Ogilvie protested, “I reckon I thought of everythin’.”
“I believe you did, too. In fact I can’t think of anything you’ve left out. What I’m concerned about is that when you’re not here someone else may not be as thorough or as quick.”
Whatever else might be said of the chief house officer, Peter reasoned, he knew his business when he chose to do it. But it was infuriating that their relationship made it necessary to plead about something as obvious as this.
“You don’t hafta worry,” Ogilvie said. But Peter’s instinct told him that for some reason the fat man was worried himself as he heaved his great body upward and lumbered out.
After a moment or two Peter followed, stopping only to give instructions about notifying the hotel’s insurers of the robbery, along with the inventory of stolen items which Ogilvie had supplied.
Peter walked the short distance to Christine’s office. He was disappointed to discover that she was not there. He would come back, he decided, immediately after lunch.
He descended to the lobby and strolled to the main dining room. As he entered he observed that today’s luncheon business was brisk, reflecting the hotel’s present high occupancy.
Peter nodded agreeably to Max, the head waiter, who hurried forward.
“Good day, Mr. McDermott. A table by yourself?”
“No, I’ll join the penal colony.” Peter seldom exercised his privilege, as assistant general manager, of occupying a table of his own in the dining room. Most days he preferred to join other executive staff members at the large circular table reserved for their use near the kitchen door.
The St. Gregory’s comptroller, Royall Edwards, and Sam Jakubiec, the stocky, balding credit manager, were already at lunch as Peter joined them. Doc Vickery, the chief engineer, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, was studying a menu. Slipping into the chair which Max held out, Peter inquired, “What looks good?”
“Try the watercress soup,” Jakubiec advised between sips of his own. “It’s not like any mother made; it’s a damn sight better.”
Royall Edwards added in his precise accountant’s voice, “The special today is fried chicken. We have that coming.”
As the head waiter left, a young table waiter appeared swiftly beside them. Despite standing instructions to the contrary, the executives’ self-styled penal colony invariably received the best service in the dining room. It was hard—as Peter and others had discovered in the past—to persuade employees that the hotel’s paying customers were more important than the executives who ran the hotel.
The chief engineer closed his menu, peering over his thick-rimmed spectacles which had slipped, as usual, to the tip of his nose. “The same’ll do for me, sonny.”
“I’ll make it unanimous.” Peter handed back the menu which he had not opened.
The waiter hesitated. “I’m not sure about the fried chicken, sir. You might prefer something else.”
“Well,” Jakubiec said, “now’s a fine time to tell us that.”
“I can change your order easily, Mr. Jakubiec. Yours too, Mr. Edwards.”
Peter asked, “What’s wrong with the fried chicken?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have said.” The waiter shifted uncomfortably. “Fact is, we’ve been getting complaints. People don’t seem to like it.” Momentarily he turned his head, eyes ranging the busy dining room.
“In that case,” Peter told him, “I’m curious to know why. So leave my order the way it is.” A shade reluctantly, the others nodded agreement.
When the waiter had gone, Jakubiec asked, “What’s this rumor I hear—that our dentists’ convention may walk out?”
“Your hearing’s good, Sam. This afternoon I’ll know whether it remains a rumor.” Peter began his soup, which had appeared like magic, then described the lobby fracas of an hour earlier. The faces of the others grew serious as they listened.
Royall Edwards remarked, “It has been my observation on disasters that they seldom occur singly. Judging by our financial results lately—which you gentlemen are aware of—this could merely be one more.”
“If it turns out that way,” the chief engineer observed, “nae doubt the first thing ye’ll do is lop some muir from engineering’s budget.”
“Either that,” the comptroller rejoined, “or eliminate it entirely.”
The chief grunted, unamused.
“Maybe we’ll all be eliminated,” Sam Jakubiec said. “If the O’Keefe crowd take over.” He looked inquiringly at Peter, but Royall Edwards gave a cautioning nod as their waiter returned. The group remained silent as the young man deftly served the comptroller and credit manager while, around them, the hum of the dining room, a subdued clatter of plates and the passage of waiters through the kitchen door, continued.
