Of course I got the shit from the director!
The worst of my candidates were those who had a beard. Here I noticed the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. Some were resentful about me and the others were somewhat friendlier to me and did not give me much trouble. It could also be construed thus: It was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire with regard to the two parties.
I had given up complaining because they always told me I could of course go back to Germany. Therefore it was: Love it or leave it. But I didn't do them this favor.
The day of my revenge came.
Two of my sous-chefs left the hotel to start working in the second hotel of the same company. I was told to appoint two new sous-chefs from the existing team. I took my own time and lo and behold, there were no more dirty tricks during the time I took for consideration.
And now came the kicker that the management, which was a Kuwaiti hotel chain, made me the Executive Chief for its two hotels. Now I was responsible for both hotels. Yet, I did not know what I wanted to do. I had enough trouble with one and now there were two!
Choosing my two new employees did not give me a headache, since I had already made a decision. They were two employees without beards.
I had very little time for Renate. Except that we had to move again, there were no news. The new apartment was not too far away, but in a nicer building. It was enormous with six rooms and a huge terrace and with two elevators, which went directly up into our apartment. With the one you rode up, and if you had bad luck, the other one just rode downward with the other elevator. In this way, you could miss one another. Or but there was such a situation, as I conjured up once: Once when I was weak and wanted to make it with our cleaning girl, who was ordered from the hotel, I heard the elevator at the large living room. Well, I put the girl quickly into the elevator, which went to the kitchen and sent her down. Once again I was lucky!
One day, Renate noticed that some of her clothes were missing from her clothes cabinet. From that day, the girl was not allowed to come any more for cleaning. Renate looked for her own cleaning lady, who was however much older than the one I had chosen. But I had Renate and did not need any adventure.
On my days off, we rented a car and drove to the Sinai. I had been able to sell my jeep. The joy of seeing our friends again was great. We stayed with Claude and Lisa and had a lot of fun. There was barbecue daily, since we did not have this luxury in Cairo. We missed Sinai and the desert with the mountains. But as the saying goes, you can't have it all!
After returning to Cairo, Renate also had to go back to her work in Germany. The time for traveling was not very safe because Iraq had declared war on Kuwait, had penetrated into the country and had occupied it. Since the two hotels for which I worked, belonged to a Kuwaiti company, the agitation was great even here, since 80% of the occupation was made up of Kuwaitis. I had never experienced such a higgledy-piggledy and hustle and bustle before.
Most of our guests were business people, especially in the new building, which had twenty floors and was a resident hotel. There were only long-term tenants. Day and night they besieged the restaurants and were always looking for news from the homeland.
The kitchen had to remain open 24 hours because the Kuwaitis were simply eating because of frustration. Television, telephone and food - that was all that was still important.
But after a month, things calmed down again and everything was normal again. My director once again had an idea, which we had to put into action. It had to be something special and become a "Chaine des Rotisseurs", the most difficult and most strictly evaluated dinner, which you could for a gourmet club. It was rated with points.
The hotel or the cuisine, which did not get at least eight points, was not allowed to speak of a gourmet dinner talk again. There was no restaurant evaluation assessment as for other assessments. Only this dinner is evaluated. But each chef wanted to get the full ten points at least for this dinner. It was the best advertisement for future events, weddings, company meals or other occasions.
The big hotel chains had a policy that either the chef was young and the F&B was older or vice versa. Thus the youthful urge complemented with seasoned experience.
So the director, the F&B Manager, two of my sous-chefs and I sat in the director's office, where we tinkered around with a menu card. Everyone had ideas, but eventually I had to decide whether that was doable with my cooks. We came to the decision that I had to fly to Germany and pick up some items from there. That was all right with me. This gave me the opportunity to see my family.
My shopping list was already a bit extravagant and I got these articles only in Frankfurt - and of course in any large city but for me Frankfurt was the better starting point. So I did not need a hotel and could stay with my family. Among other things, porcini mushrooms (preferably fresh but otherwise dried), fresh blue poppy, fresh saddle of venison, fresh Atlantic salmon, fresh trout, fresh cranberries and many other things that were not available in Egypt were on my list. There were various spices for manufacturing our sausages, spices for smoking processes for the hotels in-house spices for the in-house smokehouse for fish and sausage on the list. It was an interesting list.
Of course I got all products and had to buy a sheet steel box in order to keep the fresh meat and fish products cool with bags of dry ice. The transport costs alone were 800 DM. The purchase again was to the tune of over a thousand Deutschmark. My outward and return flight also cost 800 Marks. But I managed to take all my delicacies to the hotel unscathed.
The meal would definitely not be cheap! The members of the Rotisseurs paid but only a certain price. The difference below or above it was the problem of the hotel.
A dinner for the chaine of Rôtiseurs
As already mentioned, the dinner was a kind of promotion. The motto here was "doing things in a big way"!
So I motivated my chefs, who were scheduled for the dinner, with a bonus amount of money. If the dinner passed the test with ten points, each of them would get ten extra Egyptian pounds.
