Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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Chapter Seventeen

Winter drove us to the wall. The recession dragged on right through the coldest months, and fabled restaurants such as Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, they finally fell to the economic malaise. It was a shock, to walk down the Rue Royale and see Maxim’s windows boarded up. No one in France, not since the war, had seen such a thing. The government again repealed the 19.6 percent VAT charge, but it was too little, too late; in the end none of us were immune to the new economic climate, and my own financial problems hit with great force in late February.

My biggest problem was a personnel issue that would not go away. The waiter Claude was tidy and pleasant-looking and had come to us, with glowing references, from Lyon. We found him quick to learn, energetic, and so unfailingly courteous and attentive with the customers that Jacques, my maître d’hôtel, wrote in his initial review that the young waiter conducted himself with the “highest professionalism.”

But this you must know about French labor law: during the initial “trial period” we could dismiss Claude without too much difficulty; after six months on the books, however, the waiter was considered a full-time employee, with a long list of ironclad legal rights. Getting rid of him thereafter was extremely difficult and costly.

Our honeymoon with Claude lasted precisely until the day after the young man’s six-month “trial” was over. What previously took Claude thirty minutes—polishing the silver candelabras, for example—suddenly took him an hour and a half. Or longer. Jacques, a stickler for proper deportment, coldly suggested Claude hurry up, but the nasty little fellow simply shrugged and said he was working as fast as he could. When Claude submitted his first time-and-a-half overtime work sheets, Jacques, normally coolly elegant and composed, threw the forms back in the boy’s face and called him a “connard.” But the boy had nerves of steel. He didn’t flinch. He simply picked the papers off the floor and gently left them on Jacques’ desk, knowing full well the law would protect him from us “capitalist exploiters.”

Claude had not only calculated his overtime to the minute, but included a demand for 6.6 days in extra paid vacation to offset the fact we were violating his legal right to work only thirty-five hours a week. The restaurant business is of course all about long hours—that’s just the nature of our work—and, not surprisingly, all my other hardworking staff soon began to complain about Claude, who was not pulling his weight and forcing the more conscientious members of the staff to pick up his slack.

This untenable situation finally came to a head when Mehtab handed me Claude’s payroll records. In the year he had been on staff, Le Chien Méchant had paid Claude seventy thousand euros in salary, plus three times that amount in various social security and pension taxes. Le Chien Méchant still owed him ten weeks’ paid vacation.

Claude was not a waiter, but a scam artist.

I called the Lyon restaurants, spoke to the owners, and they finally confessed Claude had done the same thing to them, and in the end they had written him glowing reviews simply to get him off their backs. So I told Jacques to fire him. And he did.

But then the boy returned—with his union representative.

“It’s very simple, Chef Haji. The young man’s dismissal is not legal.”

Mehtab used all the poetic flourishes of Urdu to curse the union representative’s entire family lineage. Jacques erupted in French.

But I held up my hand and hushed them both.

“Explain yourself, Monsieur LeClerc. This man is a cheat. A crook. How can this not be grounds for legal dismissal?”

Claude looked entirely serene as usual, and wisely didn’t say a word, but let his union representative speak for him. “Your allegations are unfair and unwarranted,” LeClerc said mildly, making a steeple of his hands and thoughtfully pursing his lips. “And perhaps more to the point, completely without proof.”

“That’s not true,” Jacques interjected. “I have documented very carefully how Claude deliberately drags his feet on assignments, how even simple tasks—like setting a table—takes him four times as long as it takes the others.”

“Claude is not the swiftest of workers, we concede, but that is not sufficient grounds to fire him, particularly since your own records commend him as a worker of the ‘highest professionalism.’ Non, non, Monsieur Jacques. This is not right what you have done. He took so much time to execute your orders simply because of this professionalism you previously commended. Tell me, were you ever dissatisfied with the quality of his work, after he completed the assignments? Was the work somehow sloppily done? I could not find any complaints in his file about quality of execution, simply about the amount of time it took him to complete his work—”

“Well, yes, that’s true—”

“So, in a court of law, we could convincingly make the argument that it was precisely because he cared so much about the quality of his work that he took longer than the others—”

“This is outrageous,” Jacques said, his face an alarming beetroot tint. “We all know exactly what Claude is doing and what this is all about. He is holding us ransom. He inflated his work sheets. Monsieur LeClerc, you are colluding with a crook. I cannot believe you are taking his side.”

