Free Love and Food by K.L. Prince Page A

the kitchen.  Do you still cook?”
                  “Honestly, no.  I may cook a meal at home every now and then, but it’s been a long time since I’ve spent any significant amount of time in the kitchen.  Cooking was put on the back burner once the restaurant was opened.  Once the restaurant started, I got swamped with paperwork.  Other things became priority, like ordering food, scheduling, organizing functions and things like that.  Cooking wasn’t as important anymore.  Plus, I had Mack who does an amazing job back there.”
                  “I see,” Ethan says, folding his hands on the table.
                  “Alright Ethan, I can’t take the suspense anymore.  What are your plans for this place?”
                  “Well, I always like to hear the bad news first, so I’m going to give you the bad news,” he says, leaning towards her. 
                  She can’t help but groan.  “What’s the bad news?”
                  “Since we’re going to renovate this place, you’re going to have to close the restaurant for a couple of weeks.”
                  “Okay, I get that, but what about my staff.  They have bills and families.”
                  “Paying your staff for their time away is part of our budget.  I’m sure they wouldn’t mind a little time off with pay.  We may need some of them occasionally around here, but their presence isn’t really necessary.”
                  “Okay.  What else?” she says, the nervousness she felt at the words closing down the restaurant disappearing.
                  “We’re going to have a grand reopening.  What we want is for people to forget the old and be entranced with the new.  We want people to think of the old restaurant as never have existing.  You get what I’m saying?”
                  “I do,” she replies, feeling a little disappointed at having to say goodbye to everything that she had created.
                  “It’s a hard thing to do, I know,” he says, reaching across the table and putting his hand over hers.  Usually she would recoil at the touch of a man who isn’t Kyle, but his touch is reassuring.  It’s not intrusive or unwelcome.  She believes that he understands what she’s going through.  He pats her hand and pulls his hand away.
                  “So, what is entailed in this reopening?”
                  “Like I told you before, it means new décor, a new name and definitely a new menu.  What can you tell me about the current menu?”
                  “The menu now was completely created by Mack.  I told him what I envisioned and he put it all together.  I, of course, gave the green light, but the dishes are his creation.”
                  “Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking.  I think that this time around, you need to create the menu.  I think what needs to happen is that you need to get back to your love for cooking.  You need to find your passion again.  I think that the menu needs to be created with love, by you.  No offense to Mack, I think that he must be an amazing chef or you wouldn’t have hired him, but I think that you need to be the one beyond the menu.  I like to believe that customers can tell and feel when an owner, who is a chef, has put their all into the food that they’re eating.”
                  She sits back and silently thinks about what Ethan has said.  It isn’t something that she considered during the creation of the menu for the restaurant.  The thought that customers could tell things about the food they’re eating was never something that crossed her mind, but she knows that what’s he’s saying is true.  There have been times when she herself has thought the exact thing.  There have been times when she has pushed her plate away after just a