Growing up I’d always wanted a marriage like theirs, and I’d thought that I’d found it with Virginia. What a lie that had turned out to be.
I opened the paper, skimming the various news articles and moving on to the food and culture section.
And just below the article on yet another damn superhero movie—there it was.
A review for our restaurant.
I hadn’t even realized there’d been a review. Usually critics liked to make it known beforehand that they were going to be stopping by at some point. Or someone made sure to send me the article once it was printed, giving me a head’s up. But nobody had said anything about this to me. And no critic had let me know that they were going to be stopping by.
Huh.
I started to read the article, and my entire good mood vanished. It was like those eight hours of delicious sleep hadn’t even happened. All the optimism I’d been feeling about the restaurant was evaporated, and instead I felt like someone had dropped a lump of lead down my throat to land heavily in my stomach, dragging me down.
This critic was someone that I didn’t recognize, so I had to look him up on my phone. Apparently he was new to the Bay Area, but his credentials were solid. He’d written for the Washington Post, had been a judge of several cooking competitions in France… this guy was the real deal.
And he was tearing our restaurant apart.
He called the new menu ‘uninspired’ and ‘both boring and pedestrian’. He said that by removing Theo’s menu that we had taken out ‘not only the artistry but the heart and soul’ out of the restaurant and that we would be lucky to stay open until the end of the year.
I’d had a few bad reviews before. It was kind of unavoidable in the restaurant business. Or, well, any business. There was always something to nitpick about the restaurant. Nothing was perfect. But this! I’d never had a review like this before. Not even when we’d first opened and Theo had been on shaky legs a little, just starting out.
This was insane. I had to do something. This was—this wasn’t just a bad review, this was carnage. This was being eviscerated. My stomach was so tight I had to shove the remains of my toast away, unable to even think about eating it.
Things were finally starting to turn around. I had thought that we were finally in the clear. Well, not in the black, but on our way to it. I had trusted Stevie to pull us out of the slump, but it was clear to me now that neither of us actually knew what we were doing.
Perhaps this whole time… Theo really had been the reason that I’d been so successful. Perhaps I had been mistaken, thinking that I had such a hand in it. I should’ve stuck to finance and marketing, my old job in Silicon Valley. Or at least gone back to it once Theo left.
But how could I have? I loved the restaurant. It was a labor of love for me. A symbol of myself and of my family. I hadn’t wanted to let it go. I still didn’t. But maybe…
Without Stevie’s menu working, what else could I do? Go back to the old menu that none of the other cooks had understood and had been using to make sub-par food?
I didn’t understand. Stevie’s food was delicious. Or so I thought. Was I really that ignorant? That much of a dumbass? I couldn’t believe myself. I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.
All right. I’d need to… make some kind of plan. I didn’t know what, yet, but something. Stevie was a good cook and I loved her food. She was just young, inexperienced, so this was a misstep. We could rework the menu. Reintroduce some of Theo’s items, the most popular ones. Maybe make a few small adjustments so they weren’t so complicated to make. Keep up with the fresh local ingredients.
We could find a way to adjust and make this work. Not just because we were capable of it but because we had no other option. We were sinking, and we had to swim.
That afternoon, I went into the restaurant as the lunch rush was dying down. We seemed to be busy, which was a good thing. After eating Stevie’s breakfast sandwich I had been tempted to bring up the idea of a Sunday brunch to her, but now with the review, that would have to wait.
I found her in the kitchen, cooking away, yelling orders over her shoulder. She had this way of yelling orders so that she could be heard without sounding like she was angry and shouting at people. It was hard to find that balance and most head chefs just sounded angry all the time. Sometimes because they actually were angry. Other times because they were just trying to be heard over the din of the kitchen and that was how it came out. But Stevie never sounded like that. She was loud, and the cooks around her could obviously hear her seeing as they were responding to her, but she always sounded calm and cheerful.
I could remember how Theo would rush around the kitchen, simultaneously cheerful and micromanaging. At the time, I’d thought that of course he would micromanage. These were his creations, it was good that he cared, that he wanted them to be perfect. His ability to also goof off had been a bonus to me. It meant that he kept the kitchen lighthearted.
Now, however, I could see how Stevie’s way of running things was so much better. Theo made himself a friend to everyone, which meant when he whipped around and was the boss, barking and micromanaging, people got whiplash. His habit of checking everything, getting into literally every cook’s business, wasn’t a sign of passion but a sign of being too controlling. He wasn’t trusting his coworkers to do their jobs, and the cooks probably felt stifled and annoyed at his behavior.
Stevie though, she was always firm, always in position as the boss, but she stayed at her station working hard and leading by example. She wasn’t peering over everyone’s shoulders or getting in their way to adjust their dish. And she wasn’t distracting them or giving them emotional whiplash by goofing off and running around being cheerful. She was being kind and thoughtful but staying firm.
For her young age, and relative inexperience, she had true leadership. Leadership that I hadn’t even realized that Theo was lacking.
