Dear Mx. Grieg,

As the newest member of the Robson & Co. group of restaurants, we at Rêverie would like to cordially invite you to visit us. We specialise in a fusion of French and Korean cuisine, led by head chef Jonathan Dubois to provide every diner with a unique, unforgettable eating experience. As a renowned restaurant reviewer specialising in gourmet cuisine, and one who's dined at Robson & Co. restaurants in the past, the innovative dishes we serve would be right up your alley. Attached below please find a QR code that, when scanned, will provide you and your fellow diners with a 25% discount for your meal. We hope to see you soon!

All the best,

The team at Rêverie

Halle lifts their laptop screen towards Erika so that she can read the email, too. "They don't expect me to fall for that, do they?"

"I mean, they sound kinda genuine," she says nonchalantly. "They even gave you a coupon."

"Eri, fancy restaurants never give you stuff like this out of the goodness of their hearts." They close their laptop and go back to jotting down notes, continuing, "there's always an ulterior motive."

She reaches over them to grab a highlighter. "So what do you think they're planning?"

"To figure out who I really am, of course. 'Puff' is what most of my readers know me as, but even if they do some digging all they'll find of my real name is H. Grieg. If they know I have this coupon, they'll know who the person behind PuffinReviews is." They take their ruler and carefully draw a line across the page of their notebook, then continue writing. "I'm surprised other places haven't tried this sooner."

Taking a marker next, Erika quips, "how do you have a bounty on your identity at sixteen?"

"It comes with being a restaurant reviewer. I did some research when I first got the email, and I did write a review on a place in the same group before, so I don't think they're lying. But the coupon is definitely a trap."

"Mmhmm." She flips a page. "You could just go to the place anyways, just without using the coupon. Anyways, do you have notes from that lesson on March first? I think I was rushing my food tech report on that day."

They toss their notebook onto the bed.

Erika squints at the notes. "I can't read your handwriting."

Halle grabs the notebook back from her and scans the purple words. "This is just a paraphrase of slides twenty to twenty-seven of that Ming Dynasty slideshow. You'd be better off copying from there."

"Slideshow one, two or three?"

"Uh…" They open up their laptop again and start scrolling. "The, um, third one. Here you go."

She starts writing, green pen jotting down bubbly letters, and works in silence for a while before she nudges the laptop back to Halle. "I think these are all the notes we're supposed to make." Erika flexes her wrist. "Oh gosh, my hand's dead. The shift tonight is going to kill me."

"Tonight?"

"I swapped shifts with my brother," she explains. "He has extra classes today."

"Oh, okay."

"Speaking of Basch, he says hi. I made him try that chocolate-miso brownie recipe from The Serenade."

They raise an eyebrow. "How did it turn out?"

"I thought he'd blow up when I suggested it." Erika grabs Halle's stuffed puffin from the side of their bed. "What was it he said? 'How typical of those pompous fine-dining places to just throw two things together and call it gourmet.' Or something."

"And?" Halle prompts.

"And I decided to make the brownies myself. It took a while to actually make Basch try it, but he liked it! The umami flavour of the miso went surprisingly well with the dark chocolate. It's kind of weird, but in a good way." She tosses the puffin into the air. "I'm gonna tell the chocolatiers at work about it. Maybe they'll start making something like that."

If an ardent chocolate purist like Basch Zwingli can accept chocolate with miso, it's definitely something groundbreaking. It's not like the tamer combinations Erika's thought of before, either — custard-filled chocolate bonbons, her last idea, was way less adventurous than the miso-chocolate mix. "What do you plan on suggesting? Just brownies, or something else?"

"Cookies might deliver the flavour better, in my opinion — " she tosses the puffin again — "and are easier to mass-produce. But enough about food. For now." The third toss sends the puffin hurtling past Erika's hands, and it bounces off their head. She pretends not to notice. "What did I miss during last week's training?"

Halle picks their puffin up and squeezes it to their chest. "Not much, really. The only eventful thing that happened is Azemah's racket breaking."

A ding from her phone makes her jump, and Erika groans at the message. "Oh no."

"What is it?"

She shows them the screen. "Our test results are out. Like, all of them."

"Ohhhh no." I am, like, so dead. At least it's a welcome distraction from that email.

After three trips to Wang's, with their simplistic walls and furniture, Halle nearly forgot what the restaurants they usually review are like. The entirety of Rêverie is awash in a soft yellow glow, soft jazz music not unlike the tunes heard in Boulangerie Bonnefoy playing in the background. They sink into the plush, cream-coloured armchair, and the rest of their family follow suit. Two pairs of menus, one on each end of the white-clothed table, rest atop napkins shaped like lotus flowers.

Their father picks up the menu, running a finger over the gold outline. "I don't think I know what half the stuff they put in here mean."

He's right — most of the terms they use are either in French or Korean, and beneath the name of each dish, printed in cursive, is a flowery paragraph of purple prose outlining what it's made of. After reading about a soup that's apparently "gradually and lovingly brought to life with eleven hours of simmering, fresh herbs and a top-secret spice blend, every hour in the pot awakening the gentle beast of flavour that is waiting to be able to run rampage," Halle can't help thinking about the simp, to-the-point descriptions from Wang's. They didn't have metaphors in their menu.

Next to them, Stellan turns the menu over, glances at its blank backside, then flips back to the list of dishes before finally setting it down. They sound pretentious as hell.

"Says the English literature major."

He kicks them. The gleaming silver cutlery on the table shakes slightly.

"I'm assuming this restaurant is one that doesn't really care that variety is the spice of life," their mother remarks. "What kind of place only has two sets on the menu?"

"One that's really hoity-toity, quite obviously." Their father takes a sip of water from a glass that looks more expensive than their yearly tuition fees. "Too bad we can't use those coupons they sent."

"Well, the most important secret a writer has to keep is their identity."

They glance at the menu again, with its filigree border, curly font and intricate dishes, and almost unconsciously open their notebook. Now this is the type of place they're used to reviewing.

Words: 2873
Characters: 12648

Perfect. Halle didn't expect the review to be finished so quickly, especially considering the trouble they had with The Serenade and their struggle right now with Wang's. By the time the meal was over and their mother deftly signed the cheque with L. Steilsdottir, their notebook was filled with a whopping six pages of frantically-scribbled notes. They almost got caught a few times by the particularly observant waitress, who was thankfully distracted by their father delivering a well-timed compliment on his food. Overall, they have to say the visit was a complete success, with the review completed the day they went to the restaurant without even disrupting their posting schedule.

After scanning the review for the third time, they upload a few photos of Rêverie and their dishes at the very top, take a deep breath and click Publish.

Right on time.