When the waiter had gone, Jakubiec asked pointedly, “Well, what is the news?”
Peter shook his head. “Don’t know a thing, Sam. Except that was darn good soup.”
“If you remember,” Royall Edwards said, “we recommended it, and I will now offer you some more well-founded advice—quit while you’re ahead.” He had been sampling the fried chicken served to himself and Jakubiec a moment earlier. Now he put down his knife and fork. “Another time I suggest we listen more respectfully to our waiter.”
Peter asked, “Is it really that bad?”
“I suppose not,” the comptroller said. “If you happen to be partial to rancid food.”
Dubiously, Jakubiec sampled his own serving as the others watched. At length he informed them: “Put it this way. If I were paying for this meal—I wouldn’t.”
Half-rising in his chair, Peter caught sight of the head waiter across the dining room and beckoned him over. “Max, is Chef Hèbrand on duty?”
“No, Mr. McDermott, I understand he’s ill. Sous-chef Lemieux is in charge.” The head waiter said anxiously, “If it’s about the fried chicken, I assure you everything is taken care of. We’ve stopped serving that dish and where there have been complaints the entire meal has been replaced.” His glance went to the table. “We’ll do the same thing here at once.”
“At the moment,” Peter said, “I’m more concerned about finding out what happened. Would you ask Chef Lemieux if he’d care to join us?”
With the kitchen door so close, Peter thought, it was a temptation to stride through and inquire directly what had gone so amiss with the luncheon special. But to do so would be unwise.
In dealing with their senior chefs, hotel executives followed a protocol as proscribed and traditional as that of any royal household. Within the kitchen the chef de cuisine—or, in the chef’s absence, the sous-chef—was undisputed king. For a hotel manager to enter the kitchen without invitation was unthinkable.
Chefs might be fired, and sometimes were. But unless and until that happened, their kingdoms were inviolate.
To invite a chef outside the kitchen—in this case to a table in the dining room—was in order. In fact, it was close to a command since, in Warren Trent’s absence, Peter McDermott was the hotel’s senior officer. It would also have been permissible for Peter to stand in the kitchen doorway and wait to be asked in. But in the circumstance—with an obvious crisis in the kitchen—Peter knew that the first course was the more correct.
“If you ask me,” Sam Jakubiec observed as they waited, “it’s long past bedtime for old Chef Hèbrand.”
Royall Edwards asked, “If he did retire, would anyone notice the difference?” It was a reference, as they all knew, to the chef de cuisine’s frequent absences from duty, another of which had apparently occurred today.
“The end comes soon enough for all of us,” the chief engineer growled. “It’s natural nae one wants to hurry it himsel’.” It was no great secret that the comptroller’s cool astringency grated at times on the normally good-natured chief.
“I haven’t met our new sous-chef,” Jakubiec said. “I guess he’s been keeping his nose in the kitchen.”
Royall Edwards’ eyes went down to his b
arely touched plate. “If he has, it must be a remarkably insensitive organ.”
As the comptroller spoke, the kitchen door swung open once more. A busboy, about to pass through, stood back deferentially as Max the head waiter emerged. He preceded, by several measured paces, a tall slim figure in starched whites, with high chef’s hat and, beneath it, a facial expression of abject misery.
“Gentlemen,” Peter announced to the executives’ table, “in case you haven’t met, this is Chef André Lemieux.”
“Messieurs!” The young Frenchman halted, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “To ’ave this happen … I am desolate.” His voice was choked.
Peter McDermott had encountered the new sous-chef several times since the latter’s arrival at the St. Gregory six weeks earlier. At each meeting Peter found himself liking the newcomer more.
