This untenable situation finally came to a head when Mehtab handed me Claude’s payroll records. In the year he had been on staff, Le Chien Méchant had paid Claude seventy thousand euros in salary, plus three times that amount in various social security and pension taxes. Le Chien Méchant still owed him ten weeks’ paid vacation.
Claude was not a waiter, but a scam artist.
I called the Lyon restaurants, spoke to the owners, and they finally confessed Claude had done the same thing to them, and in the end they had written him glowing reviews simply to get him off their backs. So I told Jacques to fire him. And he did.
But then the boy returned—with his union representative.
“It’s very simple, Chef Haji. The young man’s dismissal is not legal.”
Mehtab used all the poetic flourishes of Urdu to curse the union representative’s entire family lineage. Jacques erupted in French.
But I held up my hand and hushed them both.
“Explain yourself, Monsieur LeClerc. This man is a cheat. A crook. How can this not be grounds for legal dismissal?”
Claude looked entirely serene as usual, and wisely didn’t say a word, but let his union representative speak for him. “Your allegations are unfair and unwarranted,” LeClerc said mildly, making a steeple of his hands and thoughtfully pursing his lips. “And perhaps more to the point, completely without proof.”
“That’s not true,” Jacques interjected. “I have documented very carefully how Claude deliberately drags his feet on assignments, how even simple tasks—like setting a table—takes him four times as long as it takes the others.”
“Claude is not the swiftest of workers, we concede, but that is not sufficient grounds to fire him, particularly since your own records commend him as a worker of the ‘highest professionalism.’ Non, non, Monsieur Jacques. This is not right what you have done. He took so much time to execute your orders simply because of this professionalism you previously commended. Tell me, were you ever dissatisfied with the quality of his work, after he completed the assignments? Was the work somehow sloppily done? I could not find any complaints in his file about quality of execution, simply about the amount of time it took him to complete his work—”
“Well, yes, that’s true—”
“So, in a court of law, we could convincingly make the argument that it was precisely because he cared so much about the quality of his work that he took longer than the others—”
“This is outrageous,” Jacques said, his face an alarming beetroot tint. “We all know exactly what Claude is doing and what this is all about. He is holding us ransom. He inflated his work sheets. Monsieur LeClerc, you are colluding with a crook. I cannot believe you are taking his side.”
The burly LeClerc smashed his fist on the table. “Take that back, Monsieur Jacques! You have fired Claude illegally and now you are attacking my personal integrity to cover up your tracks. Well, you won’t get away with it. The laws are very clear in these matters. You must reinstate Claude immédiatement. Or, if you want to release him, you must negotiate a proper severance package as stipulated under the law, not the paltry sum you gave him yesterday.”
I looked over at Mehtab, who was furiously making calculations on a pad.
“And if we refuse?” she asked.
“Then the union will be forced to bring you before the Conseil de prud’hommes on charges of wrongful dismissal, and it will be horrible. This I guarantee you. We will make sure the press is in attendance at the tribunal and that your restaurant is rightly exposed as an ‘exploiter of workers.’ ”
“This is blackmail.”
“Call it what you like. We are simply making sure our union members are not taken advantage of by you propriétaire, and that you pay them what they are entitled to by law.”
I stood up.
“I’ve heard enough. Give them what they want, Mehtab.”
“Hassan! That’s two years’ pay plus vacation. It will cost us a hundred and ninety thousand euros to get rid of the little pig!”
“I don’t care. I’ve had enough. Claude is stirring up bad blood with our decent staff, and if we keep him, it will cost us much more in the long term. Pay him. He’s figured out all the angles.”
Claude was smiling sweetly, and, I think, just about to thank me for the generous settlement, when I spoke deliberately and quietly to Monsieur LeClerc.
“Now get that piece of dirt out of my restaurant.”
Paul Verdun was among the first of the top-rated French chefs to truly understand that the economics of our business had changed entirely, and that the great restaurants of France were, like cancer patients, living on a drip of borrowed time. The French state had, in all its wisdom, finally made it impossible for us to survive a downturn. The thirty-five-hour workweek; the pension liabilities and dozens of “social” taxes; the incomprehensible bureaucratic filings requiring a half-dozen accountants and lawyers to complete. The rules and restrictions and added costs, they all pushed us to the brink that winter.
Paul, of course, had seen all these financial problems looming on the horizon well before the rest of us, and he had fought back well before they had reached their catastrophic tipping point. In particular he studied the French fashion houses that had gone through a similar shakeout fifty years earlier and he learned their lessons well: he noticed, for example, the labor-intensive haute couture, at the top of the fashion pyramid, built world-class reputations on their innovative designs, but few women in the modern age could actually afford or bought these costly creations. Result: the haute couture ateliers all lost money.
It was instead the ready-to-wear lines and perfume licenses further down the pyramid that made money for the fashion houses. The astute fashion impresarios—such as Bernard Arnault over at LVMH—effectively used such product lines to monetize the valuable reputations established by the money-losing haute couture operations at the top of their business empires.
Paul intuitively understood that Le Coq d’ Orwas the culinary equivalent of Christian Dior’s haute couture, and he similarly moved down the gastronomic pyramid to make money. He cut licensing deals in everything from linens to olive oil. Paul showed us how it could be done and he was quite simply the entrepreneurial inspiration for a generation of us lesser chefs trying to build our own gastronomic businesses during this difficult age.
So you can understand why I was so shocked when I finally understood Paul’s success was an illusion. He was both bankrupt and dead. It almost suggested—even if no one yet was admitting it—that there was no longer a place on French soil for haute cuisine, as we previously knew it.
And if I clung to any delusional fantasies about my own restaurant, then the severance package we paid Claude efficiently tore the veil from my eyes. The restaurant’s bénéfice the previous year—net profit, that is—was all of 87 euros on a turnover of 4.2 million euros. The year before that Le Chien Méchant actually lost 2,200 euros. Now forced to fork over 190,000 euros to Claude—something that hadn’t been budgeted for—we were destined to have a big loss at the end of the year. Here was the bottom line: Le Chien Méchant’sbreak-even point had just jumped to a 93 percent occupancy rate; our occupancy rate was running at an 82 percent average for the year.
So I suddenly understood how Paul had started down the slippery slope of quietly borrowing money to bridge year-end shortfalls: a little here, a little there, because next year will be better. And if there was any chance I might not fully understand the implications of where Le Chien Méchant was heading, there was always my sister to remind me, at the restaurant—where she did the accounts—or at the flat, where she lived in the back room.