Breathing in the sea air reminded a smug Takumi that he was from one of the most beautiful countries in the world. He's sure that some of his classmates would object to his incredibly unbiased ruling, but they weren't here with him, gazing at the endless tumble of the Mediterranean from the balcony of the latest suite Fuyumi booked.

"Seems criminal to skip the Amalfi Coast in our tour of Italy," she commented from somewhere behind him. Takumi turned to see her glancing through what looked like a small booklet of the hotel's amenities. Her eyes narrowed in on something. "How do you feel about dessert?"

Takumi might have gotten somewhat used to Fuyumi's non sequiturs, but they still tended to blindside him. "Positively? I mean, I'll eat it if it's in front of me. I'm not much for making them, though."

"Delightful. The restaurant in-house has five limoncello-based desserts and we're ordering one of each at dinner tonight." She closed the pamphlet smartly. "Did you bring a decent set of clothes?"

Takumi looked down at his current outfit: light-wash straight-cut jeans, a white short-sleeved button-up with a sailboat pattern, and a lightweight green jacket that he'd thrown on that morning. "Is there something wrong with this?" he asked.

"Nothing in particular," Fuyumi said with ill-concealed mirth. "No reason to change if you feel confident in it."

Takumi narrowed his eyes. "What aren't you telling me?"

"I don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about," she said airily. "We have a couple of hours before dinner hours start at five. You're free to occupy yourself until then."


Takumi soon found himself walking down a pier, sipping from a glass bottle of soda and admiring the view of the town. Amalfi itself might not have been a member of I Borghi più belli d'Italia, but that didn't make it any less beautiful.

The sun had dipped just close enough to the horizon to paint the whole view in golden light, and tourists flocked the streets, sitting at streetside bistros or walking along the coast as if in a dream. Locals expertly wove between them, carrying bags and crates and whatever other day-to-day items they needed. Boats were slowly coming back to shore as sailors wrapped up their work for the day and prepared to wind down for the night.

Takumi took a second to take a photo of the view before heading back to the hotel, finishing his soda on the way. Some part of him worried over how Fuyumi had responded to his confusion over his clothes (they were clothes. What more was she expecting?), but in the end he decided to just deal with whatever he'd signed himself up for.

Which is how he found himself at a multi-Michelin star restaurant in mildly crumpled clothes he'd just walked all over Amalfi in.

"I warned you," Fuyumi said drily when she met him in a simple blouse and expensive-looking slacks.

"You really didn't," he hissed back, trying not to look even more foolish than he felt. "They took my jacket for coat check."

She gave him a nonplussed look. "And?"

"Mizuhara, I picked that jacket up from a random boutique for maybe thirty euros two years ago. Does that sound like the kind of jacket that gets hung up in a coat check?" A pit was opening underneath him, he could just feel it. "They gave me a tag for it."

"That's what coat checks are for," Fuyumi replied, sipping her water. "It's too late now, Aldini. Just own it."

He put his face in his hands. "How do I do that?"

"By appreciating the food and not thinking about the rest," she said airily. "I'm ordering for us, by the way. Try a bit of everything. If something in particular stands out to you—"

"—tell you what combination of ingredients could have caused it and discuss why the preparation method built it up so well, I know, I know," Takumi grumbled. He didn't bother opening his menu. "Is there a particular flavor I should be focused on?"

"I don't believe so," Fuyumi said. "Just enjoy the food and parse out what you like most."

She'd been doing this a lot more recently, shifting from ordering very specific dishes and demanding full ingredient lists from him to ordering a whole slew of smaller foods that he was told to experience fully. Opinion was apparently a powerful tool for a new chef, and Fuyumi wanted his ability to state his own fully developed by the time she sent him back to Tōtsuki. At one point, she even demanded that he guess just how fresh certain ingredients were to see if Takumi could taste the difference. Those days made Takumi want to give up on being a chef and go into something else. Architecture, maybe.

