The deal was worth trillions of Won for the company, and it was riding on me, Park Jung Hwa, to make sure that it went perfectly.

The lunch in the conference room, where they’d make the deal, I mean.

In my opinion, making deals, or being the most crucial part of a plan involving deals, was not my forte. I was the head of the test kitchen, making new food and drinks through experimentation and testing. My job was in a clean, isolated workspace that was more of a lab than a place to cook food. It allowed me to bake to my heart’s content for a prestigious international food product company -- and if things went the way they had been for the last couple years, I was going to stay there forever, enjoying my life in that kitchen – just me, a warehouse of ingredients, and a triple oven.

But now, I was under a deadline expiring in ten minutes; the test kitchen was being used as an actual kitchen, and I was being mis-used as a made-to-order chef. According to the leadership, they needed the best possible person for this task – there was just too much riding on this deal to trust the luncheon to somebody who did this kind of thing for a living. And the executives decided that the best thing to do was to get me, the kind of employee who can’t handle this kind of stress, to be the single, most critical point of the negotiation.

My phone chimed in my pocket. I now had nine minutes to finish a star luncheon, for a Michelin Three Starred restauranteur.

And these sandwiches, as luxurious as I tried, were definitely going to underwhelm him.

The guy coming in today was famous; not television famous, but elite foodie famous. The kind of famous that makes rich people gasp when somebody says they met him, tasted his food. I was shaking with nerves, because these ridiculous cucumber and fresh cream cheese sandwiches I was making right now were about to either show him whether Artful Existence Foods was a company that was a true expert in all things culinary, or if it was the kind of business that had no clue what it was doing.

And that would be disastrous.

His name was Yang Do Hyun. He owned the Chrysanthemum Café (which allegedly was a lot more than just a café) in a tiny town in Gangwon-Do, tucked neatly under a luxury ski resort. And while he really was the kind of famous that meant all of the top company executives knew everything about him, I had never heard of him before.

But he was good enough to earn Michelin Stars. Three of them. That was really something to be proud of – as far as I knew, there was only one other restaurant in all of Korea to earn three.

“Careful! The cake!” my coworker said, startling me out of my thoughts. He braced himself, looking down, arms spread wildly as if the dainty little cake I had finished was about to fall over. Which, it wasn’t. He stared down at it, his outstretched hands shaking. “Do you think seven layers was too much? It was too much, wasn’t it?”

“Seven layers years is perfect,” I said through my gritted teeth, refocusing on the sandwiches I was plating. I was going the extra mile – the sandwiches were cut into perfectly measured cubes, an inch high, an inch wide, an inch long (I measured each one). The milky brioche was delicately sliced with a razor-edged knife to ensure that every sandwich held the kind of fluffy, rectangular precision that Da Vinci would be proud of, but I also used our expensive, hydroponic-grown ‘wild’ forest greens to garnish the plates like a house overgrown with bushes.

As if these greens were parsley.

I almost laughed to myself. It really was hilarious, the lengths that we were going for this guy.

Though, after deeper thought (which I really shouldn’t have been thinking considering I only had seven minutes to finish) how could I blame the leadership? According to them, Do Hyun’s coffee was so incredible, so niche, that any hint of his work, any single recipe, even a word of advice from him promised to transform the way we did business, launching us from household goods into the gourmet, luxury food and drink market.

Though, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure what they were thinking. Food could be good, sure, but how could you possibly package something by a Michelin starred chef? How could you slap a brand on it and put it up for sale in grocery stores, even if it was marketed as a luxurious, upper-class product?

“How you want the cucumber roses? Should I re-do them?” My assistant asked, his eyes wild and his words vibrating with anxiety. He held up a tray of cucumber slices so thin you could practically see through them. They were carefully sculpted, folded onto and into each other to form glassy, green flowers. Dotted with fruit reduction ‘pollen’ and misted with a glowing balsamic vinaigrette, they were perfect.

For my standards, at least. But for somebody famous?

With six minutes left, it’d have to do.