Before we get to the part where everything went wrong (or right, depending on how you look at it), I should probably introduce myself properly.
My name is Enthony Guilver, and if you've picked up this guide, you're probably wondering how a guy who couldn't cook a decent meal to save his life ended up becoming the most renowned chef in the galaxy. How someone with a 1.8-star rating on JobChef managed to master the preparation of every known species in the universe—and quite a few unknown ones.
The answer, like most interesting answers, involves bad decisions, worse luck, and a girl with purple hair who I'm still not entirely sure wasn't sent by the universe specifically to ruin my life in the most educational way possible.
This isn't just a cookbook, though you'll find plenty of recipes here. It's not just a memoir, though I'll be telling you everything that happened. And it's definitely not just a travel guide, though we'll be covering more of the galaxy than most people see in ten lifetimes.
This is the story of how I learned to cook everything and anything. How I went from the worst chef in the sector to... well, you'll see.
But first, you need to understand exactly how far I'd fallen before I could rise.
So let me take you back to that Thursday night in Neo-Seattle, when I was still just Enthony Guilver, Professional Failure.
The sweet and sour pork was on fire again.
I stared at the wok, watching orange flames lick up the sides like some kind of culinary damnation, and wondered—not for the first time this week—how I'd managed to set a dish that was mostly sauce on fire. Behind me, Mr. Chen was screaming something in Cantonese that I was pretty sure translated to "You're fired" mixed with several creative suggestions about what I could do with my spatula.
"Enthony!" he shouted, switching to English just so I couldn't pretend I didn't understand. "This is the third time this week! Third time! That Zorganian couple at table seven specifically requested human-style cooking, and you somehow made it worse than Plutonian prison food!"
"It was only a small fire," I muttered, grabbing the fire extinguisher. White foam erupted across the wok, the counter, and somehow onto the ceiling tiles.
"GET OUT! OUT! You're done! Finished! I don't care if you trained at the Martian Culinary Institute, you can't cook to save your life!"
"It was the Lunar Academy, actually—"
"I DON'T CARE WHERE IT WAS! GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN!"
So that's how I ended up sitting on the curb outside Golden Dragon Restaurant at 9 PM on a Thursday, my chef's coat smelling like burnt sugar, shame, and fire retardant foam. My seventh restaurant in two years. Seven. At this rate, I'd run out of restaurants in Neo-Seattle before I turned thirty.
The street was busy tonight. A Throxxian family walked past, their four arms carrying enough takeout bags to feed a small colony. Hover-taxis zipped overhead, their anti-grav engines humming in that pitch that always made my teeth ache. Somewhere down the block, a street vendor was selling grilled Venusian moth-larvae, and the smell made my stomach turn—not because it was alien food, but because even street food smelled better than anything I'd ever managed to cook.
My phone buzzed. A notification from the restaurant's review aggregator. Against my better judgment, I opened JobChef, the app that had become my personal hell over the past eighteen months.
"Golden Dragon Restaurant - One star. I would literally rather eat a raw Xenarian sandworm than whatever Enthony Guilver just served me. The protein was both somehow undercooked AND burnt. How is that even possible? I've had better meals on colony ships during system failures. If you see this chef's name on staff, RUN."
The review already had forty-three likes. I watched the number tick up to forty-four, then forty-five.
I opened my JobChef profile with the kind of morbid curiosity usually reserved for watching disaster footage. There it was, my entire culinary career laid out in devastating detail:
Enthony Guilver - Junior Chef
Overall Rating: 1.8 stars (based on 247 reviews)
Dishes Served: 3,847
Customer Complaints: 892
Health Code Violations: 14 (12 overturned, 2 pending)
Times Caused Actual Fire: 23
The recent reviews section was a graveyard of my ambitions:
"Managed to make instant ramen inedible."
"My Kryllian friend has six stomachs and all of them rejected this food."
"The salad was the only safe thing and he still messed it up somehow."
"How did you burn soup? SOUP?!"
