Joe was halfway down the last page of his inventory list. Now that it had been a few weeks, he was getting used to his new kitchen, pantry and walk-in freezer. When he'd first purchased the restaurant, the place had been in disarray.
The previous establishment had been a shitty diner that served reheated frozen food and where the level of culinary knowledge across the entire staff was slightly higher than that of a college kid whose diet consisted of KD and ramen. The end result was that nothing was set up the way it should be. Being a chef, and running a restaurant took a lot of different skills. Obviously, you needed to know how to make good food, but what most people didn't realize was that that was only a small part of it. Once the recipes were perfected, the lion's share of the work was in figuring out how to get tons and tons of orders out of the kitchen quickly.
In order to do that, a good restaurant's kitchen was like a factory assembly line. Every single thing had its place. It was within reach and it was ready to be used right when it would be needed. Food was not prepared as you ordered it. It was cooked when you ordered it, but the prep work was done long before that. A good mise-en-place was the difference between a good cook and a great cook. Joe took great pride in preparing his kitchen for service, so that when that dinner rush hit, there were no surprises and his line cooks could focus on churning out good food, and not on putting out fires.
Granted, those dinner rushes hadn't exactly been stressful for the line cooks yet, but things were slowly picking up. It was one in a thousand restaurants that took off right out of the gate, the rest of them started slow, built a customer base and grew from there, mainly from word of mouth and good reviews. Eventually, if you got lucky as an owner, you would hit a tipping point, and the restaurant would become a local sensation.
Joe was still far from that tipping point, but he was seeing his dinner numbers slowly creep up. If things kept going the way they were going, in a couple of weeks, he could hire another line cook, which would free him up from having to both run the restaurant and work the line every night.
In truth, Joe probably could have already hired that cook, but it would have meant stretching his already tight finances tighter, and it also would have meant accepting that he was no longer a true cook. Sure, he could call himself a chef, because he still set the menu and managed the kitchen, but he would not actually be cooking food, and that was what had gotten him into this business so many years ago. That was before he decided he was tired of working for owners who knew nothing about food, and who collected all the profits, while he put in all the work.
Only now did he realize how much more work he needed to put in to make his own restaurant profitable.
Joe's thought process was interrupted by a sound coming from the front of the restaurant.
"Hello?" Joe called.
No one else was supposed to be working tonight.
"Hey!" came a female voice from the other side of the kitchen door just moments before it swung open to reveal the voice's owner.
"Janice. What are you doing here? The restaurant's closed tonight," Joe said, stating the obvious.
"I forgot to write down my schedule before I left on Sunday, so I was just coming to check it. I wouldn't want to miss a shift, Boss," she said, a broad smile on her face.
Janice was Joe's hostess, and simultaneously one of the best and worst things that had happened to him since opening the restaurant. Janice had showed up and applied for a job during the first week that the restaurant was open. At the time, Joe thought that he was in way over his head, and was within one mental breakdown of giving up and selling the restaurant that he had only so recently purchased.
He had been managing the front of house staff, the kitchen staff, working the line, managing inventory, and dealing with all the administrative work that came from owning the place. Something had to give.
That's when Janice showed up. Janice was a college student. She told Joe she was taking a year off school. She wanted to work for a semester to save up some money, and then go abroad for a semester, all while she figured out what she wanted to do.
When she first applied, Joe told her that he wasn't hiring, but she was persistent, and he had finally accepted to give her a job, if only because he didn't have the energy to argue, and because hostesses didn't make that much anyway.
In her first week, Janice had turned so much around that Joe wondered how he had survived without her. She was not only an excellent hostess - customers loved her - she also had experience waiting tables, and could pitch in and help the wait staff when necessary. Plus, she was dependable. She was never late, nor did she ever miss a shift, and she would even cover for others when they missed their shifts.
As a general rule, when you worked in restaurants, you got used to working with less than dependable people. The younger ones did the jobs part time, and didn't care enough to take it seriously. The older ones had started off with those same bad habits and had never changed them. In Janice, though, he had an employee he could count on. It was only a matter of weeks before she started taking on more responsibilities, and was taking care of scheduling for the front of house, as well as other managerial duties that were above her pay grade. The moment it looked to Joe like he wasn't about to go bankrupt, he increased the girl's wages, lest she realize how important she was and decide to shop her talents around elsewhere.
That was the good side of Janice. The bad side was only a bad side depending on how you looked at the situation. Janice was twenty years old. There was a little more than a ten year age gap between her and Joe.
