Hi, Maybe the House of Jhereg have conventions at hotels and Valabar's does the catering. Or maybe like Khaavren's cook, www.opusfest.com 's cook could have been trained at Valabar's. >From a dinner from the Cook at Whitecrest Manor: "She therefore spared no effort, requiring the maid to run down to the market for the freshest squabs, the choicest cuts of kethna, a supply of goose fat, cresent-onions, striped mushrooms, marrows, basil, peppers, and saltpea pods; all of this while she, the cook, rummaged in the cellar for the best wines, the purest flour, the freshest garlic, and the most active yeasts. She had been trained, the reader ought to understand, at the same Valabar's Restaurant that still exists in Adrilankha today, and from which those most concerned with victualing still hire, or attempt to hire, the cooking staff; it being said that a man who has cleaned tables at Valabar's will absorb more of the art of cooking than the head chef for any other inn or tavern in the Empire; an exaggeration which, if not entirely true today, was much closer to the truth during the Interregnum." ... "When the sweet(a puff pastry filled with thin slices of cheese and covered with strawberries)" The Paths of the Dead, paperback, Chapter the Fourteenth, page 125, 126. Of course, it could turn out that your cook was not trained at Valabar's and just cleaned tables there. Bye. Linda G.