Since the fifth floor had a French theme for the inn and tavern, that, of course, meant the tavern menu was French as well. Luckily, much like Italian food, French cuisine was given a lot of importance by her chef instructors. Even the classes that didn''t focus on international cuisine had more than enough to say about the subject. That made creating this menu one of the easiest of the bunch.
For the light fare, Veronica planned to serve mushroom tarts, cheese souffle, french onion soup, and warm goat cheese salad. The names weren''t particularly spooky, but Veronica felt it was a bit repetitive to use the naming trick on every floor that had a spooky theme. It was unlikely that this would be the last one she would choose since twenty five floors left plenty of room for more. However, that didn''t mean that she wasn''t going to do anything to set the spooky theme.
The mushroom tarts would normally involve wild mushrooms, garlic, onions, and cheeses in a tart shell. This could easily have the spooky factor upped by adding powdered charcoal to the puff pastry dough and using red onions instead of white or yellow. For the cheese souffle, she had to mix gruyere cheese, butter, flour, milk, eggs, and nutmeg together. Add some red dye to the mix and you all of a sudden have a much less appetizing appetizer without having to change the flavor too much. It wasn''t like everything had to be spooky either, which is why she would be leaving the French onion soup and warm goat cheese salad as they were.
For the light fare, she had to spend 414 dungeon points to research boxes of puff pastry, bottles of creme fraiche, large jars of gruyere cheese, shakers of ground nutmeg, boxes of baguettes, large jars of goat cheese crumbles, large jars of chestnuts, and magic butane torches. The French onion soup needed the torch for browning the cheese, but it was hardly the only thing on the menu that would require it.
The hearty fare consisted of potatoes au gratin, cheese ravioli, coq au vin, and chateaubriand. As there wasn''t a convenient way to translate the French names for the dishes and she had been taught the dishes with their official names, she decided to just keep them as they were. The potatoes au gratin and cheese ravioli were the vegetarian options while having both a chicken and beef option for the meat entrees seemed like a good way to go.
The potato dish required potatoes that were thinly sliced, heavy cream, garlic, butter, nutmeg, and cheese. It would require a good bit of baking to make, so she''d likely have to prepare a large batch at the beginning of the night and then just reheat individual portions in the oven. It was highly unlikely that patrons would want to be waiting around for an hour or more just to receive their meal. Adding some cheese sauce to a squeeze bottle and drawing on a spider web design for each serving before it was sent out to guests was the best she could do to make it spooky.
The cheese ravioli required a dough made from eggs and flour while the filling was made from gruyere and ricotta cheese with butter and nutmeg for flavor. The ravioli could come pre-made, but she''d still need to cook them to order in some boiling water. Some charcoal powder in the dough and a red sauce on top was easy enough to give it a bloody appearance.
The coq au vin involved chicken being cooked with wild mushrooms, bacon, red wine, onions, garlic, carrots, and a roux to thicken the sauce. It was a rather hearty dish that required quite a bit of skill to make correctly. However, it wasn''t to be outdone by the chateaubriand, which had to be carefully cooked while wrapped in twine to a perfect medium rare before being thinly sliced. Honestly, it didn''t even need anything to add to the creepy factor as the pink inside, while normalized, was still too similar to the color of flesh to not be creepy.
Veronica''s instructors had been much like everyone else in the modern day where they insisted that anything but medium rare was a waste of perfectly good meat. They made a point of bringing up that many people would mistake the red drippings as blood, but that it was actually just a mixture of water and a protein known as myoglobin. That didn''t particularly matter to Veronica. She didn''t like the texture of the meat when it wasn''t thoroughly cooked. She liked her steak to be tender and not burnt, but cooked medium well to well done. That was something that most chefs couldn''t manage, so she rarely ever ate steak that she didn''t cook herself.
The research costs for the hearty fare ended up amounting to 600 DP for a large jar of ricotta cheese, crates of whole chickens, and crates of beef tenderloin. Meat was expensive to research, which was the only reason it was even that high. The desserts were similarly simple to do the research for.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Would you like to spend 100 DP to research boxes of chocolate eclairs using the [Base Resources] butter, milk, water, salt, sugar, flour, eggs, chocolate, heavy cream, cornstarch, vanilla, cardboard, white dye, and black dye?
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Yes
</td>
<td>
No
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Would you like to spend 80 DP to research boxes of creme brulee using the [Base Resources] heavy cream, vanilla, eggs, sugar, clay, white dye, cardboard, and black dye?
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Yes
</td>
<td>
No
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Would you like to spend 120 DP to research boxes of opera cakes using the [Base Resources] flour, eggs, sugar, butter, chocolate, heavy cream, coffee, chestnuts, cardboard, white dye, and black dye?
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Yes
</td>
<td>
No
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Would you like to spend 120 DP to research boxes of mille-feuille using the [Base Resources] puff pastry, milk, sugar, eggs, flour, cornstarch, vanilla, cardboard, white dye, and black dye?
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
Yes
</td>
<td>
No
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
While Veronica now had domvoy to help her in the kitchen, she didn''t exactly want to worry about such difficult desserts. The domvoy had actually proved to be quite skilled in the kitchen and they only had to be shown a recipe a few times in order to know what they were doing. She had already gone back through and re-assigned her [Monsters] on the first through fifth floors to account for her new staff needs. The reception areas had one will-o-wisp each to act as a greeter, the kitchens had two domvoys to act as chefs while one brownie acted as a dishwasher, and then everywhere else got between one and five brownies, depending on what the workload called for.
She''d still likely have to spend a good bit of time helping out in the kitchens and taverns to ensure everything ran smoothly, but her role would be more of that of a manager than a normal employee. If she had to join in to get the job done, she would, but it wouldn''t be something she had to do every day. Really, that was the sort of job that she had wanted all along. It would be nice to have more time to focus on the dungeon as well since she couldn''t just ignore it if she ever managed to get guests again.
Finally, there were just the libations left on the menu. Due to the otherwise classy, upscale dining experience, she decided to go with cocktails for all of the alcoholic drinks. The full libations menu included: water, mint tea, cafe au lait, spearmint lemonade, kir royals, vin chauds, St. Germain spritzes, and sidecar cocktails. Luckily, she now had unlocked 250 MP limit spawners for 1,000 DP shortly after unlocking the fifth floor, so she could now have brownies who would act as dedicated bartenders.
Maybe it was a bit odd to trust her brownies with bartending when she didn''t trust them in the kitchen. However, it was never that they weren''t capable of completing the task. They just had zero experience in the kitchen, so it would have been like teaching children how to be master chefs. It was far too time-consuming. Meanwhile, the domvoys had knowledge about how to work in the kitchen, so it was like teaching an experienced chef how to make the menu for a new restaurant they had just been hired onto. A week or two and they''d know the entire menu. The drinks didn''t require any cooking, just mixing a few different ingredients together and then pouring them into a cup to drink. That much was manageable even for her brownies.
For the libations, she had to spend 200 DP in order to research large jars of mint tea, wooden ice trays, glass pitchers for the lemonade, bottles of champagne, crates of oranges, bottles of elderflower liqueur, bottles of orange liqueur, and bottles of cognac. Some of the cocktails just required alcohol like any red wine, so she could just reuse what she already had.
After everything was said and done, she had 290,206 dungeon points remaining. It would seem she had finally dipped below the 300,000 point mark. How long would it be before she''d be below 200,000?