I really thought I'd be past the Autumn Election by the time this fic hit chapter 20. Really goes to show what I know.

If you want to support this story monetarily, I have a ko-fi set up under the username 'Shriayle'. Additionally, this story is also being posted on AO3 under the alias 'sentraia' after being slightly more polished; think of this as the place to get the quickest updates and there to get the most well worded version, lol.


"This is going nowhere," Fuyumi growled to herself.

Takumi decided not to argue and, instead, focused on enjoying the vanilla ice cream the latest acetaia paired their balsamico with. He idly wondered if Momo would actually listen if he told her about this combination or if she would upend the bowl on his head without even considering it.

Actually, he knew the answer to that. He stopped wondering.

Fuyumi had, at some point, taken out her cell phone and was using a stylus to furiously scribble something down. Takumi had glanced at the screen to see mostly illegible scribbles and the katakana for 'new track' scrawled across it. As they left, her face had grown stormy enough that Takumi found himself inching away from her.

"Change of plans for tonight," Fuyumi said. Takumi winced at how low her voice was. "I hope you're okay with cooking your own dinner."

"I hate cooking, actually. I go to Tōtsuki for the math and chemistry classes." Takumi tried his absolute best to keep his face as neutral as he could.

Fuyumi snorted, her building annoyance happily disrupted. "Cheek." She slid her untouched ice cream over to him. He glanced at her curiously before beginning to eat it. "Meet me today at 5pm in front of Sforzando. Today's one of their rest days, so I should be able to get access to their kitchen. Bring whatever you wish to test. Oh, and a baguette from that bakery down the street from our hotel. It's probably the easiest neutral-tasting base to acquire in a hurry."

She walked out of the door before he could respond. Sighing, Takumi graciously thanked the acetaia owner with prepared words of genius chefs, always getting inspiration from the smallest things; surely a single taste of your creation sparked an entire five-course meal in her mind. He followed her a couple of minutes later, his hands laden with pieces of cheese and dried hams that the consortium family swore went perfectly with any balsamico DOP worth its due.

Really, Fuyumi should be thanking him for his efforts.


As it turns out, a world-renowned chef giving you complete leeway in buying whatever you wanted to play around with in a kitchen was a little bit like throwing a dog into a butcher shop. This also meant that Takumi brought armloads of ingredients that had even mildly piqued his interest, produce and spices that ranged from possibly helpful to outlandishly bizarre. Fuyumi gave him an exasperated yet somewhat fond look when he took out a bunch of bananas. Aran, who'd given them full reign over his kitchen with the provision that he'd get to watch, started cackling when he then pulled out a tin of sardines.

"You don't do things in halves, do you, Aldini?" he managed to say between barks of laughter.

Takumi felt a blush stealing its way up his neck and tried futilely to fight it off. "You never know," he said weakly.

"Quite right!" Aran said. "Well, I'm deeply intrigued to watch whatever this will end up being."

Fuyumi briskly stepped up and examined one of the nectarines Takumi had taken out. "What is your aim for this test kitchen today?" she prompted.

Takumi gave himself a second to mull that over. "First, I think we should remake the Ristorante F agrodolce in as many iterations as we can," he said slowly. "We don't have the house apple cider vinegar, but I bought some for the best approximation. From there, we can figure out what aspects of agrodolce the new recipe will have to encompass. Then, if there's time, we can start testing ingredients together and see what combination of flavors work better than others."

Fuyumi nodded at his words. "One last question— what aspect of agrodolce are the sardines for?"

All of Takumi's assuredness fled from him. "Um. I just— honestly, I just like them," he mumbled sheepishly. "I was going to eat whatever's left of them after we wrap up here." He withered slightly under the dual stares from the chefs. "They're good on bread."

Aran stifled one last bout of laughter.

"Planning ahead is important," Fuyumi said in that stony way of hers that Takumi knew meant she was amused. She stepped forward and picked out the ingredients for her agrodolce. "Start organizing other possible combinations you want to try out. When you have a working sample, have Takehiro taste it."

"Huh?" Aran gave her a bewildered look. "Why'm I being roped into this?"

"Because you wanted to watch," Fuyumi said. "You're the most neutral party in all of this."

"How does that make any sense—"

"Yes, chef," Takumi said, ignoring Aran's protesting.

