Two hours of sleep isn’t enough for me to function this morning, but that’s what I get for deciding it would be a good idea to binge-watch one of my old favorites: The Real Housewives of Orange County.
My tiredness is enough to convince me to try drinking coffee. Plus, a $3,000 coffee maker was delivered to the restaurant yesterday and I figure I should take it for a test-drive. I have no idea what I’m doing but I press a few buttons, hold a mug under the spout and four seconds later a “vanilla latte” comes out. Okay, then.
“Miss Allie?” Hector taps me on the shoulder as I just take a seat at my desk. “The first delivery is here.”
I check the time on my screen: 6:55 a.m. At least he’s on time.
We walk back to the rear entrance and I step outside. The sun is just barely coming up and the air has a hint of fall crispness to it.
“Morning! Is this an okay spot to park and unload the truck for a few?”
The truck driver’s guess is as good as mine, but I know better than to run in and check with Angela this late in the game. So I offer what’s becoming my signature shrug and do a quick once-over for any pesky parking police. Before I know it, our delivery guy maneuvers his white box truck into the narrow entryway of our alley, hops out and unhitches the latch on the rear door.
He comes back into frame with a dolly full of boxes and I ask, all business, “How long do you think you’ll be?”
“No ‘hi, how are you, good morning, nice to see you again’? I see how it is.” He winks at me and keeps on walking. “Fifteen minutes, Allie.”
Nice to see you again? It’s too early to rack my brain so I just cut to the chase.
“Have I met you before?”
The man skips no beats as he begins unloading boxes to our back kitchen. Hector is there to receive and put away in the walk-ins.
“Seriously? How quickly you forget our apple tasting. Have you found a better Honeycrisp? Never mind. Don’t even answer that. It’s impossible.”
Oh. It’s Jared. The really nice vendor with the good garlic that Tabitha loves. And yes, he came by with some apples, but no—no, I don’t remember him having cheekbones I’m fairly certain can be seen from outer space.
It might be the caffeine kicking in, but I’m totally checking out our produce guy.
“Right. Hi. Sorry for spacing—these last few weeks have been a total blur and I’m not firing on all cylinders yet this morning,” I say.
“No worries.”
God, he’s nice.
“Hey, Jared, the sign right there says we can only load for ten minutes with our flashers on.”
“You think anyone is going to tell the pretty girl with the coffee she’s got to move the truck that’s in front of her restaurant? No way.”
I look around expecting to find a polished Angela lurking somewhere nearby, but realize quickly I’m the only one here. I’m wearing ripped jeans and a sweatshirt with a bleach stain on it. My signature messy bun with a ballpoint pen is toppled on the crown of my head and my glasses have a smudge of butter on the right lens. No way could I be the “pretty girl.” Clearly, he is blowing smoke up my ass so I’ll tip him extra. Regardless, the sudden flattery makes my early wake-up call not seem as horrifying anymore.
“Do we need to hit a reset button this morning?” he asks, stretching out a hand to shake. “Jared Marcel, produce guy.”
“Allie Simon, assistant general manager. And…owner, too, I guess.”
“And owner? Well, you conveniently left that little tidbit out over apples. Congratulations.”
He tips his beat-up baseball hat my direction, then hops back in the truck. He looks like he’s stepped off the set of a Chevy commercial. Rugged and handsome. Where has Chicago been hiding all the men like him?
“Bring that dolly over here, would ya?” he shouts from inside the back of his truck.
I set my coffee down on the curb and wheel it over. Jared shuffles around some boxes and keeps on chatting.
“Manager, owner and cutest girl on my Randolph Street delivery route. You know what they call that? A triple threat!”
I can’t believe how chipper he is as I try to match his energy without letting on that I’m taking all these compliments with a grain of salt. Imported pink Himalayan salt, but salt nonetheless.
“Here’s the dolly. What would you like me to do?” I ask.
“These twenty-five boxes. Your walk-in cooler. I’ll stack. You roll. Hector puts away. Think you can handle it?”
Wheeling ten-pound boxes a total of seven feet from the back of his truck to our doorway is so minor on the scale of “shit I’ve been asked to handle” in the past month, it’s almost laughable. But it’s nice to know that despite surviving a breakup with a drug addict, securing a restaurant deal in the most lucrative part of Chicago, quitting my day job and learning a new industry in practically no time at all, I still look like a damsel in distress. To Jared, I’m just a normal twenty-five-year-old with likely aversions to manual labor and getting up before ten.
