Couple o' things

This was a long time ago, when we just started to get busy, a couple came in, they had called for reservations, we told that we weren't taking reservations, which to them meant we didn't take them but instead meant, we were full and we no longer taking them for the night. They came in and were asked if they had reservations which made them angry. They waited then, for a table, which was in the back which they, for some reason thought was the smoking section. Rather than take the table, they marched out, stopping at the front desk to tell me that they will never ever come back. Began to rant about the smoking section (there was no one even smoking in the restaurant, which is only allowed at the bar.), the ill-informed employees. "And we have a lot of friends we're telling!!" I wondered, at the time, who would be friends with people like this.

I have hung about 80 percent of the fish. At least 80% of the ones that are made. It took forever and my feet hurt. But they're kinda cute.

Fish

It has been a long time since I posted on this thing. I think about it a lot but mostly am not happy enough about what's happening in the restaurant to want to write anything funny or interesting. 

Right now I am attempting to make a school of fish that I imagined would be miles long and swerve through the ceiling of the place. Instead what I have is about 3 feet of fish. Guess I have to work harder at it.

Key Lime Pie

Apparently there is some "thing" about key lime pie. People are in search of the best. I even had a reporter call me while writing an article about the best Key lime pie and had heard we had really good key lime pie. We buy it from a supplier. I don't know about it being good. I can't say I like it very much. But it's what we have and people seem to like it. So we're having a promotion and are offering the key lime pie since it would be less trouble than our other desserts which we make ourselves. So then the supplier calls us 2 days before the week long dining event and tells us they don't have any at the moment. 

As it turns out. You can make key lime pretty easily. I'm  not sure who makes the best or how because there is only one recipe. It can only be key lime juice, sweetened condensed milk and egg yolks, nothing more, nothing less. Making it is not hard. But juicing key limes is. They are really small. 

The event is underway and I have already made 6 of them. And they serve 30 people. My fingers are dry from the acid in the limes.

Fixing chairs, living in the moment

In the never ending battle against the destruction of the cheap furniture I purchased to furnish the place, it is already time to repaint. This is not a terrible job but it is tedious and informs me of how much needs to be done and redone. Yesterday I started to paint (I bought 12 new chairs to augment the 150 odd chairs I already have and the new ones need to be painted). I listened to a book on tape, well, on my iPhone really, while I painted. It has speakers. It is a lecture by Echardt Tolle about living a life of inner peace. As far as I could tell this involves not thinking about anything but the here and now. I'm not sure how you plan for dinner and he doesn't address this issue or anything like it, at least I don't think I heard him address it, I have to admit, I did day dream quite a bit during this talk. But the bar manager came walking in while he was talking about Jesus and his crucifixion. (he is not religious, other than being Buddhist but merely refers to it in the lecture) So the bar manager walks in as he's exhorting us to imagine "Jesus Christ crucified on the cross" living in the moment. The manager looked at me but said nothing.

The noose is looser

It's been a harrowing few months but we are getting very close to paying all our debts and actually making money. The days of sitting on the edge of my bed with my eyes wide open digging my fingernails into my forehead seem like a distant memory. On the other hand, you never know what's going to happen next and I can't count my chickens. They aren't hatched.

I took a day off

Actually 2, 3 if you count Sunday. I went to Las Vegas. I've never been there before. My friend Karen arranged it all. I just showed up at my front door and off we went. We stayed at the Palazzo which was very nice and went to see Louis Black, who wasn't. I learned to play craps and lost a little money but it was fun. Eating in restaurants is no longer the same for me. I was VERY conscious of bad service in a really expensive steak place we ate in. Aware of food temperature, saltiness, graininess in the "mac 'n cheese" that cost $14. On the other hand, I no longer feel any need to complain about it. Bad food and good service still gets a tip. Good food and bad service doesn't. The cooks don't get tips.

It's a party

It's a party and everyone's invited. Just not me. From appearances only, it seems I am having a good time going from table to table, talking and laughing (mostly). People don't seem to realize though, it's work. A friend in the design business commented this week, well, at least you're having a constant party. I'm not. It's a job. What they can't see is that the ice machine is broken, the vent over the stove is clogged, the convection in the oven isn't working, the cooler's down, the walk in cooler is frosted up. The list goes on. They also don't see that there's a french fry on the floor that's going to get stepped on and there's no busser around (probably out in the alley smoking, is my guess) to pick it up before it gets ground into the carpeting so I will have to do it. I'm also seeing that someone is looking for their waiter (in the server room texting someone making plans for later that evening) and that there are 3 people at the door and there's no hostess. Unfortunately, when this kind of thing is happening, my family and friends get short shrift. I have no problem being distracted when I'm with them. When it's a customer though, they get my full attention. Hey, it why we have family and friends.