I scrolled further, past the Luna Bay Bistro firing (three weeks), the Cosmic Fusion Cafe disaster (eleven days), the Starlight Diner incident that made local news (forty-six hours). Each restaurant, each firing, each scathing review was documented in excruciating detail. The algorithm had marked my profile with a red warning triangle that appeared next to my name on any job application: HIGH RISK - REVIEW HISTORY
My personal inbox was a masterclass in rejection:
"Dear Mr. Guilver, after reviewing your application and work history, we regret to inform you..."
"Thank you for your interest, however your JobChef profile indicates..."
"We're looking for someone with a more... stable... employment record..."
"LOL no" - That one was from a burger joint that operated out of a converted cargo container.
I'd applied to seventy-three restaurants this month. Seventy-three. Everything from high-end establishments serving Andromedan delicacies to greasy spoons that cooked food for the dock workers at the space port. Not a single callback. My reputation had spread like a particularly virulent strain of Martian flu—fast, unavoidable, and apparently incurable.
I let my head fall into my hands. Four million credits spent on culinary school at the Lunar Academy, where I'd somehow graduated in the middle of my class despite my instructors' growing concerns. Another million on that specialized course in multi-species dietary requirements. I could tell you the exact temperature to cook Rigellian meat-moss to avoid triggering its defense spores. I knew which Earth spices would cause anaphylaxis in Centaurians. I'd memorized the preparation methods for six hundred different alien proteins.
But knowing and doing, as it turned out, were very different things.
My hands shook when I cooked. They always had. Some kind of performance anxiety that turned me from merely mediocre into actively dangerous the moment someone was actually going to eat my food. The therapist I'd seen for three sessions (before my insurance from the Cosmic Fusion Cafe job ran out) had called it "culinary stage fright." She'd recommended breathing exercises and visualization techniques.
Neither helped when the wok was on fire.
"Rough night?"
I looked up to find a girl about my age standing over me, backlit by the neon sign of the restaurant across the street. For a moment, all I could make out was her silhouette—but what a silhouette. She was curvy in a way that was immediately noticeable, with a figure that would've made heads turn even on a busy Neo-Seattle street full of aliens with multiple heads to turn.
As she stepped closer, the details filled in. Bright purple hair that definitely came from a bottle, falling in waves past her shoulders. She wore a battered brown flight jacket that looked like it had seen every corner of the galaxy, covered in patches and pins from places I'd never heard of. The jacket was unzipped enough to reveal a low-cut top underneath that showcased exactly why I'd noticed her figure first—the girl was exceptionally well-endowed, and she clearly knew it based on how she stood.
Her face was pretty in a mischievous way, with sharp green eyes that sparkled with either intelligence or trouble—possibly both. She had a small scar through one eyebrow that somehow made her look more interesting rather than less. When she smiled, it was the kind of smile that immediately made me suspicious, like a salesman who'd just spotted an easy mark.
"You could say that," I said, trying very hard to maintain eye contact and failing at least twice.
She plopped down next to me without asking, close enough that I could smell her perfume—something spicy and exotic that probably cost more than my last paycheck. This close, I could see her jacket patches better. "Betelgeuse Jazz Festival 2156." "I Survived the Vorganian Poetry Slam." "Warning: Prone to Wandering." There was even one that showed a middle finger made of stars with the text "Traffic Laws Are Suggestions."
"I'm Zara," she said, extending her hand. Her nails were painted a metallic silver that shifted colors in the light.
"Enthony," I said, shaking it. Her grip was firm, confident.
"Oh, I know who you are," she said, pulling out a tablet. With a few swipes, she had my JobChef profile up on screen. "Enthony Guilver. Twenty-six years old. Lunar Academy graduate. Current rating: 1.8 stars and dropping. Just got fired from your seventh restaurant in two years." She looked up at me with those sharp green eyes. "You're kind of famous in the 'worst chef in the sector' circles."
My stomach dropped. "Great. That's just... great."
"Hey, don't be so down about it! Famous is famous, right?" She laughed, and it was surprisingly genuine. "Besides, I couldn't help but overhear your former boss. Pretty sure the whole block heard him. Something about Plutonian prison food?"
"He was being generous. Prison food is probably better."
"See, that's the spirit! Self-awareness is the first step to... well, something. Probably." She shifted, crossing her legs in a way that made her jacket fall open a bit more. I caught myself staring and quickly looked back at her face, where her knowing smirk told me she'd absolutely noticed. "You know what you need, Enthony? A change of scenery. Like, a really dramatic change."
