Ai-chan always wondered, whenever these people make requests, do they actually pay or did the cook do it for free, such as when that guard dude scraped the leftover flesh of fish and then asked the cook to cook fried rice with it.
It's strange to Ai-chan because medieval cuisines in taverns are usually ready made. You have a choice of bread, meat, soup and ale with the bread usually bought from a bakery. You could ask for different ales, mix and match different food and ask for larger helping, but you couldn't ask for custom-made foods. If the meat of the day was roast venison, you coukdn't ask for beef or request the venison to be deep fried. If the soup of the day was vegetable soup, you couldn't as the chef to make mushroom soup. You just take what's available.