine.”

They laughed.

Jealousy flared up in Archie as he worried that the two had just developed some kind of inside joke that he would never be a part of. “Shilkai?”

Rowan’s presence didn’t stop Nori from displaying some of her snobbish mockery from earlier. “I thought you were obsessed with this Chef stuff. You don’t know the best restaurant in Uroko?”

Archie felt uncultured, and feeling uncultured made him feel angry. “I guess it’s not as big of a deal as you think,” he chirped.

Rowan scoffed. “It’s a pretty big deal. I’d give Cafe Julienne the edge in terms of world fame, but it’s up there. Think Petrichor at its peak.”

The mention of Petrichor delighted Archie, putting wind back in his sails. “Have you ever been to Petrichor?” he asked, hijacking the conversation.

Rowan pulled in his lips and squinted. Archie tried to figure out if the man was annoyed or just trying to remember. “Yeah,” he said. “But that was a long time ago. I should go back sometime.”

Nori shot Archie an annoyed look.

Rowan clapped them into motion again. “Come on, let’s get you two cooking. Either of you good with bread?”

“Yes,” Nori said.

Archie frowned. He was just alright with bread, but he wasn’t about to admit to being worse than Nori. “Yeah.”

“Great. You two can work together on it. Make a few loaves. There’s some rye flour in the cabinet. Add some caraway seeds, too. Everything you need will be exactly where you’d expect to find it. I can’t tell you how, but when you open a cabinet expecting to see it, there it’ll be.”

Rowan laughed. Archie wondered if the man was having a laugh or if he had some kind of magic cabinet.

“I think we’ll serve it with a little pottage. I’ll pick some beans and onions while you two get started.”

Pottage. At a Black Jacket Restaurant. Archie shook his head. As he descended to the kitchen with Nori, he caught another glimpse of Rowan’s bedroom. A pair of squirrels were ransacking the room, digging around in blankets and bags.

“You can just take it easy. I can handle it,” Nori said as they stepped into the kitchen.

Archie’s temper flared. He took a deep breath to dissipate his anger, trying to find a diplomatic way to take Nori down a peg. “I can handle it, too.”

Nori rolled her eyes. She found the rye flour and measured out a cup into a bowl. “Can you get the yeast?” she asked as she measured salt.

Can YOU get the yeast?

Archie sulked as he opened a cabinet, angry at himself for letting Nori take the lead. He found a stack of sealed jars of yeast and handed one to Nori.

Nori measured some out and added it with a handful of caraway seeds. “I need honey,” she said as she whisked.

“You need sugar,” Archie countered. “And you can get it yourself.”

Nori took a deep breath. “Honey will add a little caramel flavor. And it’ll help the color. It’s a rye bread, it’s better with honey.”

“It’s a rye bread, it doesn’t need the extra flavor.” Archie plopped a bag of sugar on the counter.

They stared each other down. “Make a couple of each,” Rowan said as he came down the stairs. “We’ll taste test.”

Archie snatched one of the spare bowls away from Nori and started on his own loaf. They channeled their frustrations into their whisking, hardly listening to Rowan as he recounted his first time in Kuutsu Nuna. Their frustration continued into their kneading—they both would have overworked their dough if Rowan hadn’t stopped them.

Archie and Nori spent the rest of the morning cleaning dishes and wiping down tables while competing for Rowan’s attention. Rowan let them bicker, letting nature run its course while he just minded the stew and put the dough in the oven.

When the guests started arriving, Rowan traded duties, putting Archie and Nori on the stew while he sat down and talked to his guests. Rowan knew almost everyone that came through his doors, and when he didn’t know someone, he didn’t let them leave until he remembered their name.

Nori went to retrieve the bread from the oven. “Wait. Archie?”

“What?

“Which one is which?”

They examined the loaves. Archie couldn’t tell which one belonged to him, but he could tell which one had risen better. He pointed at it. “This one’s mine.”

Nori realized his game. “Uhhhh I don’t think so. I think this one’s yours.”

They wasted no time in going to their mediator.

“Rowan!” Archie called out, interrupting Rowan’s and a guest’s conversation. “Which loaf is which?”

Rowan offered a half smile as he looked to the kitchen. “Oh, I must have just thrown them in there without worrying about who made them.” He shrugged—not to say he didn’t know. It was the shrug of a man that didn’t care. “I guess the competition is off.”

He turned back to his conversation with a smug grin. Archie and Nori felt a little childish, but that didn’t stop them from glaring at each other one last time as they each took a loaf and started cutting.