André Lemieux’s appointment had followed the abrupt departure of his predecessor. The former sous-chef, after months of frustrations and inward seething, had erupted in an angry outburst against his superior, the aging M. Hebrand. In the ordinary way nothing might have happened after the scene, since emotional outbursts among chefs and cooks occurred—as in any large kitchen—with predictable frequency. What marked the occasion as different was the late sous-chef’s action in hurling a tureen of soup at the chef de cuisine. Fortunately the soup was Vichyssoise, or consequences might have been even more serious. In a memorable scene the chef de cuisine, shrouded in liquid white and dripping messily, escorted his late assistant to the street staff door and there—with surprising energy for an old man—had thrown him through it. A week later Andre Lemieux was hired.
His qualifications were excellent. He had trained in Paris, worked in London—at Prunier’s and the Savoy—then briefly at New York’s Le Pavilion before attaining the more senior post in New Orleans. But already in his short time at the St. Gregory, Peter suspected, the young sous-chef had encountered the same frustration which demented his predecessor. This was the adamant refusal of M. Hebrand to allow procedural changes in the kitchen, despite the chef de cuisine’s own frequent absences from duty, leaving his sous-chef in charge. In many ways, Peter thought sympathetically, the situation paralleled his own relationship with Warren Trent.
Peter indicated a vacant seat at the executives’ table. “Won’t you join us?”
“Thank you, monsieur.” The young Frenchman seated himself gravely as the head waiter held out a chair.
His arrival was followed by the table waiter who, without bothering with instructions, had amended all four luncheon orders to Veal Scallopini. He removed the two offending portions of chicken, which a hovering busboy banished hastily to the kitchen. All four executives received the substitute meal, the sous-chef ordering merely a black coffee.
“That’s more like it,” Sam Jakubiec said approvingly.
“Have you discovered,” Peter asked, “what caused the trouble?”
The sous-chef glanced unhappily toward the kitchen. “The troubles they have many causes. In this, the fault was frying fat badly tasting. But it is I who must blame myself—that the fat was not changed, as I believed. And I, Andre Lemieux, I allowed such food to leave the kitchen.” He shook his head unbelievingly.
“It’s hard for one person to be everywhere,” the chief engineer said. “All of us who ha’ departments know that.”
Royall Edwards voiced the thought which had occurred first to Peter. “Unfortunately we’ll never know how many didn’t complain about what they had, but won’t come back again.”
André Lemieux nodded glumly. He put down his coffee cup. “Messieurs, you will excuse me. Monsieur McDermott, when you ’ave finished, perhaps we could talk together, yes?”
Fifteen minutes later Peter entered the kitchen through the dining-room door. André Lemieux hurried forward to meet him.
“It is good of you to come, monsieur.”
Peter shook his head. “I enjoy kitchens.” Looking around, he observed that the activity of lunchtime was tapering off. A few meals were still going out, past the two middle-aged women checkers seated primly, like suspicious schoolmistresses, at elevated billing registers. But more dishes were coming in from the dining room as busboys and waiters cleared tables while the assemblage of guests thinned out. At the big dishwashing station at the rear of the kitchen, where chrome countertops and waste containers resembled a cafeteria in reverse, six rubber-aproned kitchen helpers worked conceitedly, barely keeping pace with the flow of dishes arriving from the hotel’s several restaurants and the convention floor above. As usual, Peter noticed, an extra helper was intercepting unused butter, scraping it into a large chrome container. Later, as happened in most commercial kitchens—though few admitted to it—the retrieved butter would be used for cooking.
“I wished to speak with you alone, monsieur. With others present, you understand, there are things that are hard to say.”
Peter said thoughtfully, “There’s one point I’m not clear about. Did I understand that you gave instructions for the deep fryer fat to be changed, but that it was not?”
“That is true.”
“Just what happened?”
The young chef’s face was troubled. “This morning I gave the order. My nose it informed me the fat is not good. But M. Hebrand—without telling—he countermanded. Then M. Hélbrand he has gone ’ome and I am left, without knowing, ’olding the bad fat.”
Involuntarily Peter smiled. “What was the reason for changing the order?”
“Fat is high cost—very ’igh; that I agree with M. Hébrand. Lately we have changed it many times. Too many.”
“Have you tried to find the reason for that?”