"I did not agree to being your guinea pig!"

Aran's protests were summarily ignored.

Takumi's father didn't find a lot of passion in creating new recipes, but there were still times when the trattoria was closed for days at a time and the guts of it turned into a test kitchen. He and Isami had mixed together what felt like unending mountains of pasta dough and fresh cheese, the steam of the kitchen curling the ends of his hair and forcing him to wipe off a thin layer of mist from his face every hour or so. Even then, Takumi had never felt more alive, even when his milk curdled from too much citrus or the caramel he attempted to make burned sugar into the pan. Takumi himself had a reputation for his enthusiasm in the process; too many times, his father and brother had dragged him away from making his recipe that much more perfect by saying that he had to sleep or eat or otherwise rest. The trattoria test kitchen is little more than their kitchen at home, just with more pans and stovetops and ovens to play around with. More than not, the nights ended with him and Isami half-dozing at a table as their father handled whatever clean-up they were too tired to get to.

Like basically everything else about her, Fuyumi ran her test kitchen differently. It reminded Takumi of the kitchen at Ristorante F, just with fewer people and far more dishes in small amounts. Fuyumi became a dervish of chef's knife, skillet, and spoon, darting between four different stations that each held at least two trials that were at completely different steps of the process. Sometimes, she would wrinkle her nose over a pan, set it on a cooled burner, and start up another test round with some combination of ingredients Takumi had postulated. Every once in a while, one of her pans got to a stage where she seemed satisfied with it, and she brushed a spoonful of whatever she made on a disc of bread before turning back to her other experiments.

Takumi had started out trying to keep up but gave up on that rather quickly. Instead, he found himself taking the combinations that Fuyumi deemed at the very least worthy of being seen through and iterating on them. Peach and lemon was taken and twisted in both directions, the fruit cooked or chopped or zested or whatever else he could come up with to extract their flavors (Aran made a choking sound as he watched Takumi blend a whole lemon with half of a pitted peach, pour the mixture onto a pan, and begin cooking it down to the proper consistency. Fuyumi walked over, tasted a spoonful, and hummed something about muscovado sugar, and went back to her stations before anything burned). Combinations of everything that Takumi had conceived of when staring blankly at grocery store aisles were folded together in front of him and given to him to weave into patterns of his own, and he could feel a bounce in his stride as he swept between the truly colossal amount of tests that Fuyumi was stirring together and the ones that Aran wordlessly indicated were worth developing more. He ended up writing down a few details on the peach-lemon blend to continue experimenting with in the future.

It still wasn't enough.

There was something missing, and he could tell Fuyumi was also sensing it. There was a certain body of flavor in both halves of their agrodolce that was conspicuously absent, and Takumi could not, for the life of him, even begin to speculate on what was missing. He'd devoted years of his life to cooking, to food, but there were some things that needed even more years to develop, and that included the encyclopedic palate that Fuyumi herself had barely started amassing. He was sure they'd both develop it one day, but that day was decades in the future. Takumi didn't think Fuyumi was willing to wait decades to develop this recipe.

"This is going nowhere," he said.

"It's going somewhere," Fuyumi said, distracted as she was by the rush of the sink. At some point, she had started washing the pans of her disappointments in order to start another round of cooking.

The clock read ten at night. Aran was half-slumped over at the counter.

"How much longer do you want to go for?" Takumi asked.

She glanced over at him, and behind the wear that was slowly beginning to creep across her expression was a bright gleam of unnerving attention. "Until I've parsed out everything I need to."

"How do you tell when that is?"

Fuyumi gave him a long look before her hands flitted over the ovens and turned all of the burners. She turned fully to him, her arms vaguely crossed. "This is one of the hardest parts of developing a recipe," she said, and her voice had slipped into a tutor's tone that made Takumi wish he had a notebook and pen. "We aren't seeking out something new; we're prodding around until we find the exact hole that's been bothering us. With each new experiment, more of the hole's boundary is discovered, and only when we have done enough will we figure out the full shape and make out that absence. We've only just felt out the vague outline of where it could be."

She paused, then finally looked around as if she'd just noticed how hectic the kitchen looked. "I suppose this isn't the time for all of that," she admitted with a sigh. "We're close, as well. I can feel it."

