Arthur Hailey - Hotel

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, "no doubt the first thing you'll do is lop some more 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 takes 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 dam good soup."

"If you remember," Royall Edwards said, "we recommended it, and I will now offer you some more wellfounded 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 Hebrand on duty?"

"No, Mr. McDermott, I understand he's Ul. 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 Hebrand."

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 no one wants to hurry it himself." 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 barely 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 Andre 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.

Andre 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 Pavillon 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.