“I can handle it,” I assure him.
Fifteen minutes later, our first walk-in cooler is almost entirely stocked with produce. Next up is dairy, followed by meat, then fish. This is going to be a long morning of processing inventory, but at least I’m getting a workout.
“Alright. That’s it, Miss Simon,” Jared says, double-checking the back of his truck to make sure we aren’t missing anything. He returns moments later with his clipboard.
“Signature here, here and here.” He points.
I pull the pen out of my hair and begin signing.
“Have I mentioned that I like when the women in my life are prepared?” he remarks. “It’s always the guy that’s supposed to have the pen. I’m sick of it.”
His roll-with-it sense of humor is distracting me from the ability to simply sign my name on a dotted line, but it’s in this moment that I really look at Jared for the first time. With endearing smile lines and day-old scruff, there’s something very rom-com about him. I don’t mind it. I don’t mind him.
I hand him back his clipboard. “Anything else?”
“Just your cell phone number here.” He hands me his iPhone from his back pocket and I don’t move.
“What? You have mine. I need yours. For business purposes,” he says, urging me to input some digits. “You know, in case we get in some really nice mackerel that you absolutely have to have.”
“Jerk.”
“Kidding. Kidding,” he says.
Early hour be damned; Jared is straight-up charming…and he’s scheming. He knows full well my phone number is on the purchase order I submitted, but apparently he wants it a little more accessible. For “business purposes.”
If this is the shtick he puts on for all the girls receiving deliveries on restaurant row, it’s no wonder he is one wildly busy produce man that all the ladies, including butch lesbians, seem to love. Little does he know, he can smile through those boy-next-door brown eyes until the sun rises and sets, but Benji taught me well that any man trying this hard to make me feel good about myself wants something in return.
For now what Jared can have is my signature and, perhaps against my better judgment, my cell number. I give him back his paperwork and phone, and extend my hand for a farewell shake that I hope reads “strictly professional.”
“Good luck with the opening,” he says. His hand in mine is warm and rough. “I’ll see you on Tuesday—same time, same alley, Allie.”
* * *
“Can everybody please sit down?”
It’s time for our first-ever staff meeting, led, of course, by Angela. I sit at one of the two-top tables with Tabitha. She slides the final version of our menu over the tablecloth toward me.
“What do you think?” she asks.
Here it is in the flesh, literally hot off the press. The single column of elegant text is printed on thick, manila card stock. Starters. Mains. Sides. I try to bend the card a bit to test the give; there isn’t much. Here is embossed in gold at the top in a humble serif font. I run my finger over the word to feel the imprint.
I think we really threw down on these.
“Seriously, guys, today,” Angela snaps, her voice commanding attention. “If sitting is too much to ask, then how about you find a place to put your body and not eye-fuck the person next to you for fifteen minutes? I know you’re all attractive, young and just meeting each other for the first time, but this isn’t speed dating. Exchange numbers after the dry run.”
Angela is right. We are surrounded by gorgeous twentysomethings. When they’re all together, it looks as if I pulled our entire service staff from the ranks of a J.Crew catalog. I swear I did not do this on purpose.
Looking at them all in uniform—the girls in black pencil skirts, the men in black slacks, both with button-down, white, short-sleeve shirts—they look professional but sexy, like not-so-distant but much poorer relatives of Christian Grey. At first, I wasn’t sure about the uniform selection, especially for the girls. But the final step in each server interview was to vote on the preferred outfit. By far, the ladies opted for the formfitting skirts (something about it helping generate tips) and the short-sleeve button-downs were the clear winner for both genders. Buttons down the front mean business, but it’s a party down the sleeves considering that 90 percent of our staff has ink on their arms. As for shoes, all-black and at least a half-inch heel. When I made that regulation, I meant it as a way to encourage staffers to go with Danskos, the end-all, be-all shoes for professionals on their feet for longer than eight hours at a time. But that dress code was interpreted as clunky Nike Air Jordans for the guys and three-inch wedges for the girls. Kids these days, I swear.
Regardless, as they line up I realize they’re mine—my village, my congregation. I employ these people. It’s all too much.
