The Regressed Gangwon Hunter Makes a Fortune in 1933 - Chapter 98

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

Chapter 98: Expanding into Chuncheon (3)

──────

The Owl of Blue-Gold Pavilion finished her meal twenty minutes later.

Disappointment spread across the faces of the men who had watched with watering mouths. Only bones remained on the four plates, and even those were gone from the plate that had held the boneless dakgalbi[1].

Kim Seong-ja let out a satisfied burp. She sucked the sauce off the fingers of her leather-gloved hand, one by one.

"This is... incredible."

The eyes of the bird of prey that had just fed were completely different now.

With every trace of sleepiness gone from her face, Kim Seong-ja grinned and rested her chin on her hand.

"I heard Malja has some shares in your company... Will you give me some too?"

Han San snickered.

"Ah, well. Shares were worth something different back then."

When he had first met Malja, the 200 won she had saved up from the tavern business and Ginsei's 300-won bounty had been an enormous sum.

To Han San now?

It was not a small amount, of course. But it was no longer money worth writing an essay called [My 500-Won Lord] to sing the praises of.

The scale of the game had changed.

Still, Kim Seong-ja kept going on about shares.

"Of course they're different. But the power Malja has and the power I have are on different scales too."

She was right.

The kind of power they held was the same, though.

"You aren't going to do business only with noona's family, are you? Other important people may take an interest someday. We need to leave some room open for that day."

The shares he had given Malja were for the entire Kim family, the great house of the peninsula's nightlife. There was no need to allot them any more than that.

"So stop pawing at the shares," Han San said, waving a hand. "Noona can handle money with me some other way."

Kim Seong-ja paused. It sounded as if she had just heard some awful wordplay...

Before she could think too deeply about it, Han San made his offer.

"For the next month, let's sell this dakgalbi and chicken here as limited-time menu items."

Kim Seong-ja's eyes widened.

"Heh... that..."

"It'll be a special technical partnership. Between Han's Myriad Commerce and noona's Blue-Gold Pavilion."

Blue-Gold Pavilion was an upscale drinking establishment. It even had an elegant kitchen. The dishes they had just eaten were prepared there.

What snack could possibly be better with alcohol than dakgalbi and fried chicken? This too was future knowledge only a regressor of this era possessed.

'And if we sell them as drinking snacks...'

Everyone present knew the rule. Put the same dish on a menu as a drinking snack, and its price doubled.

Again, Blue-Gold Pavilion was an upscale establishment. He could not even guess how much they could charge.

"Let's sell takeout too."

Han San went a step further.

"All the customers here are rich and important people, right? And when they drink here until late and head home, they might feel a little guilty. That's when they take home chicken and dakgalbi. 'Honey! Kids! Daddy's home!' Like that. The kids who were upset that their father stayed out drinking late will smell what comes from the package and forget all about it. And when the kids are happy, the wife is happy too. This is all for the sake of domestic peace in Chuncheon."

Truthfully, Han San did not know much about it. What could a seventy-four-year-old widower know? He was just saying whatever sounded plausible.

Seong-ja snorted too. Still, she fully acknowledged the logic behind it.

"So you mean to spread word all over Chuncheon...?"

Han San grinned. This was why talking to smart people was easy.

The homes of Blue-Gold Pavilion's customers were sure to be well-off even by Chuncheon standards. Once their families learned the taste of dakgalbi and chicken, they would become the best possible advertisement to the target customer base.

"You said it would take a month to get the restaurant ready. Will we spend that month waiting around, or prepare in advance? The line outside the shop on opening day will be different."

Kim Seong-ja smiled. This smile meant something a little different.

"Aren't you worried?"

"Worried?"

"Yes. For a month, we'll be making and selling it in our kitchen. You should have plenty on your mind. You even prepared the seasoning elsewhere and wrapped it up so tightly."

In other words, did he trust her that much? Did Blue-Gold Pavilion look like the sort of people who would snoop around, copy the seasoning and menu, then steal the whole thing?

Han San smiled warmly.

'Of course they'll copy it.'

There was no such thing as intellectual property rights in this era. The idea of selling secret recipes for money was something that would only become possible decades later.

'Even then, recipes got copied outright all the time.'

But.

"Like you said, we'll prepare the seasoning blend elsewhere. The cooking will only happen here."

Kim Seong-ja was still smiling.

"Even so, what, half a year...? A year...? All you'll gain is a little time. People's tongues are sharper than you think."

