G-E-T S-O-M-E, or Comeuppance is a Bitch

So, I've got a buddy who's a pretty good cook in his own right. We both finished culinary school around the same time and have taken similar paths, thus far, in our careers. That is to say, both of us have tried to work for well respected chefs, in solid kitchens; while shying away from the dying world of "Haute Cuisine," with the likes of Per Se, Daniel, Le Cirque, &c. This isn't so much "his story," as it is, a story about him...
A few months ago, he reaches out to me and asks if we can get a drink after service. I didn't think much of it at the time, just figured he'd had a shitty service, and wanted a sympathetic ear to bounce his frustration off of. By the time I got to the bar, he was already there, a thousand yard look in his eyes and a glass of Eagle Rare in front of him. After we exchanged pleasantries, he wasted little time in getting to the point.
"So, you guys need a fuckin' line cook, or what?"
As it happens, he had; that very same night; been fired from the restaurant he had recently given notice too.
To hear him tell it, they got a new chef at the restaurant and the guy was, for lack of a better word, a prick. He apparently came in, badmouthed the way things used to be done and told the staff on his second first official night there, “if you guys don’t want to be here, let’s find that out now.” Now, that’s all well and good, but I’d say it’s kinda tough for someone to tell whether or not their boss is going to turn into an alcoholic psycho after working with them for about eight hours…but I’m jumping ahead.
Apparently, their new chef had no idea what he was actually getting himself into, had a big chip on his shoulder and didn’t know how to expedite tickets. This means that servers would regularly stop by the pass to alert him that teams were ready for their second courses; but that the information was never passed on to the people who actually needed to be cooking the food. So my buddy tells me that the entire kitchen staff sized this guy up and started talking about putting in their two week’s notice; but that no one actually pulled the trigger. Then one night, my buddy got kicked off the line. I don’t know why, he didn’t say why; but called it, “a whole bunch of bullshit.” He said he put in his notice the very next day and three days later, there he was, sitting next to me getting drunk on bourbon.
So I asked him to back up and say that there must have been some signs leading up to the point that brought us to those bar stools. He said no, but “get this. When that asshole canned my ass, he followed me outside and got in my face!”
This in-and-of-itself isn’t all that surprising. Kitchens are high stress environments, and sometimes people say things in a “heat of battle,” I get that. I can even understand a chef yelling at a former employee; even though at that point just let it go...
This guy didn’t let it go. My buddy told me this prick got in his face and apparently called him: “a whiny little bitch,” a “punk,” a “little fucker who should rethink the profession,” “to be careful” and apparently even went so far as to stick a finger in his chest and ask, “do you want a fucking piece of me?” I was especially pissed by all of this, although I can only imagine how my buddy felt. The thing that I didn’t say that night, but have told mutual friends when we’ve discussed the story is that it was especially uncool of this guy to threaten my buddy’s future employment by telling him to rethink the profession and to watch out. Those things, to me: sound like the kind of things you say to someone before you start badmouthing them all over town…
Long story short, I talked to my buddy about a week ago, to see how his job search was going and he said it was going slowly, but that he had been given a bit of good news. “Remember that asshole who fired me? They fired him about a week and a half ago!”
While I’m never happy to hear about someone losing their job, I told my buddy it couldn’t have happened to a better person than that guy….


Special thanks to my buddy (Name Redacted) for letting me tell this story.


Next up: There Are No Darlings Here...

And maybe an Banana Pudding recipe.