Apparently, the waitstaff at the restaurant were used to people like Fuyumi who swept in and demanded everything in smaller portions so that they could fully enjoy the whole menu, and soon enough pastas, risottos, and cured meats in small plates made their way to their table. Seafood dominated almost all of the dishes, from delicate clams to large shrimps, their heads still intact, both cooked on their own or mixed into other dishes as individual instruments of an entire orchestra.

And yet…

Takumi's noticed vaguely that food from kitchens not run by Tōtsuki alumni tend to feel… not quite muted, but perhaps quieter. The flavors were always fully developed, the food itself exquisite and perfect, but—

There's always a but.

The food was perfect in every way; it was some of the best that Takumi had ever tasted, but he still felt himself looking for something. Something more, something new, something…

"Aldini-san." Takumi blinked, shaking himself out of his stupor, and looked up at Fuyumi. The lilt of her voice and the way she formed his name betrayed that she had chosen to speak in Japanese. The two of them had stuck to Italian for most of the summer, as Takumi was far more fluent in it and Fuyumi was confident enough in her learned language, but sometimes they would turn to Japanese if they wanted to speak candidly in front of listening ears. It wasn't completely foolproof, since Japanese wasn't the most uncommon language in the world, but it was better than nothing.

"Yes?"

"Let's hear it." Fuyumi had put her utensils down and was studying him from across the table. "You clearly have opinions on what we're eating. What's catching you?"

Takumi mulled his thoughts over, trying to form intelligible sentences out of them. "It's all very good," he said slowly, "but I feel like I'm missing something."

Fuyumi's eyes gleamed. "Oh?"

"I can't put my finger on it," he said. "I just know that I've had experiences at school and Ristorante F that are far more memorable than this food— more than a lot of places we dined at this summer, actually. Does that even make sense, though? Student cooking shouldn't be more impressive than professional cooking, right?"

"I see." Fuyumi looked almost amused now. "You've stumbled upon the reason Tōtsuki attracts so much attention worldwide."

Takumi paused in the middle of putting another forkful of pasta in his mouth. He slowly put his fork down. "Can you elaborate?"

"Cooking schools are a dime a dozen, if you know where to look," Fuyumi said. "The ones with good reputations are as rare as other schools with food reputations: again, common enough if you know what you're looking for. Tōtsuki would, usually, be just another school, one that teaches Japanese students as well as L'ateliers des Chefs teaches students in France."

Takumi nodded uncertainly, not quite understanding what her point was.

Fuyumi gave him a fond yet exasperated smile. "Come now, Aldini-san, think a bit. What have you learned in your first few months at Tōtsuki?"

Technically, not a lot about cooking. Takumi had still gone to as many of the morning lectures as he could, but cooking is a hands-on activity. He'd learned just as much from days spent in test kitchens than he had from a weeks' worth of lectures, and he didn't really need to know the chemistry behind why overproofing dough resulted in worse bread to know not to overproof his dough.

I've learned about competition, I suppose. Tōtsuki was a fierce battleground that had been fought over for generations, one where clashing was meant to winnow out the best of the best and polish them until they shone. The classmates he drifted towards embodied that mindset, constantly biting at each other and clawing everyone else away as they aimed for the top. It was new to Takumi, though maybe that was because he was used to only competing against his brother.

And there was something inspiring about it, wasn't there? Learning that there were others who were his age and just as passionate about excelling as he was, trying to get a step ahead of them as they fought to keep their place in front of him— he'd never considered himself the competitive sort, but Tōtsuki had brought out a version of Takumi who grounded himself and the others around him while still pushing himself to win the race to graduation.

When Takumi voiced this, Fuyumi tilted her head to the side. "I suppose that's something," she said. "Not quite what I was getting at, but an important demarcation, anyways. The hypercompetitive atmosphere is a tenet of Tōtsuki's teaching. Perhaps not an effective tool for someone who would prefer a gentler guiding hand through the industry, but that's not what Tōtsuki has ever advertised having."