Speaking of too much, I’m starting to wonder what specifically my $30,000 investment has gone toward. For instance, did I buy the fancy menus? The reclaimed 1885 barn wood in the foyer? The nine-inch bone china soup bowls at $200 a pop that we only bring out to VIPs? Yes, of course, I know my money is mixed with Craig’s and we’re all in this together. But looking at this pristine restaurant piece by piece begs the question: how far does $30,000 really go in a place like Here where, at the end of the day, it’s quite evident no expense was spared?
“A guest sits down and you find out what three things in the first thirty seconds? Anyone?” Angela asks, pacing the floor like she’s giving a college lecture in her most sleek wrap dress yet.
“Booze. Time. Water,” says our lead server, Jessica. All eyes zip to the tenacious blonde toward the back of the room. I can cut the jealousy with one of our hammered butter knives.
“Excellent, that’s correct,” Angela says. “First, you find out what they’re drinking—whiskey, wine, one of the cocktails. Remember: you want to push them into something over twelve dollars if you can. If you think that’s highway robbery now, you won’t when you realize what ordering four of those expensive cocktails will do for your tip count at the end of the night. Then find out if they have anywhere to be after dinner. There are approximately five theatres just over that river—people are going to come here before a show and make a night of it. If they need to be out in an hour because that’s when Book of Mormon starts, the kitchen needs to know so we can speed it up and turn the table. And finally, yes, we have tap water. But ‘sparkling or still?’ is the question to lead with. Our water bill is mammoth. Do your part to push bottled or we’ll be losing money refilling pitchers all night. Moving on. What do you do when you see lipstick prints on a guest’s glass building up throughout the night?”
“Swoop and swap,” shouts Andrew, our other lead server. Not surprisingly, every girl in here just fell in love with his tall, dark, handsomeness.
“Folks, are we leaving it to the service captains to answer all the questions? Very good, Andrew. But let’s try to hear from someone else with this next question…”
After a whirlwind review of several more points of service, Angela is satisfied. And so am I. Because even though I’m overwhelmed by the surfeit of information that seems so second nature to her and all the beautiful people, Craig’s R&D budget is paying off. I’m answering her questions in my head and nailing most of them.
“Alright. Looks like you guys know your shit. As your general manager, I’m proud. I know training these last two weeks has been brutal. Memorizing every ingredient in every dish isn’t fun, but it will be worth it. Any last questions?”
“I have one,” says a redhead I barely remember hiring.
“Shoot,” Angela tells her.
“On the bottom of the menu, it says the head chef is Tabitha Johnson. Soooo…what the hell happened to Benji Zane?”
A few muffled yeahs echo throughout the room. I have no clue how Angela plans to play this, but I pray to god it doesn’t incite a mass exodus.
“Okay, relax, relax, relax, everyone. This restaurant is about good people. Good food. A good time. A good atmosphere. When people think about Here, they’re going to have a picture in their head about what the experience of having dinner with us is like. And when they come back, or when they refer a friend, they’re going to expect that experience is replicated. We are about consistency. If a vendor doesn’t bring us quality beef week after week, we fire them. If we can only get the salmon to balance on the couscous nine out of ten times, we take it off the menu until we figure out how to plate it better. If a chef isn’t going to show up to be a part of the best restaurant in Chicago, we find someone who will. And if a server is going to up and quit because they took a job only to get a front-row seat to a shit show, well, then ’bye, now. We don’t need that either.”
The room falls completely silent. This is the moment we find out who was here for Benji, and who was here for…Here.
“On that note, a press release was deployed approximately sixty seconds before this meeting kicked off introducing our chef de cuisine, Miss Tabitha Johnson.” Angela gestures her way and Tabitha waves to the crowd. “By now, you’ve probably all seen her around here doing her thing, but let’s give a formal warm welcome to the woman who will be making your staff meals, shall we?”
I clap louder than everyone and smile her way. We’re really lucky to have her.
“Say a few words,” I whisper to her. She shakes her head my way like she’s refusing bad tuna. Oh, well.
“Now if anyone from the press comes to you and asks for a quote on what happened to Benji, I suggest you say ‘no comment.’ But if for some reason, you can’t control your desire for less than fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame, I better not see anything outside of what I just mentioned hit the internet. Because the truth is, we don’t know exactly what happened or what he’s up to now. And we are not in the business of making shit up. That’s how rumors get started. So if I see your name in the blogs, that’s it. No verbal or written warning—it’s straight termination. And I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be fired from a place where I’ll likely be walking away with at least $300 in cash tips per night.”