André Lemieux raised his hands in a despairing gesture. “I have proposed, each day, a chemical test—for free fatty acid. It could be done in a laboratory, even here. Then, intelligently, we would look for the cause the fat has failed. M. Hébrand does not agree—with that or other things.”
“You believe there’s a good deal wrong here?”
“Many things.” It was a short, almost sullen answer, and for a moment it appeared as if the discussion would end. Then abruptly, as if a dam had burst, words tumbled out. “Monsieur McDermott, I tell you there is much wrong. This is not a kitchen to work with pride. It is a how-you-say …’odge-podge—poor food, some old ways that are bad, some new ways that are bad, and all around much waste. I am a good chef; others would tell you. But it must be that a good chef is happy at what he does or he is no longer good. Yes, monsieur, I would make changes, many changes, better for the hotel, for M. Hébrand, for others. But I am told—as if an infant—to change nothing.”
“It’s possible,” Peter said, “there may be large changes around here generally. Quite soon.”
André Lemieux drew himself up haughtily. “If you refer to Monsieur O’Keefe, whatever changes he may make, I shall not be ‘ere to see. I have no intent to be an instant cook for a chain ’otel.”
Peter asked curiously, “If the St. Gregory stayed independent, what kind of changes would you have in mind?”
They had strolled almost the length of the kitchen—an elongated rectangle extending the entire width of the hotel. At each side of the rectangle, like outlets from a control center, doorways gave access to the several hotel restaurants, service elevators and food preparation rooms on the same floor and below. Skirting a double line of soup cauldrons, bubbling like monstrous crucibles, they approached the glass-paneled office where, in theory, the two principal chefs-the chef de cuisine and the sous-chef—divided their responsibilities. Nearby, Peter observed, was the big quadruple-unit deep fryer, cause of today’s dissatisfaction. A kitchen helper was draining the entire assembly of fat; considering the quantity, it was easy to see why too frequent replacement would be costly. They stopped as Andre Lemieux considered Peter’s question.
“What changes, you say, monsieur? Most important it is the food. For some who prepare food, the façade, how a dish looks, it is more important than how it
tastes. In this hotel we waste much money on the decor. The parsley, it is all around. But not enough in the sauce. The watercress it is on the plate, when more is needed in the soup. And those arrangements of color in gelatine!” Young Lemieux threw both arms upward in despair. Peter smiled sympathetically.
“As for the wines, monsieur! Dieu merci, the wines they are not my province.”
“Yes,” Peter said. He had been critical himself of the St. Gregory’s inadequately stocked wine bins.
“In a word, monsieur, all the horrors of a low-grade table d’hôte. Such disrespect colossal for food, such abandon of money for the appearance, it is to make one weep. Weep, monsieur!” He paused, shrugged, and continued. “With less throw-away we could have a cuisine that invites the taste and honors the palate. Now it is dull, extravagantly ordinary.”
Peter wondered if André Lemieux was being sufficiently realistic where the St. Gregory was concerned. As if sensing this doubt, the sous-chef insisted, “It is true that a hotel it has special problems. Here it is not a gourmet house. It cannot be. We must cook fast many meals, serve many people who are too much in an American hurry. But in these limitations there can be excellence of a kind. Of a kind one can live with. Yet, Monsieur Hébrand, he tells me that my ideas they are too ’igh cost. It is not so, as I ’ave proved.”
“How have you proved?”
“Come, please.”
The young Frenchman led the way into the glass-paneled office. It was a small, crowded cubicle with two desks, file cabinets, and cupboards tightly packed around three walls. André Lemieux went to the smaller desk. Opening a drawer he took out a large Manila envelope and, from this, a folder. He handed it to Peter. “You ask what changes. It is all here.”
Peter McDermott opened the folder curiously. There were many pages, each filled with a fine, precise handwriting. Several larger, folded sheets proved to be charts, hand-drawn and lettered in the same careful style. It was, he realized, a master catering plan for the entire hotel. On successive pages were estimated costs, menus, a plan of quality control and an outlined staff reorganization. Merely leafing through quickly, the entire concept and its author’s grasp of detail were impressive.