The appetizer consisted of stuffed duck breast roulade with a champagne-white pepper mousseline sauce. During the second course of the meal, there were problems. Since I have not got fresh porcini mushrooms, I had to switch to the dried mushrooms. And these had to be soaked before processing, which my chefs also did.
I had prepared a clear, golden yellow consommé. The dried, washed, boiled mushrooms arrived in a soup bowl, the consommé was poured over it and then put in soup bowls with a pastry covering and baked in the oven. That is how it is supposed to be done.
The third course consisted of a fish mousse from three different kinds of fish: Salmon / beetroot- red, trout / saffron-yellow and sole / natural white.
The fourth course was a gratinée made of cucumber juice and ginger.
The main dish was deer saddle with Crown Princess Potatoes, small pear-shaped croquette-masses with a stem of spaghetti, accompanied by fresh cranberries.
The dessert almost caused me to go to prison, since growing and import of blue poppy is prohibited in Egypt. I had five kilograms of it!
But a crazy hotel director should be of use for something. Through his connections with the police and customs, with his appearance in the airport, I was able to enter into Egypt with my sheet metal box with everything that was in it without problems.
That had been two days earlier. But now I had made a delicious dessert with the poppy. A Poppy Seed Parfait with marinated dates.
Not necessary to mention that all the sauces were made with the finest raw material. Personally, I was a "sauces-freak", so I always had the best sauces for everything that came on the table and that required a sauce.
I was horrified when I saw the pot with the consommé in the kitchen. Not a drop from it was missing, though the guests had already had the mushroom soup. After my investigation,
I found out that the boys had served the mushrooms with the soaking water, and the idiots had not seen the consommé, into which so much effo
rt had been put, although the put stood right beside the soaked mushrooms!
In spite of it all, only a small note was received that the mushroom consommé could have had a little bit more of salt. The mild criticism probably came because none of my guest had ever had a porcini mushroom soup before.
The Mini-Petit Fours, the homemade chocolates and pastries, which accompanied the Mocca, also received a good response.
The total evaluation of the dinner resulted in ten points and a plus!
We were all very proud of our work.
Soon my trial period of three months was over and I hoped that they would hand over the signed contract to me, despite some differences of opinion, sometimes with the management and sometimes with my cooks. Even though working in the two hotels was very demanding for me, I enjoyed the job.
Very often I saw Ahmed in his "submarine" and Hannes, the rat, in the German restaurant. But as so often in my life, there were clouds and also storms in my life now and then, over my otherwise sunny existence.
My leprechaun, the one, which was on my left shoulder, wanted to speak to me again and again. But I ignored him. I simply ignored him.
My daughter Maruscha had announced that she was arriving and I picked her up from the airport. It was a true joy for both of us. We had a lot to talk about, which sometimes took the whole night. She had not brought her husband out of concern that I would not understand him. He was a junkie, but a very dear guy. His name was Leo and now her surname was the same as his. So she had decided for his name. I accepted that and called her from now on also by her new name.
I had not completely got rid of my pig dog on my left shoulder because he came back. It all started innocently enough.
It was exactly one day after the three months trial period that the hotel and I had imposed on one another. The fixed contract for two years thus was valid, that had to be only remembered.
Maruscha had a day of bathing in the pool in her holidays. From six o’clock in the morning, I was already in my cubbyhole, as I called my kitchen office. Every morning I wrote the list for the people in the depot and sent a cook to pick up the things from the storehouse.
Of course I didn't always check what and if everything that I had ordered also really came or were in the storeroom. Normally my cooks complained about the individual items, if they didn't get something.
But this was just another tit-for-tat response from one of them with the beard.
The buffet was set up and I checked if everything was in order. I had chicken on the menu and I saw no such thing in any of the chafing dishes. Also my director, who had lived in Berlin and spoke German very well, had not noticed that the chicken was missing. It even got better, since there was also no spaghetti available and a guest wanted to have scrambled eggs, which were also not available because was not a single egg in the whole hotel. Furthermore, there were no salads, which were in the menu card. This evolved into a major disaster. A disaster was going to burst in on me!
I immediately went to the office of our storekeeper with assistants. I found out there that these items that I had ordered, were not in stock. I wanted to know why there were no chicken or just simply eggs, spaghetti and many other things. I was told that the suppliers had been changed and they had not yet delivered the items. Why had I not been told about this or informed the cook, who had brought the items?
He said that the chef knew about it but had not told me anything.
I was seething with anger, calling these morons by all kinds of insulting words in Arabic that I could think of and that was quite a lot!
It was all too much for me, to work with such a horde of complete idiots everyday!
There was a note on my desk that I should come immediately to the Director's office. The word “immediately!” was underlined twice and written in German. I suspected nothing but trouble.
I knew my Director and his fits of rage. How would I be right when confronted with the fury of the director! Now I heard my director tell me all the words that had occurred to me earlier for the people in the storeroom. He made me responsible for everything.
He said that even if there was something unavailable in the storeroom, I was to be blamed for it.