"Close as in another hour or another two weeks?" Aran said. His voice was muffled, since he'd long since laid his head face-down on the table.

Fuyumi flicked his shoulder. "Hush."

"We're close?" Takumi asked, somewhat disbelieving. All he remembered was a flurry of recipes and ingredients that he had chopped, nudged, and, generally, just played with until he exhausted his options. None of the combinations really stuck out to him as good enough for his own curiosity, much less Ristorante F. "It feels like we've done a lot of nothing."

"Most days of recipe development feel like that," Fuyumi agreed. "At your skill level, you can instinctively mark off what you know already will be a horrible combination of flavors, which leaves you with mostly okay- or good-tasting ones. Anyone can come across a decent recipe. It takes much, much more work to take just decent and polish it into something special." Despite how discouraging her words could have been, there was a light in her eyes that made Takumi think that she was almost excited. "We're, at the very least, closer than we were when the evening began. Tomorrow, we'll continue to try and feel out what we're missing for this recipe to truly shine."

She glanced around. "For now, let's clean everything up."

Takumi hid a sigh. "Yes, chef."


The next day brought just as frustratingly little success. At one point, Takumi mused aloud if he was even cut out to be a chef, if he was already losing patience for the incredibly long process by which Fuyumi developed her recipes.

This was waved off almost immediately. "You have the right instincts to make this your career," Fuyumi reassured him. "Just because one aspect of the job isn't something you enjoy doing doesn't mean that the whole thing is a wash."

Takumi glared down at the combination of white vinegar and cranberry juice sitting innocently in the pan in front of him. He'd hoped that deriving something from a more Asian-inspired sweet-and-sour sauce recipe rather than an Italian agrodolce would illuminate something, but all it did was make Takumi really want to order takeout. "It's just so annoying," he admitted. "I think I'm too used to knowing recipes well enough that I don't need more than one day of testing to develop something new."

"That's the pitfall we all run into at one point," Fuyumi said, not looking up from her pot of tomatoes and blueberries (she'd said something about 'similarly shaped fleshy berries', but Takumi hadn't felt like debating over botanical terms). "Every chef has their favorite substitution-friendly recipes and their favorite original recipes. You'll understand when you develop your first specialty."

"Whenever that is," Takumi grumbled. He sighed again, taking his sauce off of the heat. "I think I'm completely out of ideas for tonight."

Fuyumi hummed. "What is the commonality between everything you produced both yesterday and today, and how would you challenge it?"

Takumi's brain felt tired from the all-day training that Fuyumi had been pushing into him, but he still made a valiant effort to think her words through carefully. "They've all been fruit-based," he said. "Pretty understandable, since the two most common ways to sweeten a recipe are fruit and sugar, and enough fruits are tart enough that they can provide agro as well. If we really wanted to separate from the house agrodolce, the recipe should include an alternate source of sweetness." Takumi idly knocked a rhythm into his skull. "Don't ask me what I mean by that. I don't have a single idea of what we could use instead. Brain's broken."

Fuyumi thought through his words carefully before her eyes widened slightly and gained a sharp gleam Takumi had long since learned to be wary of. "Oh, I see. I have an idea for that," she said. "At the very least, we have our travel plans next week all sorted." She turned the burners at her station off. "Let's wrap for today. I might need all of tomorrow to make the arrangements necessary, and I was planning for our last day here to be a day of rest, anyhow. Did you have something in mind that you wanted to do while we were still in this area?"

Takumi paused, pans held over a sink. "Uh, well. I wasn't actually planning on seeing it through, but my brother did ask if I could pick up a bottle of wine for him," he said haltingly. "He sent a vineyard he was interested in. Maybe I'll give them a visit."

He caught Fuyumi's confused look. "Your twin brother? The fifteen-year-old? What on earth does he want a whole bottle of wine for?"

Takumi shrugged. "There's a lot of recipes that use Marsala."

Fuyumi nodded sagely at that.


If there's one thing Takumi loves most about Italy, it's how much everyone loves food.

Takumi hadn't realized how much Italians loved food until he moved to Japan and left the confines of Tōtsuki's campus. The passion Takumi expected had been muffled to convenience store shelves and hurried gestures, handcrafted love and appreciation exchanged for cellophane wrappers and greasy napkins.

