“People brûlée everything now! They brûlée their porridge, for god’s sake! So when they come to a restaurant like this one, they expect a little more—you get me? They definitely expect slightly more than what they sling out for breakfast on a Thursday morning. They want to be surprised. They want to be intrigued. They want to wonder how the hell we did that. They are not going to think any of those things if we plunk a vanilla crème brûlée down in front of them. They’re going to wonder why the hell they just got charged twelve quid for that. It won’t matter if those raspberries were foraged by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall himself, they’re still going to leave here brassed off, because they’ll know that that dessert was a massive middle finger to them.
“We are trying to relaunch this place as a destination. If we’re going to serve crème brûlée, then I may as well just be out there deep-frying haggis and chips, because it won’t matter how amazing the starters and main course were—all anyone’ll remember is how crap the dessert was. Please tell me your other ideas were better than this. I mean, they weren’t a chocolate lava cake with salted caramel or something, right?”
There was a very long silence.
“Ohh,” Gloria says, and the recording ends.
Julia cackles as Susan stares at the phone, stunned.
“Oh my God!” Susan finally yells, drawing stares from more than a few of the workmen.
“I know—it’s amazing, isn’t it?” Julia giggles. “I wish there was video—I’d put it up on YouTube.” She begins scrolling back through the recording. “I love that bit about brûlée-ing porridge—so true! Lord, even my friend Kerry can do that, and she once set her flat on fire boiling water.”
Susan takes several deep breaths, wondering if this day can get any worse, and trying not to tempt fate by even considering it. A headache is hammering away at the walls of her skull, as if demanding release. They’re supposed to relaunch in three weeks, and now they’ll have to recruit and settle in a new pastry chef. There’s no way there’ll be time for that. But they can’t afford to push the opening back much further.
Julia’s still giggling, listening again to the recording. “This made my day. Dad’ll get a kick out of it.”
“Julia, don’t you dare play that for him!” That’s just what she needs: for her father to think she’s incompetent and made a terrible decision, promoting Gloria. After that scene with Dan too. The last thing they need is for Bernard to appoint yet another of his friends to manage the restaurant. “And don’t play it for anyone else either.” Not that it would matter if she did, really. The staff must have overheard this if Julia did. And the pastry chef himself will be out there, telling the story, spinning it so he sounds like the one in the right. This will be restaurant-circle gossip in no time. Dan will be vindicated. Everyone will be talking about how Elliot’s is completely falling apart. On her watch.
“Lighten up,” Julia huffs. “A little viral marketing would do this place some good. But I won’t post it. Can’t do much with just a voice recording anyway. I should have live-tweeted. Oh”—she tucks the phone into her pocket—“the contractor needs to see you. He says there’s dry rot in one of the walls, but since you control the budget, I told him he’d have to speak to you about getting it sorted. And we can’t continue with any cosmetic work until that’s fixed, so make sure you speak with him today, all right?”
Bad things always come in clumps. Choosing to tackle one crisis at a time, Susan closes her eyes for a second, then says, “I’ll talk to him in a minute.” She holds out her hand. “May I borrow your phone?”
“Just for a few minutes,” Julia says, handing it over. “I’m expecting a call.”
“Fine.” Susan takes it and heads down to the kitchen.
Salsa music is blasting downstairs, and Gloria and Rey are laughing, swaying back and forth, chopping vegetables in time with the beat.
“You’ve got the hips, honey, you got it!” Rey declares, hip-bumping Gloria. It’s his first day in the new post, and his excitement is palpable, crackling in the air like static electricity. There’s been a noticeable difference in the energy in the kitchen since Gloria took over: the languid, sluggish feeling of Dan’s days has been replaced by something brighter, more vigorous. The employees, from fellow chefs to waitstaff, to dishwashers, now chatter among themselves and offer up ideas, which Gloria genuinely listens to, nodding, encouraging, saying, “That’s good—really good. Maybe if we also do this …?” And so new dishes and a new way of working are developing. The employees smile now, to Susan’s relief.
“Make sure everyone likes coming to work every day,” Elliot used to say. “Depressed people make depressing food.”
“I don’t know: I think it depends on the food,” Susan once countered. “When I’m sad, I make good comfort food.”
“You might think it’s good, but it’s not as good as it could be,” Elliot insisted. “Good comfort food needs love in it. Think—when you’re sad, would you rather have boeuf bourguignon you’ve made or one that I made?”
“You, definitely,” she responded immediately. “Though I think I’d prefer a spaghetti bolognese.”
“Good girl.” He kissed her forehead.
The new energy in the kitchen had given Susan hope. But now this had to happen.
“Gloria, I need to speak to you!” Susan shouts over the music and general cooking din.
Gloria looks up. “Oh, hey, how were the kids?”
“In the office. Now.” Susan moves in that direction and waits for Gloria to join her. A moment later she does, wiping her hands on a towel. Susan closes the door behind her, crosses her arms, and demands, “What happened with the pastry chef this morning?”
“We had a difference of opinion,” Gloria replies, sitting in the desk chair.
“I’ll say.” Susan brandishes Julia’s phone and plays a few seconds of the recording. “You think browbeating employees is the best way to get good work out of them?”
“Oh, come on,” Gloria scoffs. “He wasn’t even trying!”
“Maybe he would have if you’d had anything encouraging to say. Instead, you just yelled at and humiliated him. Of course he walked out!”
“This is a good thing,” Gloria insists. “He was lazy, like the others.”
Susan sighs deeply and pinches the bridge of her nose between two fingers, willing that headache to go away. Instead, it just redoubles its efforts.
“Gloria, listen—I put you in charge here because I thought you were ready for it. I thought you would be a better leader than Dan was, and to your credit, you have been.”
“High praise indeed.” Gloria smirks.
“Until now,” Susan continues in a tight voice. “This is not good leadership. Bullying someone is not acceptable. I won’t tolerate it here, understood? Staff should be treated with respect. We need them. We need them to do good work and to want to come and do good work here. What we don’t need are enemies. I think we’re pretty well set there already, don’t you?”