"That little bit of time is enough."

Would the restaurants that copied it do as well as the original?

Everyone would say no. Even if the taste was exactly the same, anyone would instinctively know it would be hard to surpass the original.

Why was that?

Calling it the advantage of getting there first was simple enough, but it was worth considering again what it meant for people to pay for secret recipes.

The businesses that bought recipes in later years advertised themselves by saying, [We learned directly from the original restaurant.]

In other words, buying a recipe meant buying a cooking method and an unofficial license at the same time. They were paying a franchise fee for the time and history the original restaurant had built.

[Recruiting talent isn't really about needing that person, hyung. It's about needing what that person represents.]

Remembering Teacher Han Bada's words, Han San smiled.

"By the time copycats start appearing, everyone will know who the original is. When that happens, copies? I'll be grateful for them."

Once everyone started following suit, the customer base would grow too. In the end, the person who took the largest share would be the one who started first.

Again, smart people did not need many words to understand each other.

"Hmm... Fine. You're really something, aren't you?"

Kim Seong-ja was smiling fully now. Not the smile she had worn when watching him perform tricks upon their first meeting, but the smile she gave a proper partner.

"I'll back you. Go ahead and have your fun."

Han San soon learned exactly what she meant by backing him.

The date changed.

Early morning, October 8th, 1933.

"Seong-ja noona. Can't we start after the sun comes up? It's still dawn."

"Ahem. Time is the most precious thing in the world... So what do you think of this place...?"

"Hmm... Pass. Show me the next site."

Han San and Kim Seong-ja went around Chuncheon looking at potential restaurant locations.

From the very moment they had discussed it, they had begun selling dakgalbi and chicken.

Han San had spent his time shut in the kitchen cooking, while Kim Seong-ja watched the sales figures and counted money. Their eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, but everyone was brimming with energy from their shoulders to their toes.

After looking around, they found two candidate locations.

One was easy. It stood at the entrance to an affluent residential district where anyone could see a business would do well.

The other made Kim Seong-ja tilt her head.

"You really want this one...? It's not a bad location, but it's a little quiet..."

At the edge of town, where the fields and road seemed to greet each other awkwardly, Kim Seong-ja looked around in puzzlement.

"This will do."

Han San grinned.

'In six years, a station will be built right in front of it.'

The Gyeongchun Line[2].

Just thinking of the railway station due to open in 1939 made Han San feel full already.

'I can't exactly buy up this whole area and squat on it...'

Even during the military dictatorship, people with money but no connections who tried that would get stripped clean. This was an even more brutal age.

He had to keep things reasonable.

'It's fine. Even a reasonable bite will be enough to burst my stomach.'

Having solved the location problem, Han San moved on to the next matter.

Construction and permits.

"Noona, I can trust you, right?"

"Yes, trust me and leave it to me... I know well enough that if you want to keep eating eggs, you don't kill the hen..."

"I trust you on that. But for the dakgalbi restaurant, make the kitchen especially large and spacious. Make the griddle huge too. And put in a dedicated water line while you're at it."

"I told you to trust me, you little..."

It might seem strange to make a dakgalbi restaurant's kitchen so large, but unlike later years, they would not put a griddle at every table and have customers stir-fry their own food. They planned to cook it in the kitchen, plate it, and serve it.

'If I had come five years later, we could have opened a truly clean restaurant with the sewer lines fully connected too.'

Unfortunately, that would have to wait.

Next.

"About the ingredients..."

Kim Seong-ja had been fine despite her bloodshot eyes after staying up all night, but a little sunlight had nearly turned her to ash. Squatting in the shade and panting, she said,

"Potatoes, onions, vegetables like that... This is Gangwon. Especially potatoes, we won't run short."

The problem was chicken.

"Watching what went out of our place yesterday, we'll need an incredible number of chickens... We might be able to manage some trickery with boneless dakgalbi, but fried chicken and bone-in dakgalbi... One chicken has to go on each plate. If we sell a hundred plates, that means a hundred chickens..."

It was simple arithmetic.

Keep doing that simple arithmetic, and a restaurant selling around a hundred chickens a day would need nearly forty thousand chickens in a year.

'And that's forty thousand chickens per restaurant.'

The broiler system would not emerge in America until after the 1950s. To receive regular deliveries of this many chickens on the peninsula in this era would take an extraordinary feat.

Fortunately, this was Gangwon, with clear water and fine mountains.

