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228 C H A P T E R F I F T E E N BREAKING THE NAPOLEONIC CODE THE FIRST TIME MY MOTHER FIRED ME WAS IN 1989. After too many years in too near proximity to the corporate headquarters on Broad Street, I moved to Florida to get away. We had just bought back the Florida franchise group and they needed a general manager in North Palm Beach. More than eight hundred miles would separate me from my family until the end of the school year, but, for the sake of my own sanity, I had no choice. Ralph gave his blessing:“Randy needs to show what he can do on his own without us hovering over him.” Dan was put in charge of the transition.“As a formality,” he emphasized, I would report to Bob Gifford at the Fort Lauderdale restaurant. Dan came down with me to make the introductions. Bob Gifford had helped to grow Ruth’s Chris in Fort Lauderdale into a sexy, successful restaurant, his tables turning two and even three times most nights of the week. At first I found him refreshing, a New York operator with many years experience in a number of great restaurants like legendary Joe Baum’s Water Club and River Café. Unlike Dan, Bob sat me down and talked to me at length, telling me what he wanted, what I should expect, and the problems to be addressed, starting with the quality of the French bread. But the biggest problem was sales. Unlike its Fort Lauderdale counterpart, North Palm Beach was not a mature restaurant. Its business was uneven and suffered especially in the off-season. Bob gave me my BREAKING THE NAPOLEONIC CODE 229 marching orders: Run the restaurant as if it were your own. We shared a grin about the irony. His grin had a familiar edge to it. I had arrived just in time for the snowbirds, northerners who come south for Florida’s warm winters. Business was good. After a few weeks, I found an authentic French bakery and ordered their bread for a week to see if the quality was consistent. When Bob came up to North Palm Beach for our next weekly meeting , he entered fuming. He had heard from my assistant manager about my changing the bread. Bob was an Irishman and when he was angry, he ranted. Who do you think you are, changing the bread without my okay?! Bob had an Irishman’s delight in hearing himself roll out all the permutations of an idea, its causes and consequences—in this case, the idea that I thought I was something special. He was a teetotaler, a dry drunk whose new drug of choice was anger. The rant went on for an hour. I reminded him of the marching orders he’d given me. How could I run the place as if I owned it if I couldn’t make basic decisions? I learned that this was restaurant lingo for if the place is on fire in the middle of the night, meet the firemen at the door. It didn’t mean that I had license to make my own decisions. Randy, who do you think you are?! The obvious answer was: I am a Fertel who has been eating at Ruth’s Chris since the day it opened and before. I come from New Orleans, I’ve lived in Paris, and I probably have some notion of how French bread should taste and crunch. I’ve been sopping French bread in butter and steak drippings since I was old enough to fight my brother for the porterhouse T-bone. To say any of that, however, would be seen as a refusal to accept Bob’s “authority.” Dan, I now learned, had warned him about me. Bob knew all about my authority problem. I resolved to make the best of it. I might be under Bob’s thumb but he only had two of them, compared to the fistfuls that Ruth, Ralph, and Dan deployed at my expense. Sales and profits soared as the snowbirds flocked south. I would try to grit it out. Then I was faced with a surprising dilemma about Bob’s way of doing business. Bob was supervising the build-out of a new Ruth’s Chris in North Miami. When I came to Florida, he had told me all about my predecessor, the ne’er-do-well who, before we had...

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