"I need a job," I said flatly, gesturing at my tablet where seventeen new rejection emails had appeared in the last ten minutes. "Or a new career. Or maybe just to move to a different planet where nobody knows my name."
"Funny you should mention that..." She pulled out what looked like a small metallic card from her jacket pocket. With a flick of her wrist, it projected a holographic display into the air between us, showing sweeping views of alien landscapes, exotic space stations, and what appeared to be a resort on a planet with three suns. Soft, inspiring music played from tiny speakers. "I run exclusive tours throughout the galaxy. Very exclusive. Very legitimate."
The way she emphasized "legitimate" made it sound extremely not legitimate.
"Right," I said. "And I'm a good chef."
"Hey, self-deprecation is my bit," she said, but she was grinning. "Look, I can tell you're at a crossroads here, Enthony. Can I call you Tony?"
"Please don't."
"Tony it is. Point is, you're clearly meant for something greater than setting stir-fry on fire—"
"How did you know it was stir-fry?"
"Lucky guess. You've got the look." She waved her hand vaguely at me. "That whole 'I've disappointed everyone including myself' energy. It's very distinctive. Anyway, the universe is huge and full of amazing things, and you're stuck on Earth burning pork. Well, you're stuck on Earth period now, because I'm guessing with that reputation, nobody's hiring you for the off-world cruise ships or colony restaurants either, right?"
She wasn't wrong. I'd applied to three cruise lines and gotten rejection emails so fast I suspected they'd been automated based on my profile alone.
"So here's what I'm thinking," Zara continued, leaning in close enough that I could see the little gold flecks in her green eyes. "You take a break from the whole 'career suicide' thing you've got going on. Come with me on a tour of the galaxy. Six months. We hit all the best spots—Andromeda's Ring, the Floating Markets of Nebulos-7, the Crystal Caves of Xanthia Prime. You get some perspective, some life experience, maybe figure out why you're such a disaster in the kitchen. Who knows? Maybe you'll come back a changed man. Confident. Skilled. Employable."
"That sounds expensive," I said, already suspecting where this was going.
"For you? Because I like your sad, pathetic energy?" She tapped the holographic display and a number appeared in glowing blue text: 2,000,000 CREDITS
I laughed. Then stopped laughing. "Wait, you're serious?"
"Completely legitimate business." She pulled out an actual physical ID card—something nobody used anymore except for government officials and, apparently, scam artists. It looked official enough, complete with a holographic seal that shimmered when she tilted it. "Zara Laurex, Licensed Galactic Tour Guide. Registration number GV-7734-B. Fully certified, fully insured, fully legal."
"Your last name is Laurex?"
"Is weird and unique, right?" She flipped the card around. The back had even more official-looking stamps and seals. "I'm second-generation Neo-Seattle, just like half this city. My grandfather came over from Old Earth before the exodus. Now, you want to keep talking about my ancestry, or you want to hear about this amazing opportunity?"
She tapped the holographic display again, and a wall of text appeared—terms and conditions in about forty different languages, including a few that looked like they were written in colors instead of letters. Some of them were definitely not human languages. One appeared to be in pure mathematics.
"Two million credits," she continued, her voice taking on a rehearsed quality that suggested she'd given this pitch before. Many times before. "All-inclusive. Six months touring the best spots in the galaxy. Transportation, accommodations, food, entertainment—all covered. I'm your personal guide the whole way. I know the galaxy like the back of my hand. Every planet, every station, every trading post worth visiting. I've been everywhere, Tony. Everywhere that matters, anyway."
"It's Enthony."
"Sure it is." She smiled wider, and I noticed she had a small gap between her front teeth that was oddly charming. "Look, I can see you're skeptical. That's smart. That's good. A guy who just hands over two million credits to a girl he met on the street would be an idiot."
"So you admit it's a scam."
"What? No! I said it would be idiotic, not that it IS idiotic. Big difference." She pulled out her tablet again and started swiping through screens. "Look, here's my business license. Here's my insurance documentation. Here's my ship's registration—the Wandering Star, beautiful vessel, you'll love her. Here's testimonials from previous clients. See? Five stars. 'Zara provided an unforgettable journey through the cosmos.' Five stars. 'Best tour guide in the galaxy.' Five stars. 'Would recommend to anyone looking for adventure.'"