If spaghetti or chicken or just simply eggs were missing, I should have ensured that they had been obtained, I was told.
I asked the director if I was responsible for the storeroom
or storekeeper - he said that I was responsible for it. So I proposed to him to throw out the storekeeper, get a new chef for the kitchen and leave the storeroom to me.
And then the answer came that I did not have to go anywhere, neither to the storeroom nor to the kitchen anymore! I was fired!
I swallowed a couple of times and said to him that it was alright with me that I did not need to be with such a bunch of fools. To top it off, I told him that I also meant the whole management included.
I said that he was also only an Egyptian with the difference that I had expected a little more intelligence from him.
That hit home.
He began to throw a fit and wanted to catch hold of me by the collar. But the others in the room, which became filled by then, stopped him. I went into my office, packed my bags and left the hotel. I immediately drove to other hotel and got my things from there as well and then went to my apartment right away to vacate it. One of our hotel security personnel was standing in front of the apartment's door already and he had the responsibility of informing that I had to leave the apartment at once, and he meant it literally.
The poor guy couldn’t do anything about it, so I obeyed and began to pack.
I asked him to go into the hotel and tell my daughter at the pool that she should come over. He trotted off and came back with Maruscha. She could hardly believe what I told her.
Luckily, it was a furnished apartment.
But it was a fiasco, if you had this apartment paid for by your employer. Never again I would take up a job, where the hotel was also the landlord. It was quite okay to pay for my accommodation, which was normal in this sector. But in future, I would also be the tenant so that I could move out when I wanted or didn't want to, when such a crazy boss called the shots.
Maruscha and I moved into a tourist hotel, which is not so expensive. Although it is fortunately the fifth of the month and I had received my salary already, I had to use it sparingly.
The next morning I threw my friend, the Rat, out of his bed and explained my situation to him. He was also not thrilled but said that he knew the hotel's director from the time in Berlin. He had been a waiter there in a large nightclub. He had some certificates made by specialized printers. This meant in plain language, that he only had set up references. But he got this job as hotel director through references of people and certificates. Now many things became clear to me.
That was the reason my director always had so many people in his office, because they were all his buddies, whom he needed for support. His specialists knew what he didn't know. The ass had never done a management course or anything like that. That war clear, that if someone came too close to him was fired. A very simple recipe for people, who have no idea of a matter but had power.
Hannes consoled me and gave me great hopes for a compensation, since the contract was valid.
He should have sent me three written warnings - that was the law here in Egypt.
Hannes told me that there were a few strict laws in Egypt to protect the employees. But I was not an Egyptian and was also not a customary local cook.
I was an "Agnabie" or "Khawaga", that was how foreigners were called. Along with Hannes, I consulted a lawyer and asked him for support, which he assured me.
This was a completely clear matter and I was to insist on the remaining payment as per my contract. This meant that the hotel had to pay me a compensation for almost two years. My monthly salary x 24, which would be the total amount, which I was entitled to. I could not believe that there was something like that. Here in Egypt such rights for an employ
ee?
But the lawyer, a specialist in labor law, assured me that it was so.
So I gave him all the power of attorney, which he needed to for an indictment and a trial. Since I still did not have an address, we agreed that I would be registered for one month at his office, until I had a fixed address. So that would become a lengthy process. Why make a request only after a month? The value of the dispute was extremely high and so was the payment amount for the lawyer that had to be paid immediately. I was offended, to say the least. In other words, I was livid and I vented this out on Hannes.
He was the culprit because he had brought me to this crappy hotel and its director. Hannes tried to calm me, promising me that he would get me a new good job. I berated Hannes because he had not told me that the job was connected with two hotels and also with such two big ones.
My request not to Hannes was that he gets me a job in a small hotel with a reasonable management. Hannes promised and I got myself a rental car, loaded our possessions and drove to Maruscha to the Sinai, all right, on to the Mount Sinai.
I simply cannot get used to the idea that it was "on" and not "in the Sinai". The Sinai is not an island of course, in that case you would be driving "on” it.
But it was not easy to implement the plan; the circumstances were against us. It was not possible to come away without complications from this Cairo.
We had hardly covered half on the highway to the Suez, our Japanese rental car's engine went on a strike.
After examining, I saw that a streak of oil marked our way on the side of the road. It was clear to me that this had larger consequences. A piston had gone looking for a hold in the fresh and had found it. What should I do? There were not many options. The problem was just that it began to be dark. What I could do here on the highway with so many idiots, who were driving on it!
Option one was to ask a small truck or a pick-up driver, to take us in tow and either drive back to Cairo or to take us to Suez.
Option number two was that Maruscha remained with the broken down car and I hitchhiked back to Cairo and drove back in another car from the car rental company. But I ruled out this option immediately because leaving Maruscha alone in the dark here on the open stretch of road was a complete "no go". I noticed that some of the cabs were making their way in both directions with and without passengers. So option three was possible, to take a taxi, reload the things and to drive either only up to Suez, back to Cairo or up to Sharm el-Sheikh. Everything would cost time and money.
My Dream to Be Free Page 48