The smell wafted from the kitchen. Don Peret was the finest restaurant in town, and at the moment had the greatest chef on the west coast, Martin Coy. His skills were well known, and his creativity with food was his gift to the patrons.

The orders came flying in and his hands were a blur as the knife was slicing, chopping, and dicing. The patrons watched as he stood in the window and put the shrimps dishes together, making them look like fine pieces of art. The shrimp were laid perfectly across the plate as if a protractor had been used to create perfect angles and measured the same distance apart. The sauce of a secret aioli sauce was drizzled across in a beautiful orange shade with just a splash in the middle of all of this in a picture of a sea scene.

This was the normal work of the man everyone admired and raved about to their friends. The critics always raved about him, he was like a god in their eyes. He was at the top of his game and felt as though no one could dethrone him, but that was until that fateful day when the young apprentice started to show his talents; and outshine the master with his own restaurant and amazing cuisine, but he didn’t have all of his secrets.

Martin Coy was working the first night after when the news came in that someone had recently gotten sick after eating at his restaurant. Apparently they had acquired a stomach virus after eating in his restaurant, and the health inspector was on his way to shut his place down while they did their inspection. Chef Coy could not believe that they had gotten sick after eating his food, he was so careful preparing his food, but he was ready to comply so that the issue could be rectified as soon as possible. In the meantime his understudy Mathews McGillian’s restaurant across the street was starting to have a line outisde of his restaurant. Jealousy was starting to set in as the investigator entered through the back door.

Chef McGillian was standing behind the prep station looking at his old mentors restaurant, and noticed the close sign go out. He couldn’t help but have mixed feelings about the situation in front of him. He had a lot of work and focused on what he was doing as the patrons began to file into the restaurant, he knew tonight was going to be big night.

The inspector began looking through all of Don Peret’s stock of food, and performing tests on each batch of prepared foods and meats. As he went through the freezer he opened up one of the containers and noticed a smell that didn’t seem right. It smelled like some kind of chemical, so he called Marting over to tell him what he found.

“This container of shrimp has a strange smell chef. I’m going to need to take this with me and have it analyzed.” the inspector told him. Martin wanted to take a smell of the container and pulled back quickly, “Something is definitely wrong with this shrimp. It smells as if it went bad, but it has been here less than twenty-four hours.”. The inspector asked if anyone had been in here and handled anything back here. Martin thought about this for a few seconds, but the only people had been the delivery men, and this was going to be prepped shortly before the opening of the restaurant.

The inspector shrugged and instructed his people to take the container with them and informed the Martin that he would have to remain closed until further notice. Matin was devestated, but agreed for the safety of his patrons that was how it was going to have to be that way.

Across the street Mathew smiled when he saw the sign that read ‘Closed for the foreseen future by health inspector’. Then the phone rang.

“Did it work?”, “Yes it did, thank you” Mathew said. His brother had done an amazing job while he was working for Martin, and now he had taken out his mentor which meant he was the only five star restaurant in town, he had the plan in place to destroy the rest of his competition because his brother ran the major restaurant supplier in town