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Imagine if your celebrity idol appeared at your door, grabbed you, told you that you were their inspiration, and kissed you on the lips until you passed out.
Imagine if you weren’t actually imagine that.
Imagine that that was an actual scenario that happened in real life.
Yeah, that’s Yuuri’s life right now. Slowly blacking out as one of the best chefs in the world, Victor Nikiforov, basically sucked the life out of him through his mouth.
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Let’s start at the beginning. Yuuri is a YouTuber. He’s been on YouTube for years, steadily growing a loyal following of subscribers with his vlogs, challenges, and recipe videos. He’s like Rosanna Pansino, but with cute and nerdy foods rather than desserts.
He’s not the biggest YouTuber, he’s got a little over a million subscribers, and a few hundred thousand people looking through his Instagram and Snapchat accounts. But he loves what he does. His fans send him honest feedback, give him ideas, and he’s met some of his best friends through the YouTube community. Plus he gets paid to bake and cook, who wouldn’t love that?
Phichit’s a daily vlogger. He travels the world and documents the sites, foods, and general fashion of the places he gets to go through his following. Phichit is probably the most famous YouTuber he knows, with ten million subscribers, but it’s well deserved. Phichit responds to almost every comment he gets, so open and honest, with a dazzling personality to match. Yuuri met him when Phichit was coming through Japan and they’d bonded over Yuuri’s favorite dish, katsudon.
Guang-Hong is young, new to YouTube, but his following started in China and has been spreading throughout the rest of the world as he teaches everyone how to make traditional and more modern Chinese dishes. He really had no plans to do it for a living, choosing to continue with his schooling, but he likes the people he meets and introducing new people to unique and delicious dishes. Yuuri met him through Phichit, since Phichit had kind of stalked Guang-Hong’s social media to China. They’re lucky Guang-Hong is so nice and easy going.
And then there’s Leo. Leo is Guang-Hong’s boyfriend from America, that Yuuri met by accidentally throwing shade over American food. And by throwing shade he might have insinuated that American food was under seasoned and bland. Leo had retaliated by correcting him, England was the under seasoned country, and he should come to Leo’s family restaurant to get some real food. There ended up being a YouTube reunion, with Yuuri, Phichit, Guang-Hong, and Leo all bonding in the kitchen and sharing recipes with one another.
There’s only so far you can go on YouTube, and Yuuri didn’t regret the decisions he’s made and the people he’s met. But, he wanted to become a chef one day, to join the ranks of competitive cooking and build up his skill repertoire. He wanted to be good enough to go on something like Iron Chef in America.
He wanted to be good enough to cook with the likes of Victor Nikiforov.
Victor Nikiforov was…amazing. He had eight individual Michelin stars individually, with a total of seventeen is you included all the restaurants that operated under his name. He had three cooking shows, one is Russia, one is America, and another in Japan. He had published cookbooks that appealed to people of any economic status, from budget to luxury prices. His college student cookbook had gotten Yuuri through school.
Victor was charming, beautiful, and an amazing cook. And Yuuri wanted to be just like him. Or just be with him. He honestly wasn’t picky.
So imagine his surprise when Victor appeared on his doorstep.
As Yuuri was blacking out, he tried to think as to what would bring his idol to his home.
And then he remembered the last video he had uploaded.
“Welcome back to my channel,” he had said happily to the camera, “it’s been awhile since I’ve done a Fix My Recipe video, where you send me recipes that you can’t quite work out and I change them to get the results you want! Now this recipe is actually from Victor Nikiforov’s cookbook How to Learn to Cook in Ten Days. A few of you asked me to recreate the katsudon dish, as it is my favorite dish, so I’m going to go over it and make it how I prefer!”
Yuuri walks over to his kitchen island and waves his hand over the various cups and bowls that have ingredients to make katsudon.
“Now, Victor’s recipe requires: rice, eggs, chicken stock, sugar, soy sauce, sake, potato starch, vegetable oil, onion, tonkatsu, and scallion. A lot of you have told me that when you made it, it didn’t taste quite right to you.”
Yuuri holds up a measuring cup filled with a light brown liquid.
“A traditional katsudon will use dashi instead of chicken stock. This is a soup and cooking stock used commonly in Japanese cuisine. It’s a good base for any kind of noodle broth or miso soup. And also for dishes like katsudon and gyudon.”
He bends down and collects a few more dishes, bringing up a few extra ingredients.
“Ingredients I would keep from Victor’s recipe are the: eggs, sugar, soy sauce, vegetable oil, onion, and tonkatsu. However, instead of potato starch, I will use a combination of flour, egg, water, and panko. I will use Mirin in place of the sake. And instead of scallions, I would use the Japanese wild parsley.”
Yuuri portions out the things he needs, and then separates them into stages: tonkatsu prep, sauce, rice, and other.
“It’s not that Victor’s recipe is bad,” Yuuri explains, “it’s just lacking some of the more traditional flavors of the dish. But when you have the recipe repertoire he does, some things can get lost in translation or forgotten over time.”
Yuuri blushes, starting to chop up the onion and parsley that he’ll be using.
“He’s still an amazing chef and I probably have no place to criticize him. He’s just so talented, and full of passion, and I want to be like that one day, you know? That’s my dream. I think he’d be an amazing teacher. We don’t see enough of that on his shows. It’s less instruction and more entertainment. But I think, if he really tried, he could be an incredible teacher for the next generation of chefs.”
And then he’d made the recipe, with minimum gushing over Victor, and thanked his subscribers for watching. A few hours of editing and an upload later, and the next day he was opening his door to find Victor.
“Yuuri Katsuki,” Victor breathes, “I want to teach you.”
“Eh?” a sleepy Yuuri had mumbled, thinking it was a dream. Victor had beamed at him, cradled Yuuri’s face, and pressed his lips to his.
“EHHH?” Yuuri yelped as Victor pulled away.
“You’ll be a wonderful student,” is all Victor said before Yuuri fainted.
Just what was going on?!