On top of all that, she looked like she was having a good time. She looked the way that I’d felt before I’d read the review. She was smiling, bustling around. Happy. I wanted her to always look that way. And I was damn flattered that I’d helped to be the one to make her feel like that—to put that smile on her face.
It was breaking my goddamn heart to have to ruin her mood.
“Stevie?” I called.
“Yeah?” she looked up, grinning. “What’s up, boss?”
Oh, God, she couldn’t ever call me that again, not when we’d been sleeping together. I could so easily see her using that to tease me, saying it in that coy, husky voice of hers as she winked.
I shook my head clear of those dirty thoughts. Now was not the time, as tempting as it was to indulge them, to drag her back into a side room and fuck her until she had to cover her mouth to keep from moaning too loudly. “Do you have a moment? Could I talk to you in the office?”
“Sure thing.” Stevie turned to one of the cooks. “Get that fucking chicken off the grill before it burns and can someone takeover my shit?”
Coming from anyone else, the swearing would’ve made her sound angry, but that was just how Stevie was and everyone knew it by now.
I walked her back to my office, the both of us carefully not touching each other. It was tempting, far too tempting, to reach out for her. She was like a magnet, just pulling me into her, and I wanted to shove her against the wall, or even just run my hand over the curve of her hip.
But I forced myself to stay back, to stay good, as I opened the office door for her and she walked inside.
Even just her regular chef’s jacket was tempting to me, knowing what lay underneath. And knowing that she’d let me, if I started to undress her. She’d be putty in my hands, she’d whimper and plead and beg me. The way that she gave control up to me, trusted me and gave herself over to me, was utterly intoxicating. Finding new ways to make her moan and say my name was my new addiction.
“You’ll want to sit down,” I told her.
Stevie had this anticipatory look on her fa
ce, and I realized that she was expecting either sex or some good news. Perhaps both.
Fuck, I hated disappointing her.
As I walked around the desk to grab the article, her face fell. “You seem… tense. Is everything okay?”
I wished that I could lie to her. Or even better, that everything was okay and I was about to give her a five star review that I’d found.
“This was in the paper this morning,” I said, handing the newspaper over to her.
Stevie took it and picked it up, her eyes flying across the page as she read the article. Her face, however, didn’t sink into a mask of despair the way I’d expected. Instead it hardened, the lines of it sharpening. She was getting angry.
“Well this is just bullshit!” she said, tossing the newspaper back onto my desk. “What the fuck is this? It’s ridiculous. What kind of…all that pretentious shit he’s spouting, you know that none of that’s true, right? Did he even taste the food? It sounds like he just walked in, looked at the menu, and decided to shit all over it because of that! I mean, what the actual fuck.” She looked up at me, her eyes snapping from fireworks to pleading. “You don’t actually believe all that he said, do you? You know that this is insane. And the stuff he says about Theo? What, did he suck the guy’s dick or something? Couldn’t be more of a brown-noser if he was actually bending over to kiss Theo’s ass.”
“Now you’re talking like a chef,” I said, unable to help a little bit of amusement. Chefs could never take criticism and they could be just as harsh to critics as critics were to them.
Stevie snorted. “I’m not just saying this because of my ego, Michael. I promise. Look, I’m a woman, okay? That means that nobody goes around giving me praise automatically. I have to deal with crippling self-doubt, I did that all through culinary school. The men in my classes would just skate by and be fine, but I had to be perfect. So I’m not the kind of person who can’t take a little criticism. And I learned to figure out when I was being genuinely criticized and when it was bullshit. And this?” She tapped the newspaper. “This is a steaming on-fire pile of horseshit.”
“This critic is insanely respected,” I pointed out. “He’s worked all over the world and reviewed some of the best restaurants in Europe and on the east coast. People are going to listen to him.”
Stevie scoffed. “How is it that I have more faith in this than you do? How can you not believe in this place? It’s just one bad review and the numbers don’t lie. Our business is up. We’re getting more customers, more reservations. You said it yourself, by the end of the year we could be in the green.”
“And this critic says that we’ll be lucky to be open at all by the end of the year.”
“He’s just one fucking person.”
“One person that people respect and listen to. Thousands of people read his reviews. The whole city is seeing this article this morning. And God knows how many people out of the city are reading it. People in Los Angeles, New York, all over. The restaurant world is going to know about this. Possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. And because of that? We’re going to lose business. A critic’s review can make or break your restaurant.”
“This is the 21st century, Michael! People have Yelp! They have so many others ways to speak up, critics are just one voice among many. One bad review against a bunch of good ones isn’t going to stop people from coming.”
“But we haven’t had a ton of good reviews, Stevie!” I laid my hands down on the desk, leaning in. “Listen. If we’d been getting a bunch of good reviews for a bit, that would be one thing. But look us up! The last few months have just been panning us, ever since Theo left it’s been bad. So for us to briefly pick up, but then get a bad review from a critic? Yeah, that’s going to take out a chunk of our business right when we can least afford it.”