Here's a few of my friends having fun without me.

What you wish for

Be careful. You just may get it. And it may not be what you want. The restaurant was packed this past weekend. Saturday night had an hour and a half waiting time. You could barely walk through the place at one point. This freaks me out. I seriously doubt I could get more anxious. There were few complaints and nothing was serious, just difference of opinions. Everyone seemed to be having a lovely time. Food came out timely, waiters were cheerful and happy. What more could you want. Maybe a night off on a weekend.

Spring solstice

Gotta love snow. This is my balcony on March 21st. We closed the restaurant at 6 pm.

It's my dad's birthday today. I miss him.

It lives

My bay laurel tree re-leafed. In case you were worried.  As silly as it might sound,  the thought of the thing dying was really upsetting. And not because I wouldn't have a source for bay leaves, because I have another one. In any case, the bay tree lives, the key lime tree isn't doing so well.

That's the view from my balcony, by the way.

Almost everyone is wonderful.

But the ones that aren't, aren't. I don't really understand what makes people so angry about food. I know I have been myself. It just happens. Yesterday, a man ordered the roasted red pepper soup. I make it myself. I know it's good. I taste it. I see the head cook eat it for lunch (HIGH praise). In almost every review it's mentioned. People love it. Last night a man told me it was nothing more than heated ketchup. There are ways of complaining but he was utterly vicious, refused to accept an apology, dismissed me by waving his hand at me without turning around. Suggested I was cheating him. At our price of $4 for a cup of soup, I don't think he will go broke, even if he was being cheated. 

It's interesting, too, that people think it is acceptable to complain (bitterly) about the food if it isn't what they expected. I really have no control over what they expect curried rice with a chicken breast on it, to be. Though it is described fairly well on the menu. One young woman told me she refused to pay for it (though she had eaten the chicken breast) the curry was not the kind she was accustomed to.

In retrospect, these are funny events since they happen very rarely, but at the time it was hard not to take it personally. It's a good thing I don't drink while I'm working. It takes all I got to be polite, smile and apologize to an asshole. With a loosened tongue things might get less polite.

Like I said, though, almost everyone is wonderful. 

What makes me, me.

There are things I am learning or maybe recognizing about myself that I realize make who I am. Sometimes, these are things that I like, I have muscled my way thorough an extremely difficult several months (no worse for the wear) by simply enduring what I think are very onerous burdens with great patience. Sometimes, they are things I don't like, I am capable of getting very angry and barking orders at people, something I find almost too ugly to admit I've done. And there are things like my drive to be perfect, that while it annoys me (and others, I imagine) is what helps make the restaurant what it is.

Yesterday, we had a wedding reception in the place in the afternoon. It was very informal but the bride and groom who are actors didn't have a lot of money wanted something nice. They were African American and live in Chicago. In lieu of a cake, they brought in boxes of cupcakes along with 3 towers on which to arrange them. There were also 2 boxes of cupcakes for the kids to be put in front on the table and another small box marked for the bride and groom. 

Nearing the point when the reception was to start I realized that they weren't going to put the cupcakes on the towers, I had to. These were no ordinary cupcakes, they were from some famous place in Chicago. I opened the first box of about 40 or 50 cupcakes and saw that the blue frosting was whipped up and piled high on each one with additional decorative blobs of another color and little seed-like dots and almost petal-like decorations making them nearly impossible to even touch without getting finger marks on them. Then there was the question of getting them under each platform level with getting the frosting all over the tower. I started by filling in the backs of the 3 towers, emptied the first box, opened the second and saw the second box was an entirely different kind of cup cake decorated with tan frosting. I realized there were 3 towers and each should hold a different kind of cupcake. Touching these was not something that was intended to happen frequently. The frosting, utterly delicate, easily dented and messed, was already not looking as fresh as it had in the box and now I had to move all the blue ones all to one tower. Fine. Got that done, did the next and then opened the 3rd, I can't even recall what color that was. Then I went and got the kids cupcake boxes, I opened the first and saw that though the cupcakes were smaller, the frosting was piled even higher. It was almost impossible to put my hand over the frosting and grab the small cupcake at the paper holder line. 

I have to say that although I'm not much of a sweets eater these chocolate cupcakes for the kids smelled really, really delicious. I arrange the first box in a nice pattern in front of the 3 towers and then opened the second and almost fainted when I saw that these were vanilla. It would have been completely awful to just put the chocolate and vanilla separately on the table. By this time, the guest are coming in and I began to sweat. I had to remove every other chocolate cupcake and put in a vanilla one. Then a blue cupcake fell of the tower and landed on the pink table cloth upside down.