Holy shit, for real? Screw AGM, why didn’t I just become a waitress?
“One final note before we move on to reviewing the guest list for tomorrow night. It’s no surprise there was no soft opening for Here. I know that’s not how several of you, including myself, prefer to roll. But unfortunately, for reasons you do not need to know, we weren’t able to swing a Friends & Family Night. So that means tomorrow, starting at 5:00 p.m., you need to be ON. YOUR. GAME. Chug a Red Bull, get a blow job, give a blow job, whatever you need to do to clear your mind and be sharp as a tack…do it. We have one chance to be rock stars on night one. Heard?”
“Heard,” everyone but me replies. I’ll get it next time.
“Great. Now let’s quickly go through what we have on the books for tomorrow night. Take out your Moleskines everybody, we’re announcing VIPs and preferences.”
In unison, the tribe pulls out small leather-bound notebooks from their aprons and clicks open the blue-ink pens we provided.
“Allie, you want to do this part?” Angela asks in side conversation. I pull a Tabitha and shake my head no. She rolls her eyes. I’ll hear about this later.
“First VIP, 6:00 p.m., two-top: Aurora Jenkins, Chicago Sun-Times. Her husband has a dairy allergy. Tabitha, please note that.”
“Heard,” she replies without looking up from her own notes.
“Second VIP, 6:30, two-top: Mr. and Mrs. Bill Simon, parents of our AGM-slash-owner, Allie Simon. No allergies, no preferences. Whoever gets this table, start them off with two glasses of Moët, please.”
“Noted,” says Jessica.
“VIP number three, 7:00 p.m., four-top: Catherine McGee, TimeOut magazine. One pescatarian in the party. Tabitha?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she mumbles under her breath. “Yeah, Angela. Got it.”
“Andrew, you’ll take the McGee party.”
“Heard,” he confirms.
“Wonderful. All in all, 175 on the books. First seating is at 5:00 p.m. Final seating is at 10:30. We are fully committed. Each server should expect to turn their station at least three times. It’s going to be a long night, I know. Now as far as the host stand, Allie and I will handle the majority of the seating for the night. We need to see firsthand how the flow of this restaurant is working. When we’re in the weeds, we’ll have a backup hostess. That’s Becca sitting over there. I stole her from Florette. Say hi, everyone.”
Becca is an eleventh-hour hire that Angela took the lead on. When she originally gave me the list of roles to hire for Here, I read the description of the host/hostess and thought: me. Greet guests, take their jackets, seat them, control the pacing and flow of our diners—I could do that. And to be honest, I wanted to save on the hourly cost of hiring someone else, so I told her that position was covered. When we went through some final notes a couple days ago, and she realized what I meant by “covered” she promptly texted Becca and asked if she’d be interested in moving on up to the big leagues. She said yes, which is why there’s a ballerina-type-looking woman I’ve never seen before in my restaurant.
No hard feelings, though. Angela admitted I could take the lead on seating, and probably could have handled it all myself, it’s just that there’s no way to know how slammed we’ll be now that we’ve released the news about Benji to the media.
“So, here’s the scoop. There is no room for walk-ins in the main dining room, so nobody promise anything we cannot deliver. We’ll be sending these folks to the bar until we run out of room. Then we kindly apologize and help facilitate a reservation for a future date. Allie, after this, please look over the reservation list in the system one more time and flag any VIPs I might have missed. Add detailed notes, too, okay?”
If I’d thought I was a computer expert in my time at Daxa, the software system we’re using at Here has proved me wrong. It almost makes me miss the job where all I needed to know was how and when to hit Retweet.
“Allie, did you hear me?”
“Heard,” I assure her.
“Good. Make that known next time by giving me the courtesy of an audible reply, please and thank you.”
Far from bristling at her rebuke, I like Angela even more in this moment. The woman has a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit. Sure, I might be (partly) responsible for giving her this job and changing her life, but that’s not going to stop her from giving me hell if I don’t do things the way I need to in order to make this restaurant work. There’s no special treatment for me. For some reason, that’s comforting.