It was with a newfound appreciation that Takumi thankfully took the small plate of cheeses when stepping into the winery tasting room of a vineyard Isami was more than happy to direct him to. Fuyumi had told him to go with his Tōtsuki student ID, treating it like some sort of magical key that would unlock amazing offers for him. Takumi initially took that with a grain of salt, but when he showed the card to the winery manager, the man was more than happy to overlook and give him thimble-sized samples of various wines.

"I cannot show you the many intricacies of some of these wines," he said with a sigh. "These small samples aren't enough to appreciate the wine's legs or body, but they're enough to give you a small taste of the quality that you'll be working with." He beamed at Takumi. "And if you'd like to join us for our midday meal, we'd be more than happy to accommodate you! We have plans for a lovely caprese with the first of our summer tomatoes."

Takumi was sure that if he even breathed a word of this to Satoshi, he'd be inundated with envy hidden behind his typical sunny grin. "That sounds lovely," he said with the proper amount of modesty. He sipped one of the wine samples, hiding his grimace at the bite of alcohol in the back of his throat. Whoever said that wine could taste like blackcurrant and raspberries had clearly never had either of those fruits before in their life. "And this is one you'd recommend for a dessert?"

"Ah yes, that batch or this one," the man said, pouring another taste. "This is much lighter than the one you just tried. A bit drier, with some notes of espresso that cuts through something more fatty or oily. A lovely Chianti, typically enjoyed alongside dinner; I'm sure your parents would love this particular bottle."

Takumi fought the instinctive wince as he drank the wine and plastered on a smile instead. "I'm sure." He glanced around the winery. "Does your vineyard produce anything else with its stock? I'm sure wine is your main focus, based on how lovely it is—" Takumi didn't think he'd ever understand why adults enjoyed alcohol so much— "but I've heard of other, maybe more experimental things that places like this produce."

The man gave a boisterous laugh. "Clever one, aren't you? Yes, we do have a few things that aren't your traditional wines. These are just what tourists and locals typically ask for." He winked at Takumi. "But you, my boy, are anything but typical. Here, follow me."

This was an ill-kept secret Takumi knew about everyone interested in food, whether they were an aspiring chef or a vendor: people loved to experiment and they loved talking about their experiments with others who understood. He was brought into a smaller room lit somewhat dimly. Kegs lined one of the walls, each labeled with paper and a neat script. An island counter was set up in the middle of the room and boasted a row of stemmed glasses. The man walked over to a fridge tucked away in a corner to pour Takumi and himself each a small glass of water.

"Now, many of our wines down here were prepared from a mix of fruits," the man said, gesturing to the kegs. "We've had most success with berry mixes, as you may guess, but we have a few experiments in tomato wine running as well. They're a bit less successful— much different acid-sugar ratios in them, as I'm sure you must know— but there's some spark of inspiration there that hasn't run out yet."

Takumi hummed understandingly as he glanced at all of the labeled barrels. "Definitely interesting." Something reflective caught his attention from the corner of the room; when he turned to get a better look, he came across a series of brown glass bottles, each with about a liter of liquid. They'd been arranged in neat collections, tape cordoning certain bottles off from others.

The whole set-up looked vaguely familiar, but Takumi decided to double-check anyway. "What're those being used for?" he asked, pointing over.

The man followed his gaze to the bottles. He somehow lit up even more. "One of my kids suggested those," he said proudly. "We're acetifying some of our wine to see what profiles it would gain. We've only just got a batch back after two months, but we're incredibly pleased to see the progress on it. Would you like to try some?"

Takumi nodded, wide-eyed, anticipation building in his chest. The sheer irony of the serendipity wasn't lost on him. It was almost poetic that the moment he stopped thinking about his task for the summer, a possible solution presented itself to him.

He'd probably have to thank Isami too. He grimaced internally at the thought. His brother didn't deserve to have yet another thing to dangle over his head. Maybe Takumi could blackmail him with the photo of the time he shaved his own eyebrows off again.