This is not how I imagined having a restaurant would be.

When I opened the bride and groom's special small box of cupcakes , it was obvious that the box had been turned upside down and almost violently shaken. There is no possible way to describe the horror I felt.

As it turned out, the groom had dropped the box.

I wish the bride and groom well, they were beautiful, gracious and reception was a joy.

Tearing out my hair.

A customer complained that the server, who she did not like and said was rude, had added a gratuity to the bill. This is a simplified version of what happened since her anger was palpable and she voiced it in front of the entire restaurant. I walked to the back of the place, also palpably angry and found the server unrepentant and, who, in fact, admitted that he had added the tip because he felt she would not leave one. Sometimes I wonder how people who seem to be rational can lose their ability to reason so easily. He no longer works there.

Business is good by the way.

Go figure

Thursday was about the best day we've ever had at Edgar's. Huge lunch crowd, I visit every table. Everyone was happy, then the afternoon was fairly brisk, as afternoons go. Huge after work crowd at the bar. Then a good dinner crowd. So I figure. Great!! Good weather, good sales, tomorrow's Friday, nice weather expected. So Friday comes around. 3 tables at lunch. Seriously. Not a soul, except for Greg, an across-the-street regular, who came in for dinner. NO ONE. I can't take that. I was a miserable ball of anxiety. Just standing there with nothing to do. I left at 5:58. There was no one in the restaurant.

At 6:45 michael the manger calls me at home (this never happens), my sister is there. I'd completely forgotten. I felt so ashamed and miserable. I tell myself it will be OK but am racked with doubt and misery. 

I came in this morning to do my taxes, well, organize them so someone else can do them. I look at the Micros system for the total from yesterday, it was whopping!!! They had a huge dinner hour that started at 7 and ended at 10.

Winter of anxiety

Today was a really good lunch in the restaurant. The place was full and it felt like a real restaurant. That's a big issue for me, feeling like a real place. But it's February 21st. These kinds of days are few and far between. That's going on 4 months of mostly feeling inadequate and anxious. And it's because of the weather (at least I hope that's the problem). There are other reasons, of course, no one eats out the day before Thanksgiving, no one eats out on a voting day, but really, no one eats out when the weather is bad or there is the hint of snow. And there have been a lot more than hints of snow this winter. The snow has been more along the lines of getting smacked in the face with the back of a shovel in your face than a hint. My balcony one morning. One of many mornings with new snow.

Dead or dying

My 20+ year old bay laurel tree is either dead or dying. I'm sick about it and it's my fault. It died of neglect since I have been so busy with the restaurant. It was nearly 7 feet tall. I noticed the leaves were shriveled up. Like so many things in my life I've had to neglect a lot to make this restaurant work. I'm not sure how I compensate for the things I've left behind in the frantic pace of what I am doing. In the meantime, I cut the tree back and hope it's still alive and will get new leaves. This is what it looks like now. You can see all the detritus on my dining room table in the background. Poor thing.

The wait

It is just a waiting game. I think the food is good. The interior is really nice. I painted it myself. the service is mostly good. Though it's hard to know to know for sure since I am mostly wringing my hands worrying about the service. When I went out to dinner earlier this week in the end-of-the-world weather, the service was iffy at best. I had to ask a different server to get me another glass of wine. It can't be that hard to see if people are done with their drinks and ask if they'd like another, though apparently it is since it is an ongoing problem at most restaurants. So now I'm waiting for customers to come in. I'm not sure if it will be good or bad. I'd hate to be overwhelmed with people who were then unhappy because it took 2 hours to get dinner. or worse, lunch. Gotta have a prompt lunch.

This is the interior.

Great weather!

Utter panic on the weather deck on Tuesday night. The world was close to coming to an end. White-outs, blizzard conditions, billion-mile-an-hour winds, the grim reaper, eskimos. Nothing happened. It got cold. Not a soul goes out to restaurants in winter weather when all of the helpful weather people are shrieking like madmen at their various weather desks/storm centers. Thank you Mark Baden for keeping us up-to-date weather-terrorized.

For the record, I did go out to dinner that night with my mother to a restaurant in Delafield. We lived to tell the tale. No one died in the ensuing not-a-storm-at-all. I had chicken vesuvio. I could have made it thousand times better myself.

Saturday after crappy week.