I squinted at the testimonials. They all looked... suspiciously similar. Same format, same enthusiastic tone, same vague praise that could mean anything or nothing.
"When were these written?" I asked.
"Various dates, look—this one's from last month, this one's from six months ago—"
"They all have the same timestamp in the metadata."
Zara's smile didn't falter. "That's just a display glitch. My tablet's from Tau Ceti, the time zones get all messed up when you're jumping between systems. Point is, these are real testimonials from real clients who had real amazing times."
"Uh-huh."
"You don't believe me."
"Not even a little bit."
"Okay, fair." She leaned back, her jacket falling open even more—definitely intentional, I realized. This girl knew exactly what she was doing. "But let me ask you something, Tony. What's your alternative? Keep applying to restaurants that won't hire you? Move to a different city where your reputation hasn't spread yet? Change your name and hope nobody runs a background check?"
She pulled up my JobChef profile again. "With this rating and this history, you're unemployable. Not just in the cooking industry—anywhere that does a basic search on you is going to find this profile and assume you're a liability. And it's only going to get worse. That review from tonight? Already has sixty-seven likes. Someone's going to turn it into a meme by morning. I've seen it happen."
My chest tightened. She was right, and I hated that she was right.
"So here's the deal," Zara said, her voice softening slightly—though the calculating look in her eyes didn't change. "You're sitting on a pile of credits from what I'm guessing is inheritance or school funds you never used. That money's just sitting there while your life circles the drain. Why not spend it on something that'll actually make you feel alive? Worst case scenario, you blow all your savings on a six-month vacation and come back broke but with some amazing memories. Best case scenario, you figure out what you actually want to do with your life."
"And you get two million credits for being my tour guide."
"Hey, I gotta eat too. This face doesn't pay for itself." She gestured at herself in a way that was probably meant to be self-deprecating but came across as deeply self-aware. "Plus, I'm really good at what I do. You'll see."
I looked at her—this strange, overly confident girl with her too-tight top and her supposedly legitimate business license and her smile that screamed 'trust me, I'm totally trustworthy.' Every rational part of my brain was screaming that this was a scam. The ID card was probably fake. The testimonials were definitely fake. The whole thing smelled fishier than a Neptunian market on a hot day.
But then I looked back at my tablet, at those rejection emails, at my JobChef profile with its damning 1.8-star rating. At the review that now had ninety-two likes and three comments, all variations on "I can't believe this guy is still allowed near a kitchen."
Two million credits. That was most of what I had left. My inheritance from my grandmother who'd believed in me enough to leave me everything. My culinary school fund that I'd barely touched thanks to a scholarship I'd somehow conned my way into. My savings from the brief periods when I'd actually held a job long enough to get paid.
It was everything. My safety net. My backup plan. My last chance at maybe, possibly, somehow starting over somewhere else.
And I was seriously considering handing it all over to a girl I'd met five minutes ago who was very clearly running some kind of scam.
"What's the refund policy?" I asked.
Zara's grin got impossibly wider. "Oh, there isn't one. All sales final. No refunds, no returns, no take-backs."
"That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be honest." She stood up, stretching in a way that made several passing pedestrians walk into things. She either didn't notice or didn't care. "Look, Tony, I'm not going to pressure you. You're a grown man, you can make your own terrible decisions. But I'm leaving tomorrow at dawn from Landing Bay 7 at the south port. Dock 23-B. If you want to stop being Enthony Guilver, Worst Chef in the Sector, and start being Enthony Guilver, Guy Who Did Something Interesting With His Life, you know where to find me."
She tapped her tablet and sent something to my phone. A confirmation code appeared, along with coordinates and a meeting time: 06:00 GST.
"Think about it," she said, starting to walk away. "Or don't. Your call. But between you and me?" She looked back over her shoulder, and for just a moment, the calculated saleswoman expression slipped into something that might have been genuine sympathy. "You look like a guy who's got nothing left to lose. And those are my favorite kinds of clients."