The burly LeClerc smashed his fist on the table. “Take that back, Monsieur Jacques! You have fired Claude illegally and now you are attacking my personal integrity to cover up your tracks. Well, you won’t get away with it. The laws are very clear in these matters. You must reinstate Claude immédiatement. Or, if you want to release him, you must negotiate a proper severance package as stipulated under the law, not the paltry sum you gave him yesterday.”

I looked over at Mehtab, who was furiously making calculations on a pad.

“And if we refuse?” she asked.

“Then the union will be forced to bring you before the Conseil de prud’hommes on charges of wrongful dismissal, and it will be horrible. This I guarantee you. We will make sure the press is in attendance at the tribunal and that your restaurant is rightly exposed as an ‘exploiter of workers.’ ”

“This is blackmail.”

“Call it what you like. We are simply making sure our union members are not taken advantage of by you propriétaire, and that you pay them what they are entitled to by law.”

I stood up.

“I’ve heard enough. Give them what they want, Mehtab.”

“Hassan! That’s two years’ pay plus vacation. It will cost us a hundred and ninety thousand euros to get rid of the little pig!”

“I don’t care. I’ve had enough. Claude is stirring up bad blood with our decent staff, and if we keep him, it will cost us much more in the long term. Pay him. He’s figured out all the angles.”

Claude was smiling sweetly, and, I think, just about to thank me for the generous settlement, when I spoke deliberately and quietly to Monsieur LeClerc.

“Now get that piece of dirt out of my restaurant.”

Paul Verdun was among the first of the top-rated French chefs to truly understand that the economics of our business had changed entirely, and that the great restaurants of France were, like cancer patients, living on a drip of borrowed time. The French state had, in all its wisdom, finally made it impossible for us to survive a downturn. The thirty-five-hour workweek; the pension liabilities and dozens of “social” taxes; the incomprehensible bureaucratic filings requiring a half-dozen accountants and lawyers to complete. The rules and restrictions and added costs, they all pushed us to the brink that winter.

Paul, of course, had seen all these financial problems looming on the horizon well before the rest of us, and he had fought back well before they had reached their catastrophic tipping point. In particular he studied the French fashion houses that had gone through a similar shakeout fifty years earlier and he learned their lessons well: he noticed, for example, the labor-intensive haute couture, at the top of the fashion pyramid, built world-class reputations on their innovative designs, but few women in the modern age could actually afford or bought these costly creations. Result: the haute couture ateliers all lost money.

It was instead the ready-to-wear lines and perfume licenses further down the pyramid that made money for the fashion houses. The astute fashion impresarios—such as Bernard Arnault over at LVMH—effectively used such product lines to monetize the valuable reputations established by the money-losing haute couture operations at the top of their business empires.

Paul intuitively understood that Le Coq d’ Or was the culinary equivalent of Christian Dior’s haute couture, and he similarly moved down the gastronomic pyramid to make money. He cut licensing deals in everything from linens to olive oil. Paul showed us how it could be done and he was quite simply the entrepreneurial inspiration for a generation of us lesser chefs trying to build our own gastronomic businesses during this difficult age.

So you can understand why I was so shocked when I finally understood Paul’s success was an illusion. He was both bankrupt and dead. It almost suggested—even if no one yet was admitting it—that there was no longer a place on French soil for haute cuisine, as we previously knew it.

And if I clung to any delusional fantasies about my own restaurant, then the severance package we paid Claude efficiently tore the veil from my eyes. The restaurant’s bénéfice the previous year—net profit, that is—was all of 87 euros on a turnover of 4.2 million euros. The year before that Le Chien Méchant actually lost 2,200 euros. Now forced to fork over 190,000 euros to Claude—something that hadn’t been budgeted for—we were destined to have a big loss at the end of the year. Here was the bottom line: Le Chien Méchant’s break-even point had just jumped to a 93 percent occupancy rate; our occupancy rate was running at an 82 percent average for the year.

So I suddenly understood how Paul had started down the slippery slope of quietly borrowing money to bridge year-end shortfalls: a little here, a little there, because next year will be better. And if there was any chance I might not fully understand the implications of where Le Chien Méchant was heading, there was always my sister to remind me, at the restaurant—where she did the accounts—or at the flat, where she lived in the back room.