As everyone who has an opinion will tell you, January is a bad month for restaurants. They will also tell you that downtown has bad parking, that you aren't advertising enough, that no one knows what Caribbean food is, that you aren't giving enough free food away, that the fries are cold (OK, valid point) and on and on. Got a tepid review in the online press on Monday. Tuesday morning my mom's best friend of 54 years died. Coinciding with those 2 things were the worst 2 days, dollar-wise, at Edgar's. I put up the banana palm tree to an assortment of criticisms from the staff, so much so that, as I've said, I moved it to behind a roof where it seems happy. Or at least, the staff is. I had, also, to look forward to an off-premise restaurant event on Friday night where one stands behind a table and doles out food for free to crowds of, what I was sure would be, critical and complaining freeloaders. In fact, by Friday, restaurant numbers were better customer-wise, and despite some difficulty getting the entire preparation done and over to event, it went very well. No one was critical, in fact, our food was very popular. We had people in line for seconds and thirds with people running up as we were closing down.

When I got back to Edgar's that night business had been good and a man and woman and their daughter were there asking for me. He, it turned out, was the GM for a large restaurant group in town and he and his wife were exceptionally flattering and positive. They loved the interior but were amazed particularly by the quality of the food.

So the week ended well. But now I have to go to a funeral.

Sunday morning.

Well, it's Sunday afternoon now. Spent the day in the restaurant. Made vegetarian lasagna, pepper pot soup. Finished the banana tree. It might be not the strongest thing in the world, It's held together with coat hangers. And as it turns out, not the prettiest. I hung the damn thing on Tuesday (it's now Wednesday) and it really didn't look so hot. (Picture to come) and I ended up putting it sorta behind a hut. Fortunately there is a lot of room for things that might not make it front and center in a normal place. The Caribbeany edge to this leaves a lot of that kind of room. Sloppy and not so nice. But still somehow works.

The pepper pot soup was awesome.

Painting as a life style

I started painting in August. With every stroke, the project got more grand, or rather it was the same size, I had just realized how big the place and idea were. At some point early on, I realized I as going to be painting the entire umpteen thousand square feet of wall with a little paint brush meant for canvases. It's OK, I liked the painting part. I started out painting the walls after work for a few hours. I put my life on hold. I'd work, then go downstairs and paint. Gradually, I left work upstairs earlier and worked downstairs later. Until, near the end, I was getting up at 5 and working in the soon-to-be restaurant until 10 at night. I thought that it was hard but that I was nearly done with that part, the restaurant would open and I'd be done.

The manager had hired cooks, bussers, hosts, servers, cleaners. He'd bought plates, pans, pots, silverware, glasses, napkins. Some things I thought were odd but what did I know. I'm not a restaurant guy.

So I had some concepts

And I thought about them for a long time. When it came down to it and I signed the lease I really had nothing on paper. I went into the place the day I signed and drew something on the wall. I felt like I was about 90% there.

That was in the near the end of August.

I had advertised for a GM in July but no one wants to take a job when there is really nothing there but a concept. I had 3 people take the job but disappeared immediately. After I signed the lease I hired someone who would get things going while I painted.

Not getting a thing done

My days are roughly all the same. I go work in the kitchen in the morning. I do prep work since I can't afford to have someone else do it. It turns out that I am fairly good at this and may need to get a second job doing it in retirement when I am flat broke.

I have to follow recipes since these dishes require huge amounts of things and, for instance, a half cup of cinnamon dumped into a vat of BBQ sauce looks like 2 cups to me and that sort of thing can make your food taste differently which is a problem for customers who have come to expect just the half. So I follow recipes and use measuring devices. Once I've made the soup, the sauce, all the desserts, chopped the salads, I am good at covering, labeling. cleaning, too. Then lunch begins and, depending on how many people are there (lately not many being the beginning of January and all) I work the lunch shift. This terrifying exercise is getting less so but still, I work through that pandemonium and after that, grease-coated, go upstairs to my design studio to work on the marketing concepts. Creativity seems so far away from me.

Banana leaves in progress

Spent Sunday making banana leaves to hang from the ceiling. Took considerably longer than I anticipated, not done yet. Could be sorta cool looking if I get them done soon. I can't imagine life without a glue gun.

Lessons learned:

And not in any particular order. Snow means no one in your restaurant. Packers game means no one in your restaurant, unless you're a sports bar, which my restaurant is not. Though, I did have the game on and there were people eating, no one was watching except the servers and the bartender. Anyway, I'm pissed at the Packers since they lost to Chicago which is irrelevant here, I understand, but hey, it's my blog.

In the beginning

The restaurant below my office was going out of business. I knew why. It had bad service. Really bad service. The food was OK. But the interior had absolutely no style whatsoever and the logo sucked bongwater.

So the landlord asks me if I want to open a restaurant. No thanks, I tell him.

Foolish choices

I opened a restaurant a little more than 2 months ago.

It's very difficult. I had no idea.

Starting a restaurant

Everyone says "This was always your dream," it's a nice thought but it wasn't. Not that I didn't want a restaurant, I just didn't want it to be like this. This was not my dream.