Then she was gone, disappearing into the crowd of humans and aliens that flowed through Neo-Seattle's streets like a river of bad decisions and half-formed dreams.
I sat there on the curb for another twenty minutes, watching the city move around me. A Voltarian street musician played something haunting on an instrument with too many strings. The hover-taxis kept zipping overhead. The smell of the grilled moth-larvae vendor mixed with the scent of ozone from the nearby transit station.
My phone kept buzzing with rejection emails. Indeed-Galactic: "We regret to inform you..." SpaceJobs: "After careful consideration..." HireAChef: "Unfortunately, your profile doesn't meet our current needs..."
I pulled up my banking app and stared at my balance: 2,847,392 credits. My entire life, reduced to a number on a screen.
Then I pulled up Zara's confirmation message. Landing Bay 7. Dock 23-B. Tomorrow at dawn.
I should sleep on it. I should do research. I should check if her business license was real, if her ship was actually registered, if any of what she'd said was even remotely true.
Instead, I opened my banking app and set up a transfer. Two million credits, ready to go. All I had to do was enter the recipient code and authorize the transaction.
My finger hovered over the button.
"I would literally rather eat a raw Xenarian sandworm than whatever Enthony Guilver just served me."
I pressed the button.
The confirmation came through immediately. Two million credits, transferred to account GV-7734-B. The same registration number from Zara's ID card, I noticed. At least she was consistent in her scam.
My phone buzzed with a new message:
"CONGRATULATIONS ON BOOKING YOUR TOTALLY LEGITIMATE GALACTIC TOUR! I knew you had it in you, Tony. See you at dawn. Bring a bag, some comfortable clothes, and maybe some antacids. The galaxy can be rough on the stomach. - Zara (Licensed Tour Guide)"
The asterisk after "Licensed" was almost definitely not a good sign.
I looked back up at the Golden Dragon Restaurant. Through the window, I could see Mr. Chen already interviewing someone for my position—a tall Rigelian with four arms, which would probably make them objectively better at cooking than I'd ever been.
Then I looked at my phone, at that terrible review that now had over a hundred likes, at the confirmation of what was probably the worst financial decision I'd ever made.
"Well," I said to no one in particular, "at least I can't get fired from being a tourist."
I stood up, my legs stiff from sitting on the curb, and started walking home. I had about eight hours to pack for a six-month journey through the galaxy with a girl who was almost certainly going to take my money and disappear.
But you know what? For the first time in two years, I felt something other than anxiety and shame.
I felt excited.
Terrified and excited, which was probably not a healthy combination, but I'd take it.
My phone buzzed one more time as I walked. Another rejection email: "Dear Mr. Guilver, thank you for your interest, but we're looking for someone with more... experience... that doesn't involve arson."
I deleted it without reading the rest.
Whatever happened tomorrow, at least it would be different from this.
And different was looking pretty good right about now.
I didn't sleep that night. Instead, I packed a single bag—some clothes, my chef's knives (optimism? stupidity? both?), and my grandmother's old cookbook that I'd never been able to follow successfully. Then I spent the remaining hours staring at my ceiling, alternating between excitement and the certainty that I'd just made the biggest mistake of my life.
At 5:30 AM, I gave up on sleep and headed to the south port.
Landing Bay 7 was in the industrial section of the spaceport, the kind of place where legitimate tour companies definitely didn't operate from. The area was a maze of corrugated metal buildings, cargo containers stacked three stories high, and the kind of ships that looked like they'd been held together with duct tape and prayer.
I found Dock 23-B wedged between a cargo hauler that was actively leaking some kind of purple fluid and what appeared to be a salvage vessel with more rust than hull.
And there, in all its dubious glory, was Zara's ship.
The Wandering Star looked like it had wandered through a debris field. Possibly several. The hull was a patchwork of mismatched panels in at least four different shades of gray. One of the engines had scorch marks that suggested it had exploded at some point and been inexpertly repaired. The landing gear was uneven, making the whole ship list slightly to the left. There was a dent in the nose cone that was roughly the shape of another, smaller ship.
It was, without question, the most suspicious-looking vessel I'd ever seen.
"Beautiful, isn't she?"
