Home > Recipe for Persuasion (The Rajes #2)

Recipe for Persuasion (The Rajes #2)
Author: Sonali Dev

Chapter One


Ashna Raje couldn’t remember the last time her restaurant had thirty occupied tables. The gentle hum of customer conversation drifted into the kitchen from the dining area. It was nowhere near the nightly five-hundred-person din from when her father ran Curried Dreams, but it kindled the tiniest glimmer of hope inside Ashna. She snuffed it out. Hope terrified her. Ashna didn’t credit her parents with much humor, but giving someone like her a name that meant “filled with hope” was definitely a cruel joke.

“Angry customer at table twelve, boss.” One of the servers ran to her just as Ashna finished plating an order of biryani and slid it onto the counter. “She’s demanding the crisp fried okra we served last week. I told her we took it off the menu. But she won’t listen.”

Ashna released a breath, expelling whatever scraps of hope she had left, and patted the server’s arm. “Thanks. I’ll take care of it.”

She made her way into the tastefully ornate, albeit slightly run-down, dining room, stopping to ask the two tables on her way if they were enjoying their meal. She got one noncommittal shrug and one enthusiastic “Everything is delicious!” from a couple celebrating their engagement. She stayed to hear the story of how he had proposed in a hot-air balloon, then signaled the waitstaff to bring the couple complimentary champagne and the noncommittal table complimentary gulab jamuns.

By the time she reached table twelve, the customer demanding the fried okra—which Ashna had removed from the menu and was never putting back on—looked in no mood to be placated.

“I have to have that okra,” the woman said as soon as Ashna introduced herself. She didn’t seem used to being denied things.

The man sitting next to her patted her hand, earning himself an impressive glare for his effort. “We’re pregnant,” he declared, ignoring his wife’s glare and the fact that he was, obviously, not in the least bit pregnant.

“How lovely,” Ashna said pointedly to the woman. “Congratulations.”

She was about to add that they were no longer serving the special menu when the woman threw Ashna the most tortured look. “Thank you. It’s been a rough two months. I haven’t been able to eat anything.”

“Anything,” the husband echoed, rivaling her desperation.

“James brought me the bhindi last week and it’s exactly how my mother made it when I was little. It’s literally all I can keep down.”

“Literally all she can keep down.” Another echo.

The okra recipe was one Ashna’s friend DJ had created when he helped her come up with a menu to resurrect her failing restaurant. Why oh why did her friends have to be so good at what they did?

The couple blinked up at her, matching pleading looks widening their eyes.

“Of course.” Ashna smiled, even as her heart raced. “We can prepare the okra for you. I’ll send out jal jeera. My cousin says the mint and cumin settle her nausea. She’s pregnant too.”

The woman jumped up and hugged Ashna, then sat back down and dabbed the sweat off her husband’s forehead with her napkin.

Any other time, Ashna would have found the man hilarious. But as she hurried back into the kitchen, she could barely breathe. Fortunately, her sous chef hadn’t left yet. Ashna had promised Mandy that she could leave early today, but seeing that she was still here filled Ashna with relief.

Mandy paused in the act of putting on her jacket and the attention in the kitchen shifted to them like a spotlight. Two line cooks, the prep staff, the dishwasher, the bussers carrying trays, everyone pretended a little too hard to focus on their tasks.

When Ashna had returned from culinary school in Paris ten years ago and taken over the restaurant, she’d been buzzing with new recipes. But the first time she’d tried to cook something that wasn’t Baba’s recipe in this kitchen—his kitchen—the panic attack had knocked her off her feet, literally. It had felt like a truck driving onto her chest. Fainting and waking up surrounded by her staff staring down at her on the kitchen floor was an experience she’d sworn she would never risk repeating.

Then a few months ago DJ had helped her revamp her menu and she’d forced herself to try again, only to find that nothing had changed. For a month Ashna had relied on Mandy to prepare DJ’s new recipes. Then her sous chef had asked for a day off and Ashna realized that she had to be able to cook her menu herself, without passing out. She had reverted to Baba’s original menu.

Now, the panic truck revved close to her chest as she retrieved okra from the pantry and turned to her assistant. “The customer’s pregnant. Can you take care of the okra?”

Mandy took off her jacket and tied her smock back around herself just a little more forcefully than necessary. “Sure, boss.”

Ashna resisted the urge to fall to her knees in relief. Instead, she put her heart into a simple “Thank you,” and got back to the next drop.

Her hands flew over sautéing garlic for the dal makhani. The act of preparing Baba’s recipe loosened the panic in her chest, along with the congealed grief lodged deep inside. It had been twelve years since Baba put a bullet through his head. Ashna had heard the shot seconds before she found him facedown on his desk, a month before her eighteenth birthday.

After his death, Ashna had left Curried Dreams in the care of his two most trusted employees and gone to Paris to fulfill Baba’s dream of attending culinary school there, and to lick her wounds. It had been an indulgence she’d been paying for ever since she returned to find her father’s legacy destroyed and buried in debt. The two men had siphoned five million dollars from Curried Dreams and made off with the money.

Baba’s life had ended in a single deafening blast, but his restaurant had continued to bleed out for the past ten years. And Ashna was responsible for both.

With Curried Dreams she was determined to stem the bleed. So, thirty tables was definitely a victory, foreclosure notices notwithstanding.

After the last customers left, including one very grateful pregnant couple, Ashna thanked her staff, saving the announcement of the budget cuts for another day.

Mandy, who had stayed on after missing the baby shower she’d been headed to, pursed her lips as Ashna waved goodbye to Khalid and Wilfrieda. Her line chefs grabbed each other’s hands as soon as they were out the kitchen door, making Ashna smile. Ah, fresh young love! It was like the smell of cumin roasting in butter: you couldn’t hide it for anything.

“Which one of them are you going to fire, then?” The sharpness in Mandy’s eyes nipped Ashna’s sigh in the bud.

“I have a plan,” Ashna lied cheerily.

“Of course you do.” Recently Mandy’s cynical gruffness had morphed more and more into bitterness, something Ashna refused to allow into her own heart.

Filling the copper kettle with water, she put it on the stove. What Mandy needed was a good tulsi oolong tea to relax her.

Mandy ignored the overture, hung up her smock, and for the second time that evening grabbed her jacket from the closet. Mandy was always the last of the staff to leave. There was something comforting about their nightly routine of taking stock of the day and planning tomorrow together.

Except tonight, Mandy didn’t throw Ashna her usual: “Get some rest, how will you catch a man if you look this exhausted?” Instead, she placed a hand on her hip and paused as though she didn’t quite know what to do.

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