Chapter 20 #2
Girard has a good eye and confidence enough to perform the task, but I hail a cab anyway.
Girard is young to be promoted to sous, but so, too, had I been in Dublin.
He is talented and ambitious, but despite this—or maybe because of it—Joelle is wary to hand over the reins to him in any meaningful way.
As GM I’ll have to find a way to foster this relationship or save everyone’s time and end it for them.
Joelle is as talented as it gets, but she needs the best possible team if she’s going to have a successful run as head chef.
The problem with any hierarchy is that when someone higher up the ladder moves on, too often everyone underneath gets shoved up a rung, whether they’re ready or not, because it’s always easiest—and cheapest—to find new entry-level people.
But it remains that while someone can be a perfectly competent station lead, they may not be at the point in their professional development where they’re prepared for the responsibility of sous-chef.
When that’s the case, it’s easy enough—in theory—to hire an experienced sous from outside an establishment.
But when people feel the promotion they earned has been outsourced, it can lead to friction in even the best-run kitchens, so efforts are made to promote from within.
Sometimes the result is that a chef thrown into the deep end proves their worth spectacularly.
Other times, they drown and the kitchen suffers.
The taxi drops me off about twelve minutes after the vendor was scheduled to arrive, which is ideal.
Girard has had enough time to show that he’s capable, but I’m there early enough to intervene if anything is amiss.
And nothing can be amiss if Joelle is going to earn her star.
Flavors have to be complex and original.
Ingredients must be unique and inspired.
There is no room for a single entry on the menu to be anything less than stellar.
Girard is deep in an animated conversation with the seafood vendor when I enter the kitchens, shooting me a glance as though I am intruding on some kind of private meeting before he forces his expression back into a neutral one.
“How’s it going in here?” I pretend I didn’t notice the look he’d cast my way.
“Perfectly well. Everything appears in order.” His tone implies that he has everything under control with subtle undertones of “I’d prefer you didn’t interfere.” But interfering isn’t just my prerogative, it’s my duty.
I take a cursory look over the order and find that everything is, as Girard promised, in order. As I hoped and expected it would be, because if the second-in-command can’t handle a simple delivery, he has no business being sous. I hope Joelle will gain some trust in him for this.
“Joelle won’t be too long, but she emailed me instructions for the specials, which I’ll get to you. Can you handle starting service?”
He nods, the corners of his lips tugging slightly upward.
He is going to be at the helm, at least temporarily, and I expect he’s excited for the opportunity.
I’d never led a service the entire time I’d worked back of house, but being a head chef was never my goal.
I know it is Girard’s dream, and it must feel to him as if he’s making an important milestone. And he is, if he can pull it off.
“You’ve got this.” I don’t flash him a bright smile as I might have done in an American kitchen, but rather just a ghost of a grin that I hope he finds encouraging.
I retreat to my office where I run the financial side of the restaurant.
I’d taken a number of restaurant accounting classes in culinary school for this very reason.
Tracking vendor payments, general expenses, and payroll is drudgery, but it’s a necessary part of the trade.
While I don’t want to make a career out of spreadsheets and databases, the ledgers tell the story of a business, and there is a lot to learn from them.
I fire up my laptop, which is connected to a large monitor that makes the hours of staring at columns of numbers more bearable on my eyes. I launch Restaurant365 and lose myself in the ledgers for a bit before I hear a smart rapping at my office door.
“Entrez.” As our staff comes from all over the globe, English is the de facto language in the kitchen, but I do try to observe the niceties in French when it seems practical.
Not for the first time am I glad that I took French in high school despite my mother and the counselor trying to tell me Spanish would be more useful.
Joelle comes in, her delicate face looking swollen and her deep brown eyes looking frazzled.
Her usually perfectly slicked-back brown hair is unkempt from her time in the dentist’s chair.
The last time I saw her, when we were unceremoniously fired, she looked similarly discomposed, which was not the way she preferred to present herself to the world.
She was one of the few people I’d considered a friend over the course of my career, and I spent more than a little time worrying that she blamed me for our dismissal.
I want to hug her and apologize for something that hasn’t even happened yet, but before I even have the chance to disabuse myself of that notion, she leans over my desk.
“Did you approve the order for bluefin tuna?” The dental work and her strident tone have made it hard to parse her words.
I blink, uncomprehending. “No, I asked Girard to handle the seafood order. I wanted to see if he was up to the task.”
She throws her hands up in frustration. “Either the seafood vendor pulled a fast one or Girard changed the order. There is a massive cut of bluefin out on Girard’s prep station. At least a hundred pounds, Sabrina.”
I curse under my breath and check my email for the final delivery invoice from the seafood guy.
The PDF is waiting there, showing an added line item for the tuna and a very bloated total due.