The man had simply beamed before bustling off in search of something to pair the developing wine vinegar with. He returned with a spoon, a small platter of cheese, and an apology already forming about how they didn't expect to serve their newest creation so soon and how they weren't really prepared for it. Takumi took the first two and waved off the third, his eagerness soothing any last fretting he might have received. The man retrieved one of the bottles, checking its label as he walked back over with it, and poured Takumi a careful spoonful of the liquid inside of it.

Takumi examined the vinegar he'd been presented with: richly pink, a far departure from both the inky darkness of the balsamico he'd tried in the past week and the cheerful auburn of the apple cider vinegar he knew from Ristorante F. It wasn't heavily-scented, though whether that was because it wasn't quite ready or if that was the nature of the vinegar itself, Takumi wasn't sure. It wasn't anywhere near as dark as any of the wines he'd been presented with earlier, which made him think it had either been somewhat diluted prior to being acetified or that some part of the process had eaten away the tannins present.

After he stared at the spoon for long enough (perhaps too long), Takumi carefully took a sip of the vinegar.

It was milder than he thought it would be. Takumi had expected some echo of the wine's kick or the acidity of vinegar to take over the flavor profile, but what he got instead was a somewhat fruity sourness that made his tongue curl with more interest than disdain. He wasn't one to enjoy drinking vinegar, but of all of the ones he'd tried… Takumi couldn't say it was the best, not after days of tasting decades-old balsamico, but it was pretty good.

"This was only aged for two months?" he double-checked.

"Just under," the man corrected. "This is a new venture for us; it's only now seeing any possible returns."

"It's very good," Takumi hurried to say. "Much lighter than I expected from any sort of vinegar, but that might be due to where it is in the process."

"I believe that to be a quality of the wine we sell here," the man offered in response. "Many wineries choose to leave their less valuable stock to turn to vinegar, as it's not the primary good that our businesses sell. My kid said we should treat it as an untapped market, so we're setting aside the wine that we can't quite bottle to turn to vinegar, no matter the age, quality, or make." He nodded to the spoon Takumi held. "The wine that went into that vinegar was aged for close to ten years before we began turning it into vinegar. A waste of wine, most would say, but I believe it's fine to sacrifice such a thing if we create something just as wonderful— and lucrative." He quirked an eyebrow at Takumi.

"I know what you mean." Takumi reached out to read the label on the bottle. "Sir, you wouldn't happen to have a small bottle of this handy? I know someone who would find your work here very, very interesting."

The man's eyes lit up. "But of course! Would you like the bottle of wine you were looking at upstairs, as well?"

"Absolutely. Could I get that one wrapped?" Takumi tried to hide a smug grin. "The most outrageous paper you have, if possible."


Fuyumi found him that evening in the main room of their suite, carefully applying stickers of various cartoon animals on a thin box wrapped in silver paper patterned with ornamental, gaudy golden filigree.

"Do I want to know?" she asked drily.

"They didn't want to dig up their Christmas paper," Takumi replied, as if that cleared anything up.

"Of course." She pointedly didn't roll her eyes at him as she walked up, her curiosity winning out. "What're these?" She tapped on the table next to the other bottles Takumi had returned with.

Her pseudo-apprentice paused from where he'd been smoothing out a particularly round-eyed fox along a fold of the box. He carefully laced his fingers together and hid the bottom half of his face behind his hands.

"...it can't be that bad," she deadpanned.

"It's not bad. Complete opposite, honestly," he said. "I'm just weighing how likely it is that you'll run off with them and how tired I am."

Fuyumi actually rolled her eyes that time.

Takumi rather effectively swallowed back his laughter. "Alright, fine. The winery's expanding into wine-based ingredients. Apparently, this includes experimental vinegars." He gestured vaguely at the three bottles. "Those are from their first batch. I thought you'd be interested."

Fuyumi picked one of the bottles up and stared at the pinkish-red liquid inside.

Something akin to dread began to bubble in the pit of Takumi's stomach. He recognized that look in her eyes.

"Be back from Florence by two tomorrow," she said with a murmur. "Sforzando will need to be ready to open by four. That only gives us two hours."

Takumi sighed to himself, but he could still feel an excited grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Yes, chef."


Out of curiosity, what are y'all's favorite Shokugeki stories? I've been reading a lot of fics from other fandoms, but it's been a few years since I've gone through the Shokugeki archives. I'm interested to hear what you're all reading besides this story of mine :)