A Pastry Tale (for Boxing Day)
It's story time, and still Boxing Day in some parts of the US.
Recent rumblings about treating your customers right, why some folks don't, and the subtle slope between happy customers and captured customers remind me of one of my favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant employees, Phil. He loves his customers: even the ones who ask for off-menu items, even the ones can't properly describe what they really want, and especially the ones who likes what he cooks and tells their friends about it.
I won't name this hole-in-the-wall, because it's a front for some flavor of organized crime. I'm not sure what crime syndicate it is, and whenever I ask Phil he gets really sheepish about it. Still, the food is good, and Phil is proud of what he and his small staff cook. The most recent time I asked about the owners, however, he told me about how chefs often work at establishments with ties of some sort to organized crime. He then went on a bit longer.
Phil started in by telling me he used to be an excellent pastry chef for a one-Michelin-star restaurant. Its owners used it to launder money from their more nefarious operations, but kept their laundering businesses as clean as possible to avoid IRS or other law-enforcement scrutiny. You don't get a Michelin star without having very happy customers. The restaurant had incredible wait staff, bussing that was simultaneously invisible and highly responsive, and cuisine from world-class chefs. The restaurant management and staff also believed firmly it could get even better, adding a second star perhaps, through an assortment of ways. They were highly motivated to try new foods, new recipes, and new dining experiences. Phil noted that not long after he joined, they doubled the restaurant size with minimal disrutption to the dining environment. He noted he designed his pastry station to fit nicely into either the expanded kitchen, or the original smaller one. They replaced a wall with a glass pane that allowed folks to see the chefs at work.
Phil's chocolate crinkle cookies, listed on the menu as Knockout Cookies, were his most famous pastry. He and his staff developed them to test the pastry station's capabilities, and they were yummy. Soon the other chefs and the staff started eating them. Some of the staff had friends at other restaurants, and so the Knockout Cookies would sometimes be eaten behind closed doors at other restaurants. Any new staff that showed up at Phil's old restaurant would be asked to try a Knockout Cookie, and they usually liked it enough to take some home with them. Phil thought maybe Knockout Cookies could be sold to other restaurants, the way the donut chain AnyDonut did with their donuts.
Many more such projects were in the middle of being planned or tested when the nearly-absentee owners found themselves unwittingly in a turf war against a more dangerous syndicate, which they lost. All of the protection rackets, illicit activities, and money-laundering businesses became part of this new, more dangerous, syndicate.
The new owners of the ONE-MICHELIN-STAR restaurant wanted to cut costs, because more money could be laundered that way. This cost-cutting plan irrtated the staff and more than a few quit immediately or not very long after the turf war ended. Those that stayed behind either fell in with the new syndicate, or naively thought that as long as money was being laundered, they could continue with their new cuisine, recipes, or dining experiences. As if to dispel such notions, the new syndicate even spray-painted the glass pane red!
Another one of the cost-cutting measures was to reduce the in-house pastry selection. The Knockout Cookies, in spite of their devoted fans, were eliminated. Adding insult to injury for Phil, the restaurant started outsourcing chocolate cookies from AnyDonut. Phil was pissed, and scribbled on all of the menus: crossing out Knockout Cookies and writing AnyDonut Chcolate Cookies. This earned him and the pastry staff a meeting with a remaining manager, nose brown with sucking up to the new syndicate. The new manager even threatened a visit from an underboss.
Not long after that half the pastry staff quit, including Phil. It took him way too long to figure out what had happened while he wandered around for any cook or chef job he could find. Turns out AnyDonut was not only a supplier, but they were ALSO a protection-money payer. It was likely more profitable to use AnyDonut since they were paying protection money anyway, and the new syndicate had no interested in self-sabotaging their protection money.
Phil finished, shook his head, and said, "It didn't take long to lose the star." He then slipped me a Knockout Cookie, gratis, and whispered, "I still bake and eat 'em at home."
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(Inspired by BDHA's parable.)
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