She was responsible and dependable, but she was also free spirited. One only needed to take a look at her to see it. In addition to a nearly permanent mischievous smile, her hair often had a streak of a different colour in it. She wore things in her ears that made holes that one could put a pinky finger through. Joe had learned that those were called spacers. She also had multiple tattoos, although none were in places that customers could see.
The only reason Joe knew about the tattoos was because of the part of Janice's personality that went along with the free spirited look. Janice was something of a tease. She wore tight clothes and low cut shirts. The girl was tiny. She couldn't have been taller than 5'2, if that, and Joe knew she had never seen a third digit on a scale.
Her figure was almost boyish. Almost. There was still just enough woman to drive a man crazy, especially when someone dressed the way Janice did. When she was working, she would dress professionally in pencil skirts and blouses. Unfortunately, both, although professional, were insanely sexy. Her blouses were always buttoned to a point that straddled the line between appropriately sexy and scandalous. One could always make out just enough of the swell of her small, but perky breasts, but never saw so much as a hint of her bra. She did such a masterful job of not crossing that line that Joe never felt he could justify bringing it up.
Her skirts hugged her tight ass so that it removed any delusions of boyishness. While it was nowhere near as round or as full as his wife's behind, Janice's ass was what teen fantasies were made of.
What made all this worse was that Janice took every opportunity to tease her boss.
On this particular night, when she was off duty, she wasn't in her usual pencil skirt and white blouse uniform. Instead, she was in cut off jean shorts, a tank top and flip flops. The cut off jean shorts rode low, and were cut off high, making them absurdly tiny. The tank top, stopped just below her belly button, exposing a portion of her midriff between the top and the bottom that gave Joe a glimpse of one of those tattoos that he rarely saw when customers were in the establishment. It was just inside her right hip bone. There wasn't enough of it showing for Joe to discern what it was, but whatever it was, it looked like it dipped below the waist of those jean shorts to a significant degree. That meant it was close to...
Joe immediately tried to banish thoughts of the young girl sitting in a tattoo artist's chair, a needle dangerously close to her most private of areas. This was the part of Janice that he had trouble with. Even when she was being completely innocent, she managed to cloud his mind.
"Oh, go ahead," Joe said. "The schedule's hanging in the office. You know where it is."
"Thanks, Boss," she said, with a smile, as she bounced into the office.
Joe shook his head and returned to his inventory. He was almost done, and he could get home to his wife. He really hoped she hadn't finished that bottle of wine.
He moved to the salad station, and bent down to open the cold storage under the prep table, so he could count the vegetables in there. He jotted numbers down besides each veggie and straightened, as he did, his back bumped into something soft.
"Oops. Sorry, about that," Janice said.
Joe jumped. He had not heard her get so close to him.
"Didn't mean to startle you, Boss."
"No, it's okay. I just didn't hear you. Got your schedule? Everything okay?"
"Yeah. Pretty much same as last week, so all good. Can I help you out here?"
"No, no. I'm almost done anyway. You go on and enjoy your night off. I'm sure you have better things to do."
The cute twenty year old flashed him another smile. Her white teeth contrasted beautifully with her tanned skin.
"Actually, no plans tonight. Just going to head home, lay in bed, and watch some TV. All by myself."
Somehow, she took an activity that Joe had done hundreds of times in his own life, and made it sound sexy. This girl was trouble.
"Well, sometimes a relaxing night at home is a good thing."
"I guess, but why don't you let me help you finish this up, so that you can get done quicker and have a relaxing night of your own. After all, isn't this supposed to be your night off, too?"
"It's fine. Like I said, not too much longer. Then I can go home and see Jenny."
Joe felt compelled to slip his wife into conversations with Janice as often as he could.
"I'm sure she's not thrilled that you're still here at this time on your day off."
Joe winced at the truth of the girl's words.
"Well, I'll be home soon."
"And you'll be home even sooner if you let me help you. Just tell me what you need a count on, I'll do the count and you can mark it down. Come on. No sense arguing. We could have been done by now."
It was amazing how much sense she seemed to make.
"Umm... sure. Okay. Why not. Thanks. Heads of Romain?"
Janice gave him a mock salute, like a soldier going into battle, and immediately found the right under-counter storage where the lettuce was stored. No one else who worked in the front of house would have been able to do that.
She opened the stainless steel door, put a hand on the counter and bent at the waist to get a look inside.
"Three. Next?" she said.
Joe missed the number. He was too busy staring at the tight twenty year-old bottom that was bent in half in front of him. The tight little shorts were not meant to be worn on a person in this position. The bending caused them to slide down, in the twenty year-old vixen version of plumber's crack. With her shorts sliding down, an impossibly thin string appeared from between the young girl's butt cheeks and wrapped around her waist.
Joe swallowed hard.
