Imagine that you are an experienced Executive Chef of a hotel. Your preference and culinary training is in Asian food. You know that trendy Asian food sells. You are highly motivated to sell the hotel on letting you open up an Asian restaurant.
At first, you work through your immediate boss, the Food & Beverage Manager. Soon you find that his interest is the lucrative convention business, and that he doesn’t really care about the hotel restaurants. After all, they aren’t all that full, while conventions bring in the attendance and the bucks.
The General Manager of the hotel is a finance guy. He has never been interested in the food side of the operation. Oh yes, he will wander into the kitchen every now and then, but just to say hello. Don’t bother asking him whether you can cook up something special for dinner next Saturday; he’ll let you do what you want in that regard. The General Manager is more concerned about keeping a high profile for the hotel in the community and keeping the whole operation running smoothly and without controversy.
But back to that Asian restaurant concept. You really, really want it. So you pitch it to the Food & Beverage Manager. He forgets, so you pitch it over and over. Finally, he says OK, you can try an Asian menu. Great! You go ahead.
Later, the Food & Beverage Manager realizes that it costs money to set up this new restaurant format. And he knows the General Manager, as a finance guy, does not want to spend money, especially not to indulge some chef with eclectic tastes. As far as the General Manager is concerned, everyone should be happy to have a choice between New York Strip, Chicken, or Whitefish. Forget that sushi stuff; who even understands the names of those items anyway?
So before he even takes his case to the General Manager, the Food & Beverage Manager tells you, the Chef, no, on second thought, you can’t have your restaurant. You, in frustration, ask for the petition to be reconsidered. So the Food & Beverage Manager, wanting to have a good relationship with all of his employees, as well as not wanting to be perceived by the General Manager as advocating some guy’s bizzare agenda, recommends that a plan be submitted, and it will be run by not only the General Manager, but the Board of Directors as well. None of whom care for Asian food.
You do have an ace in the hole. The majority stockholder in the hotel has been photographed dining out at Asian restaurants on multiple occasions. He has been quoted as praising the wonders of Asian food. But he lives in another state and has no day-to-day involvement in the hotel corporation.
You are Fr. Mark.
**