Stevie grabbed the newspaper, balling it up and tossing it at the small garbage can I kept by the side of my desk. “I won’t ever believe that what he’s saying is true. I know the truth, I know that my food is good, and I know that the customers like it.”
“Not all of them, clearly. This guy wasn’t satisfied.”
“And you’re running scared.” Stevie folded her arms. “I honestly can’t believe it. I always looked up to you and your being a person of principle, and here you are, ready to, what, go back to Theo’s menu? Is that what you want?”
I took a deep breath. I knew that she wasn’t going to like this, and I tried not to think about how well she knew me if she already had a damn good guess about what I was planning.
“If we would just add in a few old items from the menu, the most popular items…”
“What?” she shook her head. “No, no way.”
“We could make them with the local fresh ingredients…”
“Michael, are you even listening to yourself? If we backtrack now not only will we lose customers since those dishes weren’t good and didn’t fucking work, but we’ll look like we have no conviction! We’ll look like we’re ready to change the menu on a whim, the second that someone says that we’re wrong, and that’s no fucking way to run a business. Businesses that stay with the same shit forever will die, sure, you have to fucking adapt. But businesses that are constantly rebranding and changing to try and capture their audience, they fucking fail too!”
I hated to let her get to me, to get my temper up, but she did. Stevie was a brilliant cook, and a smart person, but she was also young and just starting out. Who’d been running a business for a decade, her or me?
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I snapped, a growl rumbling at the base of my throat. “You’re just out of culinary school. I’m the owner of the restaurant, not you, and I’m going to make final decisions on things. I know how this all actually works, not you.”
“Oh, this that it?” Stevie put her hands on her hips. “That’s how the fucking land lies? Fine! If you think that you can do such a good job with this, then why haven’t you managed to get your restaurant out of the ground in the three years since Theo left, huh? Face it, you couldn’t handle this without a good chef. You need a partner in this, and you just sank into despair after Theo and Virginia screwed you over and I am trying, I am really fucking trying to do everything I can to help you because I believe in you, and in this restaurant, and I want to work here, but really, Michael? You were failing on your own, you were drowning, you need me! So don’t go pulling that high and mighty bullshit with me, it ain’t gonna fly!”
“And don’t you go pulling your own high and mighty bullshit, young lady.”
Stevie’s eyes went wide in shock, then narrowed. “Do not ever,” she growled, “ever use my age against me like that. You are not my father, and you have never, ever treated me like I was too young or like I was a child. That was the number one thing I respected about you. I’m an adult, I am old enough to be treated like an adult, I will not have you pulling age rank on me. Especially not after you’ve fucked me!”
She had a good point there, actually. I couldn’t exactly pull age rank on someone that I was sleeping with, because sleeping with her implied that I found her mature and old enough to be my equal. And I did—I didn’t think of her as a child anymore. In fact, I was shocked at how much she’d grown in just three years, going from a child to an adult and blowing me out of the water in the process.
But did experience mean nothing anymore? Was she just going to say move aside, old man?
“That’s rich coming from you,” I said, my temper getting the better of me. “You’re basically telling me that I’m a useless old man who needs to move aside for the younger generation and get with the times.”
“That is not what I’m saying, and you’re a fucking idiot if that’s what you’re hearing. I’m telling you that you need a partner and that you’re in a slump. That’s not the same fucking thing at all!”
I didn’t want to fight with her, I genuinely didn’t. But she was just so goddamn stubborn and opinionated. Honestly that was part of why I was so drawn
to her. I loved that fire in her and that passion. But now it was working against me. And I could be a pretty damn stubborn and hotheaded person myself, so…
“And you need to accept the fact that just because you know a lot doesn’t mean that your age works against you. You still have a lot to learn and I’m still the boss of this place and so what I say goes, all right?”
Stevie snorted. “Well you’re welcome to replace me if you think that you can find someone better. I know that my menu is fucking good, and my cooking is fucking good, and it’s definitely fucking better than Theo’s bullshit pretentious-ass mess. You want to dick around and jump every time someone says boo? Try to recreate what Theo did ten fucking years ago? Fine. But leave me out of it.”
She practically ripped off her chef’s jacket, tossing it onto the chair, and then stormed out the door.
Shit.
I collapsed into my own chair on the other side of the desk. Her chef’s jacket seemed to mock me. I didn’t want to fight with Stevie, far from it, but God, dammit. I couldn’t have my business in the shitter either and she had to see reason.
What the fuck was I supposed to do?
18
Stevie
It was two weeks since my fight with Michael, and it was finally my day off. I took Mondays off since they’re the slowest days in the restaurant industry. Everyone was back at work from the weekend, busy and rushing, and nobody wanted to go out or anything afterwards.
Everybody enjoyed their days off, no matter how much they might love their job, but for me it was extra welcome. I was relieved to get out of the kitchen in a way that I almost never was. I would’ve left the city if I could have, just to get away from it all.
Best Friend's Daddy (Forever Daddies Book 3) Page 12