Girard has committed a screwup of the first order.
We’re a high-end place, but this is astronomical, even for us.
Bluefin is rare, and usually a restaurant has to commit to buying the whole fish—all five hundred pounds or more of it.
This isn’t quite that disastrous, but we can only flip so many tables in a service.
We have three days at the very most to serve one hundred pounds of the most expensive seafood on earth before the quality starts to turn.
Even if every table ordered bluefin—and was willing to pay market price—we’d still lose money.
I mumble another curse and lead Joelle out to the kitchen where Girard has his head down focusing on a skillet.
“So you were just going to spring a new dish on us without warning?” I don’t bother with a preamble. “And spend close to ten thousand euro of restaurant funds without asking?”
He looks up from the skillet, his eyes flashing. “Neither of you will listen when I suggest something.”
“Petit éspece de—” Joelle growls, then winces from the effort. I put a hand on her shoulder to keep her from creating a workplace-hostility incident that could get us in trouble.
“Setting the menu is Joelle’s prerogative, Girard. If you want to audition a dish, you do it the right way.”
He looks at me with all the disdain of a surly teen.
“I saw an opportunity and I took it. The fishmonger offered me the chance to split a fish with another restaurant, and I couldn’t resist. Bluefin is rare to come across in a smaller quantity.
” The arrogance rolls off him like a cheap cologne.
“Taste this and you won’t be upset anymore. ”
He offers us each a portion, which Joelle refuses due to her dental work, but she smells and assesses the plating.
She meets my eyes, and I can tell she’s not particularly impressed.
Not for what we’ll have to charge per plate.
The saucier has done some good work with a pesto to accompany it, and it looks pleasing enough.
I sample it and find it—fine? While Girard’s fate rests largely in Joelle’s hands and is yet to be settled, I decide we’ll be firing the seafood vendor.
This is decent tuna but not worth a third of what he charged us.
“This was an opportunity you clearly weren’t ready for, Girard.
There is a lot wrong here, and that’s why we don’t add new dishes on the fly like this.
We have to calculate a price point for every new entrée.
And that price point needs to make sense.
You bought bluefin at three times the market rate when he should have been offering you a deal to split with another house.
We’re going to have to charge three hundred euro a plate just to break even. ”
His lip curls in a sneer. “You don’t think people will pay it?”
I stare at him, unflinching, and he has the good graces to appear intimidated.
Precisely the effect I’m after. “Not more than once. Sure, it’s well prepared, well seasoned, but it’s not anything gobsmacking.
Specials in a restaurant vying for a third star have to be better than flawless, especially for the cost. They have to be art. This is not art; it’s barely adequate.”
This is the worst insult I can hurl at him, and I’m fully aware of it as the words escape my lips. He tosses a dish towel down on the counter with a flourish. “What does an American know about food? What would you have me do? Drown it in ketchup?”
Joelle emits a low, guttural growl and I restrain her before I find myself bailing my head chef out of jail for assault less than an hour before service. I take a step closer to Girard.
“Leave this kitchen. Now. You’ll be paid in lieu of notice and get whatever severance you’re entitled to by law if you go quietly.
If you don’t, I’ll report you for a faute grosse and you won’t get a cent.
And we’ll win. I’ll go after damages too, given what you committed us to with this damned fish.
And if I hear of you bad-mouthing Joelle or this restaurant, I’ll be sure you never work in the industry again.
In Paris or anywhere else. Not even Chez McDo will have you. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
He looks at me, furious, but knows I am well connected enough that I speak the truth.
He removes his apron and throws it on the floor, glaring in my direction and Joelle’s.
“You’ll never get a third star with this one at the helm, you know.
éugenie’s genius was a fluke, and she was daft to leave Joelle in charge just because she’s a woman.
Her legacy will be destroyed within six months.
” He storms out with a rude gesture and without a backward glance.
Joelle looks at me in wordless horror. Whether she’s struck silent by the sudden departure of her sous or in too much pain from her dental work, I can’t say.
She isn’t at her best, and it would have been an appropriate day for her to lean on her second-in-command.
That’s his job, after all, to keep things running when the head needs support.
She will have to lead the kitchen for the services, despite feeling miserable, and I’ll have to fill in where I can. It’s too late to shift everyone up a rank, and I’m not sure we want to pull some people upward if they aren’t ready. Clearly we made that mistake with Girard.
“We can do this, Joelle.” I pat her on the back, and she’s as tense as cellophane stretched too tight over a bowl.
I pick up Girard’s apron off the floor, don it over my clothes, and begin cleaning up his mess, resisting the urge to grouse.
After a few attempts at reliving my own life, I’m finding that cleaning up messes left behind by others and sometimes—okay, especially—myself is tedious work.