Fuyumi idly tapped the edge of a plate with a fork. "Tōtsuki prides itself on making chefs out of children, and that means students are taught to treat food as an extension of themselves, an expression of something lodged deep inside of them. All graduates— and many who dropped out— subconsciously develop their dishes in that way. Those not associated with the school have started calling these 'specialties'."

Takumi hummed while absentmindedly poking another forkful of salad. "Chef Gotōda's seminar at the training camp was about developing our own specialty. We were to make strides towards one and speak with him for critique."

Fuyumi grimaced minutely. "I'm sure that's what he tried to do," she said. "Gotōda-san has always believed that anyone can be an amazing chef by even Tōtsuki's standards if they just tried hard enough. I'm sure many of your classmates appreciated his positivity in between the rest of us finding the more worthwhile students of your generation." She took a sip of her wine. "Or perhaps not. It's not like he expected actual results from one morning of work. It took Gotōda-san himself until the end of his second year to fully realize his first specialty."

Takumi set his fork down carefully. "What makes a dish a specialty?"

"The answer to that depends on who you ask," she said. "Shino would say something about the perfection of a recipe. Gotōda-san always believed in the heart of a dish, describing it as something that couldn't be taught and had to be learned in a kitchen. Inui-san would spin you some silly story about people coming together and specialties being a product of their energies clashing."

"What would you say?"

Fuyumi's grin went sharp. "A specialty is a dish that only you can create. Nothing more, nothing less." She waved a hand vaguely over the food between them. "These are excellent dishes, each polished to a point of perfection. If we weren't Tōtsuki-trained, I suspect both of us would find them admirable and deserving of the Michelin recommendation that comes attached to this restaurant. Despite that, or maybe because of it, there's little to no personalization in them. The chefs who came up with these recipes created them to be delicious for anyone who ate them. We create recipes meant to change anyone who eats them."

"What about the menus you create for Ristorante F?" Takumi asked. "You have a whole team of chefs who work on those dishes; wouldn't those dishes technically stop being specialties?"

"Perhaps," Fuyumi allowed. "By my definition, they would. However, I developed those recipes myself before teaching them to my team. There was no part of the process that was developed alongside someone else for the express purpose of being marketable. I like to think my personal hand allows me to spend enough time to develop each of my dishes into a specialty of their own right. You'll see how recipe development in pursuit of a specialty differs from simply coming up with new dishes next week. I've already made sure Ristorante F will be closed for us to work."

"That can't be all that it takes to make a specialty," Takumi said incredulously. "If that was true, these chefs would have come up with at least one dish that qualifies." He pointedly looked at the half-eaten plates on the table. "I found something lacking in all of these."

"That's because there's something lacking in all of these," Fuyumi said, mimicking his tone while gesturing at the plates herself. Something intense and almost frenetic slowly lit up from within her, flaring bright as she continued. "Whoever made these dishes had no drive to create something new; they simply wanted to create something enjoyable. Anyone can do that. Not anyone can make a dish capable of affecting its audience."

Takumi nodded hesitantly.

Fuyumi caught the eye of their waiter and waved him over. "We'll simply have to see if the dessert options are just as disappointing or if that's where this restaurant truly shines," she said before effortlessly switching back to Italian as the man approached. "After all, a chef who's capable of creating such amazing entrees must pair their dishes with equally sublime options to end the night, no?"

Takumi hid his snicker in his water as the waiter fawned over the restaurant's head chef to Fuyumi, who nodded along in faux earnestness. He ended up taking a photo of a particularly tempting looking cake adorned with a delicately curled candied lemon peel next to a simple looking custard, which Fuyumi allowed with blatant amusement.

"Why are you laughing, Mizuhara?" Takumi asked, putting his phone away.

She shook her head at him, reaching out to spoon up something covered in flaky pastry and cream. "For someone who was so worried about being underdressed, you're happy enough to act like a normal teenager." She smirked when he froze at being reminded. "Don't overthink it. Not like you can do anything about it at this point, seeing as we're at the dessert course."