“One final note,” Angela says. “With or without a soft opening, it’s crucial that no one has tunnel vision tomorrow night…or ever…in this restaurant. The biggest fuckup you can make is assuming your job is to keep your eyes on your table and your table alone. You need to see if the bar is backing up before you promise someone their Moscow Mule will be out in just a minute. You need to see if your hot food is coming off the line before you start to take an order for a table of six. You need to occasionally look toward the front to see if no one is at the host stand for some reason when a party walks in. Keep your eyes open, people. All night. All directions. Harder than it sounds, but absolutely mandatory if we’re going to spot and correct small issues before they become full-blown crises. Okay?”
Even though I say “heard,” it doesn’t mean I got it. That task is going to be harder than the rest. I’m only one person. Two eyes. I can’t be everywhere at all times, but I know that’s what Angela is going to expect out of me—more than anyone else.
After the training meeting, I hobble over to the computer screen to follow up on my task. It’s crazy to see my parents’ names on the reservation sheet. We’ve come a long way with this whole Here thing. I click on their names and make a note in the system to start them off with two glasses of Moët, just in case Jessica forgets. She won’t, though.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot two of the servers eating family meal at one of the tables in the bar. Family meal, aka staff meal, is cafeteria-style food that Tabitha prepares for us each night before service. Even though we don’t open until tomorrow, we’re going to do a mock-service in about an hour to help ease everyone’s nerves about the lack of a soft opening.
Angela explained to me the importance of staff meal a couple days ago when I suggested we should make it a point to tell servers to eat before they show up for work or bring some granola bars to tuck into their apron. That way, they wouldn’t get hungry running around holding plates of delicious-looking food all night. She shook her head at the cost-saving idea and I couldn’t figure out why—labor laws don’t mandate we feed these savages and I know money’s tight with opening costs. Turns out staff meal gives everyone the opportunity to relax and enjoy each other’s company before they’re screaming at one another in the back for cutting them off while carrying a tray of hot soup. Time to eat, as short as it might be, sets the tone for service. Plus it’ll start getting people on the Tabitha train once they eat more and more of her bombtastic food.
Of the two girls eating, one is the redhead who gave Angela sass about Benji’s whereabouts in the preshift meeting. I can hear her whispering as she looks up at me intermittently. I casually walk closer to them for a better angle as I pretend to take stock of our liquor.
“He must have had a ten-inch cock because why the hell else would you buy your boyfriend a restaurant just so he stays with you?” says the redhead, who’s skinny with a pointy nose.
“I heard she’s never even worked in a restaurant before. I’m sorry, but I’m going to make my children be servers the day they’re old enough to work. There’s so much you learn about life here,” says the other one, a chubby brunette with a pretty face.
“Like not dating a drug-addict loser who robs you?”
“Oh my god, did you see that photo FoodFeed posted a few weeks ago of her walking in here? She had a black eye, I swear. They’re probably into kinky shit.”
“You can totally tell she does tons of coke, too.”
“Probably off his dick.”
“I can’t believe this bitch is our boss.”
Annnnd that’s about all I can take.
“Excuse me?” I say, walking over to the girls. “What did you two just say?”
“Nothing. We were talking about how many covers we have tomorrow,” says Red.
“The hell you were. Look, I may not have spent the last five years of my life waiting tables every day and getting drunk every night, but didn’t Angela just say something about having eyes and ears open at all times? Something about not having tunnel vision and spotting problems before they turn into crises?”
“Yeah, something like that,” says the chubby one.
“Well, I’m spotting one right here. Two, actually.”
“What’s the issue? Talking behind your back? Got news for you, Allie, that’s the way it is in the restaurant industry. First they love you, then they hate you,” the brunette says. I really wish I knew their names, though that’s becoming increasingly irrelevant.
“Yeah, just watch what happens after the press finds out about Benji being gone,” the redhead adds. “People know you have something to do with the reason he left. And when they figure out what it is, they’ll turn on this place. It won’t be pretty.”
I’m at a loss for words. These little bitches are intimidating me as they stuff their faces with homemade stir-fry. It’s time to throw this thing into sport mode and remind them who they work for.
“This is my restaurant. Okay? I sign your paychecks.”
“Which we’ll mail you in a week. Now get up and get the hell out,” says Angela from behind me. “You’re both fired.”
I lock eyes with Angela. She’s firing two servers the day before we’re expecting a full house. I don’t want the girls to sense weakness, but is she crazy?
“You heard me. Leave your uniforms in the office. You have five minutes to be out of here. Get going, ladies.”