I turned to find Zara standing behind me, holding two cups of station coffee. She'd changed from last night's outfit into fitted cargo pants and a tank top that was somehow even more revealing than her previous ensemble, with her flight jacket thrown over it. Her purple hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she had the kind of energetic morning person glow that made me want to throw something at her.
"That's one word for it," I said.
"Hey, don't judge a ship by its hull. She's got it where it counts." Zara handed me one of the coffees and patted the ship's exterior with genuine affection. A small piece of metal plating fell off. We both pretended not to notice. "Fast, reliable, and she's taken me to every corner of the galaxy without exploding. Well, without exploding permanently. That one time on Proxima Station doesn't count because we made it out alive."
"That's not reassuring."
"You say that a lot, you know." She pulled out her tablet and tapped a few buttons. The ship's loading ramp descended with a hydraulic whine that sounded like it was in pain. "Come on, let me give you the grand tour."
The interior of the Wandering Star was somehow both better and worse than the exterior. Better because it was clean and relatively well-maintained. Worse because it was absolutely tiny.
"So this is the cockpit," Zara said, gesturing at the front section which had two pilot seats surrounded by controls that looked like they'd been scavenged from three different ship models. "That's the common area slash kitchen slash dining room." She pointed at a space barely large enough for a small table and a kitchenette that would've made my culinary school professors weep. "And back here are the sleeping quarters."
She opened a door to reveal a room with two bunks, a tiny closet, and approximately zero privacy.
"Wait," I said, my stomach sinking. "Two bunks? As in, we're sharing this room?"
"Well, yeah. It's a small ship, Tony. What did you expect, luxury suites?" Zara tossed her bag onto the top bunk with practiced ease. "Don't worry, I'm a heavy sleeper. Barely snore at all. And I promise I won't peek when you're changing."
The smile she gave me suggested that was absolutely a lie.
"I assumed there would be... other passengers. Other clients. This is a tour, right?"
"Oh, it's definitely a tour. Just a private one." She leaned against the doorframe, and I tried very hard not to notice how the position emphasized her curves. "What, you think I run group tours in this little thing? Please. This is a premium, one-on-one experience, Tony. You get my complete and undivided attention for six whole months."
She said it in a way that made "complete and undivided attention" sound vaguely threatening.
"So it's just... you and me. Alone. On this tiny ship. For six months."
"Now you're getting it!" She clapped me on the shoulder. "Come on, it'll be great. We'll bond. Tell stories. Become best friends. By the end of this trip, you'll probably name your firstborn after me."
"I'm starting to think I've made a terrible mistake."
"Oh, absolutely you have," Zara said cheerfully. "But you made it, you paid for it, and there's no refund policy. So you might as well enjoy it. Now, stow your stuff and strap in. We've got a departure window in twenty minutes, and if we miss it, we'll have to wait six hours for the next one."
She bounced back toward the cockpit with an energy that no one should have at six in the morning.
I stood there in the tiny cabin, looking at the two bunks that were maybe three feet apart, the closet that would barely fit my single bag, and the door that definitely didn't lock.
Then I looked at my phone one last time. One new notification: another rejection email, this one from a restaurant I didn't even remember applying to.
I tossed my bag onto the bottom bunk and headed to the cockpit.
Zara was already running through pre-flight checks, her fingers dancing across controls with the kind of practiced confidence that suggested she actually did know how to fly this thing. The engines rumbled to life with a sound that was only slightly concerning.
"Strap in, Tony," she said without looking at me. "And welcome aboard the Wandering Star. Next stop: anywhere but here."
I sat down in the co-pilot seat and buckled the harness. Through the viewport, I could see the sun just starting to rise over Neo-Seattle, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink.
Somewhere down there was the Golden Dragon Restaurant, where someone else was probably already burning something in my place. Somewhere down there was my apartment, my old life, my reputation as the worst chef in the sector.
"Ready?" Zara asked, her hand hovering over the throttle.
No, I thought. Not even a little bit.
"Yeah," I said. "Let's go."
She grinned and pushed the throttle forward.
The Wandering Star lifted off with a lurch that made my stomach drop, and just like that, my old life was gone.
For better or worse, I was now at the mercy of a purple-haired girl with a questionable ship and a smile that promised trouble.