Indeed, that night, after work, I returned to the apartment behind the Institut Musulman Mosque. I dropped my keys and phone on the hall table and went into the kitchen; my nighttime snack plate—a spoonful each of my sister’s baingan bharta and dum aloo, mashed eggplant and potatoes in yogurt—was waiting for me on the kitchen counter. But Mehtab was not in her bed, as was normal at this late hour, but sitting in her nightgown at the counter before a pot of chai, her eyes red-rimmed and sagging in their fleshy pouches.

She got up, poured me a glass of sparkling water from the fridge, and handed me a napkin. “Very serious,” she said. “I see it now. We will be back to selling bhelpuri by the roadside in no time.”

“Mehtab, please. I am very tired. Don’t get me riled up before I go to bed.”

She sucked pensively on her lower lip for a few minutes, but I could tell she was in one of her pugilistic moods. The next thing she said was, “And what happened to that Isabelle? Why she doesn’t ring anymore?”

“We broke up.”

“Aiiieee. You dumped her. You are like a teenager, Hassan.”

“I am going to bed, Mehtab. Good night.”

Of course, my sister had gotten under my skin—it was her comment we’d soon be selling bhelpuri at the side of the road that did me in—and I tossed and turned that night. Somewhere in the middle of the blackness I flashed to a trip I had made just the month before, to a greenfield site outside Paris. One of my poultry suppliers had opened a new factory, and, very proud of his state-of-the-art plant, he had invited me for a tour. It was the size of an airport hangar, smelled of hot feathers and guano, and inside this cavernous space I was greeted by chickens flying down a chute to a pen, where North Africans in hairnets, white coats, and rubber boots stood waiting. The men, burly but oddly graceful, grabbed the squawking birds by their scaly legs and rhythmically slotted them, one by one and upside down, into clips moving along a conveyor belt overhead, a magic carpet heading straight to a black flap in the wall.

Pulled through the opening in the wall, the chickens—dangling upside down, their hearts pounding, wattles trembling—were plunged into a dark and warm and confined space, their automated journey lit softly by a soothing purple tube light overhead. The birds were instantly calmed, their shrieking wing-flap suddenly reduced to a cluck now and then. The belt headed—smoothly, inexorably—up to another flap. As the belt turned the corner, the silent birds’ dangling heads brushed against an innocent-looking wire. The electric jolt to the head instantly stunned them. Then another wire, again, as they went through the last flap.

So they never saw the rotating blade, like an electric can opener, coming in to slit their throats, or heard their spurting blood hit the steel walls. They never saw the butcher leaning in, with his steel-gloved hand, knife at the ready, slitting further any chicken neck not completely opened up, the slop trays underneath filling up with tapping fluids. But I did. And I saw how the dead birds continued on their automated journey into a block-long metal box, where they were dragged through boiling water to loosen feathers and where rollers peeled off their white coats, so they emerged pink and naked and ready for the rows of men and women sitting at their posts, ready to quarter and package and ship.

This was the vision that visited, in that restless space between sleeping and waking, and it greatly soothed me. For this vision of the chickens heading to slaughter reminded me that there are many points in life when we cannot see what awaits us around the corner, and it is precisely at such times, when our path forward is unclear, that we must bravely keep our nerve, resolutely putting one foot before the other as we march blindly into the dark.

And it was just before I fell asleep that I remembered one of Uncle Mayur’s favorite expressions, often repeated as we walked, hand in hand, through the slums of Mumbai when I was a little boy. “Hassan, it is Allah who gives and takes away,” he liked to tell me, with a cheerful wobble of his head. “Always remember this: His will is only revealed at the right time.”

And so, finally, I arrive at the last pivotal event of those strange days. Following Claude’s dismissal, Jacques and I searched for a front-room replacement. We interviewed I don’t know how many prospects—a Welshwoman with a ring through her nose; an earnest Turk who seemed promising but spoke very poor French; a Frenchmen from Toulouse who looked superb on paper until we found out, during a background check, that he had been arrested three times for torching cars during student riots. In the end, we hired the half brother of Abdul, one of our best waiters, who promised he would take personal responsibility for his younger sibling.

It was toward the end of this wearisome process, late one afternoon, that Jacques stuck his head in my office to announce that there was a chef downstairs asking to see me personally.