Takumi groaned as she quietly snickered at him.


Takumi found himself quietly marveling over how bucolic his surroundings were again. Amalfi was gorgeous in its own right, but standing between the ancient trees that filled the orchard he was in, gazing down the carefully constructed steppes that housed it, and seeing the expanse of the Mediterranean stretching in front of him was its own ineffable beauty.

Fuyumi had paused to wait for him, and she hummed equally appreciatively as she followed his gaze to the view. "Every once in a while, I get homesick for Japan and consider moving back and opening a satellite location for Ristorante F," she said. "It's days like this that remind me why I chose to call this country home."

"Is that what drew you to Italy to begin with?" Takumi asked, glancing away from the view to look at her.

Fuyumi sighed. She sounded content. "One of many things," she admitted. "Japan is beautiful in its own right, but it's an austere kind of beauty. Italy has more hidden gems between the obvious." She gestured at the shimmering water stretching out around them. "The obvious doesn't exactly hurt, either."

After a couple more seconds of admiration, Fuyumi gestured a bit more impatiently for Takumi to follow her up the steppes. He dutifully followed along, nodding to the man who owned the orchard. A proud smile stretched across his face at both their appreciation for the view and their attention when he started talking about the lemons his family grew.

Takumi had grown up hearing about Amalfi lemons from the time he was a child. Some relation of his mother lived in a smaller village along the coast, and she'd grown up with the sweet-tart flavor of the citrus at the tip of her tongue. His father ended her birthday dinner every year with the same semifreddo, filled with the lemons of her childhood and the limoncello sold alongside it. Takumi had never been the biggest fan of it, but Isami had inherited their mother's taste for the dessert and was always happy to finish whatever Takumi didn't.

That didn't stop Takumi from reaching out and picking himself a lemon when it was indicated that he could, nor did it stop him from slicing it into rings and sinking his teeth into the flesh of the fruit itself. Flavor exploded onto his watering tongue, sour and sun-sweet, enough of a kick for Takumi to wince and yet addictive enough for him to go for a second bite.

"These trees are like our family," the orchard keeper said. He reached over and fondly patted the bark of a branch within reach. "They have given generations of us our livelihood and our pride. We plant a new tree whenever a new member of the family is born, and when one of them dies we mourn it like a grandparent lost too soon."

Lemon oil clung to Takumi's fingertips, perfuming the air around him with a sharp summer-y smell. He was sorely tempted to sink his face in his hands and surround himself with it, but he managed to hold himself back to just holding a hand in front of his face.

The orchard keeper beamed at him. "Aren't they a marvel for all five senses?"

Takumi felt himself turn pink at being caught smelling his hand like a curious child.

Fuyumi huffed out a laugh. "Let's back up to the main farmhouse; I'm sure some of the lemons harvested are processed into some sort of perfume or cologne."

"And you'd be correct," the orchard keeper responded, ushering them back down the steppes with renewed energy. "It's not quite as popular as the limoncello we also produce, but it's a lovely smell. You could surround yourself with the beautiful scent of the Amalfi Coast every single day, if you wanted to!"

Takumi's blush didn't fade, even when Fuyumi stopped teasing him in favor of examining more of the lemons harvested that day. He ended up buying a small bottle of perfume as discreetly as he could along with the limoncello he's sure his mother would appreciate.


The last stop of the cross-country trip was Cilento, specifically some hidden corner of another park. After finding whatever ingredient Fuyumi intended to source there, the two of them would be driving back to Bologna, arriving in time to spend Takumi's final week in Italy in Ristorante F's kitchen.

So when Fuyumi approached him and asked if he wanted to stay in Amalfi or go to Cilento with her, he gave her a startled look.