The two scurry from the table. Whispers of “bullshit” and “fucking cunts” trickle back to us.
“I’m really sorry, Angela,” I say. “I shouldn’t have gotten so heated with them. I probably fucked us for tomorrow, right?”
“First of all, don’t apologize. You’re the boss and the owner. I’m not saying you should let it go to your head, but if someone doesn’t respect you, they shouldn’t be here. That said, if you feel like firing Tabitha, you need to run that by me first, okay?”
“Don’t worry. Two staff members down with less than twenty-four hours until we open seems like enough excitement. Do you have any—”
“Backups? Always.”
“I love you. You are seriously the Queen of Plan Bs. Where are the résumés? I’ll comb through ’em.”
“Easy, tiger,” she says. “Don’t get used to expecting we’ll always be okay if something fails. There are only a handful of pillars that determine if you’re successful in this industry. A quality chef and people to serve her food are two of them, so of course I had backups for both of those. But let me tell you, there are still a hundred-and-one-thousand things that can go wrong tomorrow night for which I have made absolutely no preparation. So from here on out, let’s run a tight ship, shall we?”
“Aye, aye, captain,” I say. Despite her grim pep talk, I found us a new head chef in a day, so I’m pretty sure we can find two half-decent servers before the doors open. Maybe even before the mock service if we’re lucky.
“The résumés are in a green folder in the cabinet near Tabitha’s desk. Can’t miss it—it’s labeled. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to smoke my last ‘stress cigarette’ as I go through the sixty voice mails on my phone from the press.”
“Need any help?” I ask.
“I didn’t realize you were so eager to converse with strangers about your ex-boyfriend.”
“Oh. Right. Scratch that.”
Angela lovingly flicks me off and heads out the back door. I pull up the YeltonXT and wipe the two defunct servers from the system. A few moments later, Craig walks in and greets me at the hostess stand. He’s all but disappeared since signing the paperwork—though more than once I’ve thought that might be a good thing. Like our own personal Santa Claus, he comes down the chimney, drops off a nice present, then scoots out, never to be seen again. Having been in the trenches here these past few weeks, I have to admire a guy like that: one who can dump $300,000, plus a couple mil in cosmetic adjustments (on the restaurant, not his wife’s face), into something, then walk away, leaving the entire operation to a former homeless chick and an emotionally frazzled twentysomething. That takes balls.
“Hi, Allie, how’s it going, sweetie?” He kisses me on the cheek in a way that manages not to be totally creepy. I wonder if any of his spray tan is now on my face.
“It’s going good, Craig. Less than twenty-four hours now, can you believe it?”
“Figured it was coming soon enough. You have to remember, not my first rodeo.”
His lack of excitement is either concerning or calming, but I can’t decide which.
“Yeah, I forget that you’re a seasoned pro.” A little stroke of the ego never hurt anyone. Damn, I forgot how shiny his veneers were.
“Well, Angela is. She’s really the star of this show, no offense to you.”
“None taken. I happen to agree.”
“So are you nervous, Allie?”
“Incredibly. Angela thinks that since we dropped the news about Benji today, there’s going to be up to five critics here tomorrow night.”
“Blinds?” he asks, which is industry speak for a critic who is entirely undercover versus a known food writer.
“It’s a mix,” I say. “We’ve already got two from the media—both of whom have crazy allergies.”
“Oh, fuck. No pressure, Tabitha,” he says in jest.
“Yeah, exactly. But she’s already prepping for them and fully expecting the blinds. In fact, I’ve got one of the barbacks in the office right now doing Google image searches of all the big ones. I mean, they obviously keep a low profile, but there are enough rumors out there about who’s who, I figure it’s worth taping some photos on the wall and telling the staff to keep an eye out for them.” Admitting this aloud feels neurotic as fuck.
“And what about you? What are you doing to prepare?”
“Well, I’m going to study all the critic images really hard tonight, then go over all the starters again, and—”
“No, no, no. I mean what are you doing to prepare?” Craig asks again, this time pointing toward my heart. I put my hand there to make sure there’s nothing out of the ordinary—no nip-slips or mustard stains.
“I’m not sure what you mean, Craig. I’ve been studying the menus morning, noon and night,” I say with a bit of defense.
“Can I give you a little advice, Allie?” he asks as he adjusts his Ferrari-branded cuff links.