I looked up from the stock sheets I was studying.

“What’s this? You know full well we don’t need another chef.”

“She says she used to work with you.”

“Where?”

“Le Saule Pleureur.”

I had not heard that name for some time, but hearing it again on Jacques’s lips was like a bolt of lightning. My heart began to pound.

“Send her up.”

I don’t mind admitting, in that peculiar mental state I was in, I was strangely frightened and half-expecting Madame Mallory to walk through the door.

But of course it was not the old woman.

“Margaret! What a wonderful surprise.”

She stood hesitantly at the door frame of my office, shy and retiring as she had always been, waiting for me to invite her in. I instantly came from behind my desk, we hugged and kissed, and I gently led my old culinary comrade and lover by the hand into the center of the room.

“I am so sorry to barge in on you like this, Hassan. I should have called.”

“Nonsense. We are old friends. Here. Sit. . . .What are you doing in Paris?”

Margaret Bonnier, in a fleur-de-lis dress and cardigan, calfskin Kelly bag at her shoulder, nervously fingered the crucifix around her neck, bringing it up to her lips, just as she had done so many years ago when Madame Mallory used to terrorize us. She was more matronly, of course; her hair was now bottle-blond. But through the thickening of age, she had somehow managed to hold on to something soft, and even through the marks of time I could see my old friend from long ago.

“I am looking for a job.”

“In Paris?”

“I married. The mechanic, Ernest Borchaud. Do you remember him?”

“Yes, I do. My brother Umar was mad about cars. Ernest and Umar, they used to work on engines together. Doing I know not what.”

She smiled. “Ernest owns the Mercedes and Fiat dealerships now. We have two children together. A boy and girl. The girl, Chantal, she is eight. Alain, he is just six.”

“That’s marvelous. Congratulations.”

“Ernest and I divorced. The papers came through two months ago.”

“Oh,” I said. “I am sorry.”

“The children and I, we have moved to Paris. I have a sister here. We all needed the change.”

“Yes, I understand.”

She looked at me, steadylike. “Perhaps, it is something I should have done long ago. Moved to Paris.”

I did not say a thing.

“Of course, the city is so expensive.”

“Yes, it is.”

Margaret looked out the window for a moment, gathering herself, before turning her eyes back on me. “Forgive me for being so bold,” she said, in a voice so battered of its self-confidence, only a whisper came out. “But . . . do you need a sous chef? I will work any position. Hot kitchen. Cold kitchen. Desserts.”

“No, I am afraid not. I am sorry. I cannot afford to take on more staff.”

“Oh,” she said.

Margaret looked around the office in a panic, trying to figure out what she should do next. Her shoulders, I noticed, were tensed and bunched under her dress, but then abruptly dropped in defeat. And then she was standing to say good-bye, clutching her Kelly bag for balance. She smiled, but her lip was trembling a little.

“I am sorry to have troubled you, Hassan. I hope you won’t hold it against me. But you see, you are the only restaurateur I know in Paris, and I didn’t know whom else I could—”

“Sit.”

She looked at me like a frightened girl, her crucifix dangling from between her lips.

I pointed at the seat. “Nah?”

Margaret sank back into her chair.

I picked up the phone and called Chef Piquot.

“Bonjour, André . . . Hassan ici. . . . Tell me, did you fill that cold-kitchen opening? . . . He didn’t work out. . . . Yes. Yes. I know. Terrible, the way they carry on these days. Such prima donnas. . . . But you know, it’s excellent news the fellow didn’t work out because I have the perfect candidate for you. . . . Yes. Yes. Not to worry. I worked with her at Le Saule Pleureur. First-rate sous chef. Hardworking. Very experienced. I tell you, my friend, you will be thanking me. . . . No, I don’t think so. She’s just moved to Paris. . . . I will send her right over.”

When I put the phone down I discovered, much to my horror, Margaret was not joyous that I had found her a position at Montparnasse, but was sobbing into a tissue, unable to talk. I did not know what to do, where to look, as the office filled with her weeping. But then, still shaking with emotion, head still down, Margaret’s left hand reached out across the table, fingers blindly searching the air for contact.

And that’s when I understood she had had a very hard time.

That this was the best she could do—for the moment.

So I reached over with my right hand and we silently met halfway.