"Do you want me to go along?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Honestly, you don't have to. It's going to be a day-trip if anything, and I can easily come back to Amalfi before driving north. You'll see what we're working with in the kitchen, and the only thing you'd miss is another walk through an orchard. This is your vacation too; you deserve some time to yourself to relax. And honestly?" She gave him a tiny smirk. "I have the feeling you'd appreciate having a day to yourself to think about our conversation over dinner last night."

Takumi found himself sitting on the patio of a cafe by the shore that morning, nibbling on a ham and cheese sandwich, an espresso con panna sitting next to his hand. He didn't have any semblance of an itinerary, since Fuyumi had been the one arranging everything throughout the summer, and he hadn't a single clue of what he wanted to do. He was sure that if any of his classmates were in his place, they'd be seeking out the highest caliber restaurants to barge into the kitchen and demand to learn some secret, incredible technique from the head chef, but he'd spent the past five-ish weeks with Mizuhara Fuyumi, someone who would claim (possibly quite rightly) to outclass anyone he could find in all of Amalfi. He briefly considered looking for a secondhand bookstore and tracking down old cookbooks and the like, but that didn't appeal to him any more than his other idea.

He finished his sandwich, got a to-go cup for his espresso, and started walking down to the shore.

The Mediterranean Sea stretched out far beyond Takumi's view. Logically, he knew that there were distinct boundaries for the Mediterranean, places where it definitely flowed into rivers and the oceans beyond. From where he stood, though, it looked like it went on forever, as if it was the only body of water that all land floated on top of. He found a boat that promised to take passengers to some more secluded beaches (despite it being just past nine in the morning, the shoreline by the town was already filling up) and boarded, happily talking to the person who ran the business and seemed more than excited to speak with another native Italian.

The beach was, as promised, far emptier than the one Takumi had left behind. After thanking the driver of the boat, he quickly disembarked and went straight to the sand, his feet sinking in slightly as he walked. An unfamiliar levity sank into him as he walked, and soon Takumi collapsed onto his back and stared at the sky.

He closed his eyes and reveled at his newfound peace.

It didn't last long, unfortunately. Soon, Fuyumi's words filtered back through the haze of his memories, and he sat up to stare at the Mediterranean idly casting waves against the shore. It was beautiful, something he'd never quite seen before, as familiar as he was with the sea. He wondered what everyone he knew would think, were they in his shoes.

Isami, the brother he knew better than himself, was a toss-up between crying at the sight or laughing and sprinting into the waves. His parents would sigh in appreciation and stand to admire the view. Even though he'd known her for a far shorter time than some others, Takumi was confident that Fuyumi would simply stare at the horizon for a couple of seconds before turning back to whatever she was doing.

It's his classmates that were trickier to pin down. The Polar Star members were simple enough, to be fair; Yūki would probably screech and say something about being in the prime of her youth, and Ryōko would want to sit and stretch out beneath the sun. Daigo and Shōji would dive straight into the water, shouting and jeering at each other, and Zenji would probably mutter something about sunscreen and settle himself into the shade with a book. Takumi couldn't imagine Shun at a beach, but maybe he'd see the view as a nice change of pace. Ikumi would find it relaxing, Momo inconsequential, and Sōmei fascinating for the fauna that the Mediterranean held. For some reason, Takumi had the feeling Erina would be wholly unmoved by the sight.

And as readily as Takumi could conjure those assumptions of the people that populated his life, he knew deep down that he'd be disappointed to hear any of them voice those opinions out loud. He would try his best to hide it, but he couldn't deny that his immediate reaction would be to tell them no, that's not why I want you to see this.

Takumi thought back to his conversation with Fuyumi as he sat underdressed in a Michelin star-earning restaurant (and no, he wasn't ever going to be able to live that down, especially with how much his embarrassment amused Fuyumi). She had claimed that Takumi hadn't felt connected to any of the dishes they tried because they weren't made to be specialty dishes and that the concept of those was so nebulous that every chef defined it separately. He thought back to the dishes he'd tried from fellow students and chefs alike since starting Tōtsuki, wondering if Fuyumi would deem any of those worthy of being called specialties. Somehow, Takumi doubted it, even if Ikumi's Shokugeki-winning don had been filled with her signature bombastic flavors.

