am I going to spend the rest of the night watching every scene of Tom Hardy beating the fuck out of people on screen and imagining it’s Panzer finally at his limit?? no. absolutely not why even suggest that
also man i am starving for a pacrim restaurant AU (no pun intended) LIKE……
stacker pentecost owns the pan pacifica, an international restaurant with the toughest kitchen in hong kong (okay, fifth toughest; they are, after all, in hk). wildly successful, serving upscale, seasonal, locally-sourced seafood to an increasingly demanding and finicky set of customers. his old friends in the RAF would accuse him of having ‘gone native’, seeing as there’s no english on his menu— only chinese, japanese, and french— but he takes it as a compliment.
stacker expedites most nights, though he lets mako practice on the slower days while he handles front of house. she’s desperate to get into the kitchen and he’s reluctant to let her— he has no doubt in her skill with a knife or in front of a fire, but there’s an awful lot of both in pan pacifica.
mako helps rehaul the menu every quarter, taking into consideration everything from production costs to labor involved to each season’s tuna spawn rates. she refers to tendo’s notes more often than not, their accountant/IT specialist paid handsomely for keeping tabs on their yearly take of nearly 10 million USD in revenue.
the weis hold together his kitchen, three of them doing the bulk of mise en place well before opening, breaking down fish and meat for the day and cutting vegetables at a volume that would probably bloat a small army of rabbits to death. they’re faster than anyone else stacker has ever had the pleasure of working with, ambitious enough to suggest their own dishes once in a while— usually when a local connection tips them off to a source that had slipped under mako’s notice. the rest of the time, they quality-check and direct the entire crowd of dishwashers, runners and cooks crowded in the space.
(stacker remembers when he first met them in their father’s little restaurant, a neighborhood institution suddenly doing brisk business, three of them in t-shirts and blue jeans, red bandanas and aprons moving around a tiny kitchen with absurd ease. they never once bumped into each other despite the lack of space, each of them lightning-quick with their cleavers, deft movements spare and professional. then he caught sight of them several hours later getting into a scrape with a crowd of hipsters who’d complained about their food.
they never did end up in culinary school but stacker’d coached them personally on the weekends, their talent and potential already clear from what little he’d seen of them. when their dad decided to close up shop, stacker snapped them up before they could jump into the market, paid them enough to let their parents retire comfortably. he’s had their loyalty since; they’re in chef’s jackets now, but they kept the bandanas.)
stacker brings on herc as head chef somewhat late in the game; the entire industry is suffering, herc’s own restaurant in sydney having gone under after a decade of business not too long before. chuck is a quick, skilled cook with plenty of formal training and a few trips to france under his belt, but he gets himself on the wrong side of pacifica’s core brigade not twenty minutes into his first day.
(’can’t anyone in this kitchen speak english?’ he’d griped to mako when she’d dropped in to greet the staff and review the menu, brief chuck on how the grill station works. everyone around them had been shouting in cantonese.
‘actually,’ hu had coolly answered before mako could, cutting himself off halfway through a request to one of the dishwashers and practically shouldering chuck out of his way, ‘my brothers and i grew up in canada.’)
it wasn’t really fair of them; they’d even answered the boss in cantonese when chuck first arrived, but gossip spreads quickly and when sasha and aleksis arrive for the dinner rush, the couple gives him pitying, judgmental looks before changing into their whites and taking over for the triplets— one of the weis joining the line to speed up production, one helping out the dishwashers and the last heading for the dining area, servers overworked and shorthanded for the evening.
at the end of the night chuck finally endears himself to the team, throwing together a family meal the likes of which the staff hasn’t seen since mako’s last play for a spot in the kitchen, elegant and hearty. he serves it with a warning not to expect anything like it again, mako flashing him a victory sign from her office door.
'make something delicious but don’t waste anything,’ she’d told him. ‘don’t use too much salt and avoid dairy. if it’s good, they’ll forgive you. maybe.’
the next day, chuck gets some playful teasing and no more dirty looks. he lays low for as long as he can handle— which turns out to be right up until stacker decides that mako’s ready to join the brigade in the kitchen and the staff gives her none of the grief they’d given him.
when he implies that the triplet dogging her heels and walking her through service is only politely making corrections and adjustments because she’s the owner’s daughter, five sets of knives are suddenly not-at-all discreetly pointed in his direction; herc whisks him away from the kitchen and chews him out before anyone’s hand slips.
things settle down for a while, until stacker pulls cheung out of the kitchen and casually suggests that he might bring raleigh back to pacifica; herc’s already given the go-ahead, but he’ll be answering to the weis. cheung gives him a pained look, but lifts his shoulders in a resigned shrug. ‘it’s your call, boss,’ he says unconvincingly, then flashes a lopsided grin. ‘we can handle it.’
I have been thinking that there’s no way you can disprove that everyones part of my imagination and I’m the only one who exists.
But then you can do the same about yourself.
What if we’re all disguised as individuals when in reality we are all just one person, maybe we are part of god, or god and everyone including yourself are all projections of different people and I (everyone) have created the world and I’m sort of, simulating in it, experimenting.