“Sure, I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“Your job as the AGM is all about heart. Leave it to your staff to know how many ingredients are in the king crab appetizer. Leave it to your bartender to know how much bitters to add to an Old-Fashioned. Your job is to make people feel at home when they are here. That’s why you guys named it what you did, right?”
Though being confronted with Benji’s namesake day after day might have made me bitter, that’s not how I feel about Here. When the clouds cleared from the shit storm he caused, Here is still the perfect name for what we’ve created.
“What’s ‘Here’ mean to you?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s the right place at the right time. Maybe, like, the one spot where you feel the most like yourself. Happy, lively, things like that.”
“Alright, nice. But give me more. Dig deeper.”
I look away from Craig and give myself a second to think.
The memory hits me all at once, from a time that seems impossibly far away.
“A couple years ago in college I studied abroad in France for a semester. God, I was so homesick. I thought it was going to be all glamorous like Carrie Bradshaw frolicking around Paris or something. Yeah, it was nothing like that. Anyway, my host house flooded and the school paid for me to get a hotel for a few days, so I picked the Ritz-Carlton. It was so over-the-top but at least they had super fast WiFi, so I Skyped my mom. It was daytime here in Chicago; my dad was at work. She left the laptop streaming in the living room all day. We watched a Days of Our Lives marathon together. Then my mom got up and said she’d be right back. She was going to go make herself some lunch—a grilled cheese and some tomato soup. I was so jealous. That was my favorite food and she knew it. Well, about ten minutes later, I get a knock on my hotel room door. It’s room service. I tell him he’s got the wrong room, I didn’t order anything. But he says, ‘Allie Simon?’ I say yes and he says, ‘Then this is for you. Can I set it here on the desk?’
“He walks by me to place the tray down, lifts up a heavy silver lid and guess what’s there? A grilled cheese and a bowl of tomato soup. There was a note with it: ‘Not quite how Mom makes it, but hope it’ll do.’ A few minutes later, my mom comes back into the Skype window with her meal and says, ‘Eat up, honey!’ I’ll never forget it. An ocean away and I felt like I was right there in the house I grew up in, watching TV on the couch in my pajamas with my mom.
“I felt so loved. So cared for. So thought about. So comfortable. I remember talking with my mouth full of food and saying to her, ‘It’s so good! It’s like you’re here with me.’ And she just smiled, pointed at her heart and said back, ‘I’m always going be here, I’m your mom.’”
I finally pause and look back at Craig.
“Sorry. Was I talking this whole time?”
Craig laughs a bit. With me, at me—I can’t be sure, but it doesn’t feel mean-spirited.
“You know, if you weren’t already the assistant manager of this restaurant, I would have hired you right here, right now based on that response. Because you get it, Allie. You may never have had to void a check or comp someone’s appetizer, but I can already tell you understand precisely what your job is all about. Make everyone who walks through that door tomorrow—and every night after—feel exactly how you did when that grilled cheese showed up at your door in Paris, and you’ll make your money back tenfold. Can you do that?”
Of all the job descriptions online I’ve read about AGMs, I’ve never had it put the way Craig did. And if that’s what it takes to do this job, then I’ve never felt more confident that I got this.
“Yeah, I think I can.”
“Great. Now, where’s Angela? I’ve got some last-minute paperwork she needs to sign off on.”
“Straight back.” I gesture toward the office.
Craig raps the counter with his left hand on his way to the back. I hear his wedding band clank against the polished wood. I’m sure his wife is trophy in nature, but I bet Craig is a really good husband and father.
“Thanks again for sharing that story, Allie,” he says, turning to face me again. “Angela was right about you being more than some junkie’s enabling ex-girlfriend. I didn’t believe her at first. I thought, what kind of an idiot hands over thirty grand to a guy who’s just going to end up leaving her for another pussy and a bigger paycheck—and not necessarily in that order. But now look at you. Hospitality is in your bones. Who knew?”
I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. First of all, I generally don’t do well with men over the age of forty using the word pussy in a conversation directed toward me, but okay. Secondly, Craig obviously doesn’t realize that I didn’t have a choice. Benji left me high and dry and it’s his girl Angela who made it crystal clear that there was no way out. Craig seems to be operating under the very false impression that this has been my secret wish all along, which means Angela must not have told him the version of the story where Benji left me battered and broke.
And for that, I am really, really thankful.