had all the answers. No matter what they threw at me, I was ready.
"What kind of hours would you expect to put in?" I knew that one.
"Whatever it takes. I'll put up a pup tent in the kitchen for the first few
months . . . After that? I usually work ten to ten . . . at least. Six, seven
days, whatever's needed."
"What would you say your strengths and weaknesses are?" I'd fielded
this one before, neatly handling it with a wry but self-deprecating
assessment of my finer qualities. "Why are you leaving your current
position?" Snore. I knocked that out of the park, knowing full well that to
slag on my most recent employer would not speak well of me. I
embarked on an articulate dissertation on "honest, straightforward
American food".
"What kind of positive changes could you bring to the table?"
I was doing fine. Every answer brought smiles and nods, the rote answers
falling trippingly and amusingly off my tongue. Soon they were all
laughing. I larded my account of my hopes for the future with casual
references to owner-friendly buzzwords like "point-of-sale", "food cost
percent", "labor-intensive" and "more bang for the buck", careful to
slowly, almost accidentally reveal that I was a serious, experienced chef,
a reasonable man—good-tempered, reliable—the sort of guy a fifty-five-
year-old Scottish steakhouse owner could talk to, spend time with—a
realist, a journeyman professional—without airs, illusion or pretense.
I finished a sentence and smiled at the two men, pleased with myself at
how things had gone so far. When bossman asked how much money I
was looking for, I took a chance, said 85,000 dollars plus family health
plan—I was a happily married man after all—and the guy didn't blink,
he just jotted the number down on the corner of my résumé with a
sharpened pencil and said, "That's do able." I kept the conversation
moving, more than anything else trying to avoid the obvious—that sure,