“They don’t listen to you at all?” he asked thoughtfully.
“No. None of them. I’ve barely convinced the servers I’m the one in charge. The kitchen staff is completely feral.”
He lifted his gaze and gave me the full force of his stormy gray eyes. If I was a lesser woman I would have fainted. Or at least had to fan my face.
“Fire someone,” he said.
I shook my hair out, afraid I’d been so distracted by his face I’d misheard him. “What?”
“Fire someone. Tonight. The first time someone doesn’t listen to you or talks back or ignores you, fire them.”
His advice was so completely out of left field to me that I had trouble processing it. It was like he’d spoken a foreign language. “Your solution to getting the staff to respect and listen to me, is to fire someone? Just like that? Just walk in the door and make someone leave?”
“These aren’t your people, right?” At my look of continued confusion, he clarified, “You didn’t hire them? They came with the restaurant?”
“Right. Ezra hired them. Or the chef before me. I just stepped into the position with the current staff in place.”
“Okay, so they have no reason to be loyal to you. You’re the outsider, not them. And my guess is that you’re younger than all of them too?” I nodded, hating every second of his honest assessment. “Less experienced?”
I shrugged, not wanting to admit this part. “It’s impossible to say.” His gaze hardened, expecting the truth. “But most likely, yeah. I’m relatively new to the game.”
“And even though you have the chops for this job, they likely assume you only got it because of your brother.” When I started to protest, he reminded me, “You said so yourself.”
“Okay, yeah.”
“Fire someone. The first time someone talks shit, cut their ass loose.”
“I get the lesson, but don’t you think that’s a little harsh?”
He shrugged. “Honestly, depending on how hostile this work environment is, you might have to keep firing people.”
Laughing at the lunacy of his suggestion, I decided I wasn’t the only one on the brink of insanity today. “You’re suggesting I handle dinner service all by myself every night?”
“I’m suggesting you do what it takes to get this kitchen, your kitchen, under control. You clearly can’t keep working like this. And you shouldn’t have to. You’re the boss.”
His rousing speech was delivered with such conviction that I couldn’t help but repeat, “I’m the boss,” as if saying it for the first time ever.
“You’re the boss,” he repeated. “Is this how a normal chef takeover happens? You walk in to someone else’s kitchen and have to convince them to listen to you?”
I thought about his question and shrugged. “Not always. Sometimes EC’s bring their own sous chefs. More often, they promote from within so the staff already respects the new leadership. I have never been a head chef before so I don’t have a sous to bring with me and I’m obviously not being promoted from within.”
“You have no choice,” he pointed out. “You’re going to have to fire someone.”
I wiggled, feeling uncomfortable with the idea. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, you could fire them all and start from scratch. I’m sure you have friends in the industry that would be willing to come work for you.”
Chewing on his words, I realized that to get people I knew to come work for me, I’d have to poach them from my friends. That wasn’t an option.
And starting from scratch wasn’t an option either—not if I wanted to turn Bianca around in a reasonable amount of time. I needed people in the kitchen that knew what they were doing, that already believed in her mission and wanted what was best for her. I needed people that gave a hell about the restaurant, but also listened to me.
“God, I feel sick,” I mumbled, slowly accepting that his suggestion made sense. Fire someone? Me? That would take guts. So many guts.
Who did I think I was? Gordon Ramsay? I never yelled at people. I convinced them to be my friend and then got them to do what I wanted by respectfully asking them to do their job. It wasn’t in me to walk into a hostile work space and take away someone’s livelihood just to get everyone to wake up and pay attention.
“Can I hire them back?” I asked him.
His chin jerked in surprise. “What do you mean?”
