Turn up the Heat

on the new staff, okay? Nothing too awful, and it’s all in fun. So when Dig and I worked with her, we made a batch of cayenne cookies one time. Chefs cook for the staff a lot as a way to say thank you for their work and all that, but this time we baked up a bunch of nasty cookies. Spicy. Everyone else who ate them got mad at us, sure, but they eventually laughed and didn’t hold a grudge. Leandra threw a hissy fit and started telling us what a bunch of juvenile assholes we all were, and then she told the owner. Pardon my language, ma’am. Not that he was going to fire us or anything, but still. Then the weird thing was, the next time a new girl was hired, Leandra got her a soda and laced the straw with Tabasco sauce. Leandra laughed so hard she almost choked. That’s the kind of person she was.” Lefty bit into a scallop and took a swig of his beer.
    Digger jumped in. “She might have been good at her job, but she was the first person to point a finger at someone else. Like, at a restaurant, the chef’s food cost gets blown to shit from things like bad servers who take forever with their tables or let food sit out so long that we can’t serve it anymore. People make mistakes with orders, and food has to get thrown out. Stuff like that. Leandra didn’t do that, but she had no problem shouting about who fouled what up. You just don’t do that. Maybe you bitch about it with a few other people, but Leandra was the one who was always ratting people out to the GM or the owner. Again, not that she deserved to die for that, but she wasn’t liked much. Damn, this swordfish is kickin’!” Digger licked mango salsa off his lips. “Oh, sorry, Josh. Maybe I shouldn’t mention swordfish. Don’t want to give you flashbacks.”
    “Thanks for the sensitivity. I think I’ll be okay,” Josh assured him.
    “Josh, was Leandra like that at Simmer?” I asked him.
    “Yes and no. I mean, she and Blythe hated each other, but I think that was because they are so similar in some ways. They both get a lot of attention from the guys and all that and they’re both pretty outspoken. Were, I guess. Were. But, yeah, Leandra was good at pushing people’s buttons. Just a general snottiness and bitchiness. But once she and Gavin started dating, she calmed down a little.”
    “He must have seen something in her, though,” I said. “Leandra must’ve had some good qualities. Otherwise, Gavin would’ve dumped her right away. He seems like a normal enough guy. I can’t imagine he’d put up with constant awful behavior.”
    Or, I wondered, had Gavin discovered that Leandra wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was?
    “I don’t think Gavin knew about everything she did,” Josh said. “Like, Leandra called Isabelle ‘rat girl’ all the time because she used to live on the streets, but I don’t think she said that in front of her boyfriend and boss.”
    Now I was pissed. It was one thing to call Blythe flatchested but quite another thing to call Isabelle “rat girl.” Leandra was a bitch! Poor Isabelle! It ticked me off to think that I’d found her a job in Josh’s kitchen only to have her subjected to name-calling. “Didn’t you do anything?” I demanded.
    “There wasn’t much to do except tell her to lay off, which I did. But Isabelle has to learn to fight her own battles. And it’s not like we have an HR department.”
    That was true. Was it ever! Very few workplaces of any kind would have tolerated the kind of behavior that the chefs had just described. I couldn’t imagine that employees at Goldman Sachs, for instance, would be allowed to kick each other in the shins or lace straws with Tabasco in between managing assets. I’d spent the past year interning at the Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace. Although I was in the habit of referring to it as the BO, I’d actually learned a lot about handling inappropriate workplace conduct. In the world of restaurants, however, conduct that would have been outrageous elsewhere was considered normal. There was an unspoken rule about paying dues: You had to put up with abuse to prove yourself worthy of your position and to move up in the ranks. If you complained about how you were treated, you faced a serious uphill battle that you’d fight with little or no support. Restaurants run by big corporations didn’t allow that kind of hazing, but it flourished in small independent establishments, which, sadly enough, were often the