"There's a man named Gye Myeong-ung... People call him the Chicken Elder too... He controls every poultry farm around here. The problem is, he's a little eccentric..."

Kim Seong-ja said it with a frown, but as soon as Han San heard the name, his sharpened memory lit up.

Not a memory from his past life, either. It was from this life.

[This is the membership list for our Kaesong Merchants' Fellowship. Hey, you're not supposed to show this around, but since it's you, I'm giving you a special look. If you're going to Chuncheon, memorize it well. And remember, the closer someone is to the front, the more senior they are!]

Han San took out the invitation to the Kaesong Merchants' Fellowship that Ma Jong-sung had given him as he retraced the memory. A whistle slipped from his lips.

"Bingo."

"Yes...?"

"Ah, nothing. I'll handle this part."

Leaving Kim Seong-ja staring at him in confusion, Han San took Ma Jong-sung's letter of introduction and went to find Gye Myeong-ung, the Chicken Elder.

A magnificent tiled house. A yard wide enough to fit a football field. Chickens crowing everywhere.

It seemed there should have been a nerve-racking negotiation, a test of Han San's worth, and a tense confrontation with Gye Myeong-ung, whose temperament was said to be eccentric enough to make even Kim Seong-ja frown.

Yet the moment Gye Myeong-ung heard Han San's name, he reacted at once.

"Ah! That wild ginseng!"

Han San smiled broadly.

"Yes. The wild ginseng that went to the young man named Kim Yu-jeong[3]. I dug it up myself. Did you see it too, Elder?"

"Did I only see it? How long has it been since I saw a root crown like that...? I even took photographs! Wait here, I'll bring them out!"

A portable camera of the sort only Hajama the Second had carried around in Inje slipped out from the Chicken Elder Gye Myeong-ung's sleeve, and he brought out photographs of the wild ginseng from a developing room set up in one corner of his estate.

'Chuncheon really is something...'

As Han San marveled at that, Gye Myeong-ung continued admiring the photographs.

"This thing Ma Jong-sung brought that day. The second I saw it, I wanted it so badly! But when you reach my age and position, there are desires you may indulge and desires you must not. That young man Kim Yu-jeong, he even ran a night school over in Sille Village. He was an outstanding young man."

That name sparked Han San's interest too.

"How is he doing lately?"

"I hear he's improved! He's still writing fiction too. I heard he'll send me something once he has enough manuscript pages together, so you should read it when that day comes."

Han San did not say, Well, I don't think it'll be to my taste... He was not insane enough to say that while he was building such a positive relationship.

"Please do!"

"Yes, yes. Well... But you see. If you happen to get the chance someday, then..."

"Of course, Elder."

Han San smiled at Gye Myeong-ung.

"I'm busy with business these days. But if heaven favors me again and I dig up some good wild ginseng, I'll bring it to you first."

The wrinkles across Gye Myeong-ung's face smoothed out as he beamed.

"Ha ha! Yes, yes! That's what I wanted to hear! Don't you worry! This Gye Myeong-ung will make sure you get a proper price!"

Han San was happy too. He had secured a special route to sell eighty-year or hundred-year wild ginseng for its proper value in the future.

"Then I'll send you the chickens. If they're going to hands favored by heaven, my chickens won't have anything to resent!"

"Thank you, Elder!"

With that, the chicken supply issue, the part most likely to become a bottleneck, was solved cleanly.

When he returned to Blue-Gold Pavilion, Kim Seong-ja clicked her tongue.

"Wow... You really are something else..."

The Han's Myriad Commerce employees who had come with him were calmer. In their minds, Han San was already a perfect superhuman who could do anything except tell a funny joke.

They only worried about Han San, who had been up all night and spent the entire day going around outside.

"Sajang, leave the kitchen to us today and get some rest!"

"Y-yeah... It's getting chilly after Chuseok. You'll work yourself sick..."

Han San was reaching his limit too. Kim Seong-ja added a word.

"Mm-hm. I'll have bathwater drawn for you. Boiling hot... Soak for a good while, then rest in one of the rooms inside. The beds are soft."

"Ah, is that all right?"

"Of course. Keeping you lively seems like it'll be my priority for a while."

Han San grinned and gratefully accepted the favor.

After soaking in the hot water, Han San slept sweetly that day without even dreaming.

In the heart of Chuncheon's nightlife district, the chickens' mournful wails rang out in the meantime.

"All right, while Sajang rests, let's get to work! Chairman! Rookie!"

"Yes, Leader!"