"A dish that only I could make," Takumi muttered to himself, staring out into the Mediterranean. "Does that mean it's something so personal that only one person could conceive of it? That doesn't feel right; surely, it's more than just a recipe that defines it. Anyone can come up with a recipe."

His eyes were drawn back to the view of the Mediterranean in front of him (beyond him).

Something struck him. Forget his friends and family. What did he think of this view? What did he want to do in the face of that unending body of water?

Takumi slowly kicked his shoes off, holding one in each hand. He walked into the surf, the water pooling first around his ankles and then his knees. It was warmer than he'd expected, though he'd still flinched slightly when he first stepped in. He knew that there were sections of the Mediterranean along France that were far choppier in winter, but it had never been anything but beautiful and calm in Takumi's memory.

There was something humbling about standing there, shoes in his hands, the sky and sea stretching out into an unending canvas of blue in front of him. The sounds back at the shore felt muffled in favor of the whispering waters around him, hushing the world into a haze of far-off bird calls and manmade chaos.

It's like the world gave him a chance to breathe, to look around, to experience, to just 's like Takumi is the only person who matters in the neverending face of the sea and the eternal stretch of blue sky overhead.

Is this what it's like, from the peak? Takumi wondered, feeling almost manic at the prospect. The future stretching out overhead, the past pooling around my feet? He turned to look back at the shore, both so close and yet what felt like miles away. Is this how it'll feel when I look back at my childhood and realize where I came from?

Maybe he's going too far. Maybe he's caught up in some sort of heady delusion, but he knew he'd be successful the way that his brother knew they'd inherit the trattoria and change the world. It almost felt like an inevitability, as if his entire life had been predetermined and all he could do was live it to the caliber that he expected. He still didn't know what Fuyumi meant when she told him to mull over their conversation the previous night, but standing there, knee-deep in water, staring at the sky, it almost didn't matter. So what if he didn't have a clear idea of what it meant to develop a specialty, to be a chef to Tōtsuki's standards? He'd figure it out. It's like it was ordained for him to figure it out.

Takumi ran back to the shore, walking along the beach as his legs dried out and shoving his shoes on as soon as he could. He caught a boat back to Amalfi proper and spent the rest of the day wandering through the town, finally comfortable in experiencing everything as simply himself, not just as a Tōtsuki student or an aspiring chef or anyone else at all. He found a small hole-in-the-wall bistro that served food that he'd deemed alright to pick up dinner from, and he spent an hour or so after the meal abstractly parsing out the various ingredients and their interplay to wind down rather than to actively try to learn something from the practice.

When Fuyumi got back that night, hair pushed out of her face by a bandanna that was beginning to unravel, she found Takumi lying on the couch in their suite's living room, holding a small notepad so close to his face that he could barely read it. When he noticed that she'd gotten back, he quickly sat up, somehow smacking himself in the face with the notepad and dropping his pen in the confusion. Takumi blinked blearily, exhaustion winning out over embarrassment. Fuyumi just raised an eyebrow at his clumsiness and pointedly turned away to hang her jacket up.


Apologies for how long this took! Somehow, I got burnt out on researching Italy, somehow, and had to take some time to write Literally Anything Else. I'm not actually sure how culturally accurate it is for Takumi as a fifteen-year-old to be comfortable wandering around a new place by himself, but this is a story based on manga/anime, where they do that kind of thing all of the time.

Food notes: The Amalfi Coast is known both as one of the most beautiful places in Italy and as home to a specific strain of lemon that dates back centuries, if my research is correct (and if I remember correctly). Limoncello is a liquor made from lemons that can be both drunk and used as an ingredient in cooking. It's not touched on in the body of this chapter, but Fuyumi went to Cilento for the white figs that the region is known for.