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sensational seasonal cuisine™ Reservations • Directions • Menus • Wine List |
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A Day in the Life Last night for some crazy reason I thought it
might be interesting to keep a journal of what happened during a random day. Maybe
it will be interesting, maybe not, but anyway, here goes a long stream of
consciousness journal of what started as a pretty typical day. 8:03a My internal clock goes off and I manage to
crack my eyes open. The time is unusual because I am up generally between 8:06a Into the shower on autopilot as ever. As I put
my left hand under the hot water, I am reminded forcefully of the collection
of new burns that I got last night. I get burned daily, but this was a freak
occurrence. I was walking past the range when a pan with a sockeye salmon let
go a fusillade of hot oil that plastered the back of my hand. Hurt like hell,
but nothing to do but keep going. There were tickets for 24 entrées on the
board that had to be finished. No time for whining. In the shower, there is some spark of brain
activity and my mind starts to wander over the perpetual series of lists that
drive chefs everywhere. Leg of lamb special, out of pork, out of
rosemary—need to borrow some from AJ at I remember why we are out of pork unexpectedly.
We had a table of 20 people last night from out of town, who called around 8:32a My morning routine continues on autopilot.
After the shower, I always check email for anything that might have come in
overnight. I don’t get a lot of mail overnight because I check it
around 8:47a On my way out the back door, I check my garden
on the off chance that my neglected rosemary might have wintered over. Fat
chance. Everything is 3 feet deep in weeds and I actually have ripe
wineberries from vines that were not there last fall. This is the first time
I’ve actually looked at my garden this year. I head down the driveway
on foot, walking to work. Weather permitting, I will make the 10-minute walk
Wed-Thu-Fri, days that I don’t need my truck to make runs to the
market. The walk gives me just a little think time to myself and my cell
phone stays turned off the whole way. 9:00a Still on autopilot and trying to wake up, I
arrive to unlock the front door, turn off the alarm, turn on the lights, hang
out the flag, and check messages on the machine. Next order of business,
coffee. While the coffee is brewing, I check the thermometers in all the
refrigerators (no problems, thankfully), then head to the office and start
reviewing my notes that I left for myself. Thought and concentration do not
come easy at this early hour, so it is best if I work off a list of tasks. I
start working through paperwork. 9:20a Ben is already here setting up lunch, giving me
a few minutes to browse through the latest issue of Art Culinaire, a
well respected magazine for professional chefs. A lot of the dishes I
don’t get. I’m much more into simplicity and a lot of the
so-called hot chefs are about sculpture and shock value. Plus I’m in a
fairly rural market and cannot push the envelope as much as the city chefs
can. 9:35a I sit down on the deck with last night’s
dinner menu to remind me what we have left in the cooler and I gather my
thoughts about tonight’s menu. Coffee in hand, Ben comes out and we
discuss the pork that we have coming in tonight and possible treatments. He
reminds me that we have lemongrass in the cooler. I like this idea and decide
on a Vietnamese treatment of the pork porterhouse as a change from the
Chinese influence we have been doing recently. I remember that my neighbor and line cook Shawn
and her husband are coming for dinner tonight. When I told her last night
that I was going to butterfly and roast a leg of lamb, she hinted broadly
that garlic mash might be nice. She’s not afraid of carbs! We rarely
serve potatoes on the menu because the latest wave of fad diets has all our
gorgeous fingerling potatoes going to waste in the trash can. I add garlic
mash to the prep list for Shawn. Working down the menu I cross off all the dishes
that we sold out of last night and any dishes that I want to discontinue.
Today, I cross off 5 of the 16 items—the menu has 8 appetizers and 8
entrees, plus we generally run 2 to 4 specials. There are a few things that
are immune to being crossed off, the dishes that our customers demand be there:
Thai-Inspired Crabcakes, Prosciutto-Wrapped Scallops on Sweet-and-Spicy Baby
Arugula with Red Raspberry Syrup, and our Breadcrumb-Crusted Roasted Rack of
Lamb. Now I start filling in the holes in the menu
based on what new products I know will be arriving over the next few hours. I
am not concentrating on preparation right now, but rather on raw ingredients.
Once I am ready to think about preparation, I start balancing the three hot
stations in the kitchen—range, oven, and grill—in hopes that customers
will order a balanced mix of entrées and not overload any one station. This ideal mix rarely works as customers are
fickle and what sells well one night will not sell well the next. Moreover,
big parties are prone to “Me Too” syndrome: “I’ll
have the roasted mahi-mahi. Me too. Me too. Me too.” I also keep in
mind the night of the week. Tuesday is expense account night and Saturday is
big date night: we’ll sell a lot of grilled meat and roasted racks of
lamb, so I will keep the fish on the range, rather than baking it or grilling
it. The other nights are fish nights, so I often push fish to the oven or
grill to lighten the load on the range. I run the sauté station, so I get the bulk of
the fish, which is the trickiest food we have to cook because it is so easy
to overcook. Ben runs the grill and does salads for lunch. When Shawn is
working lunch, she runs sauté and I do salads. I am bringing her along as the
next sauté cook. Still, at dinner I do all the sauté. When we’re busy,
Ben runs the grill, and a third person does salads and desserts. And of
course, we all step in for each other when necessary. There are no prima
donnas in my kitchen. 9:55a Reluctantly heading back inside, I have already
decided on today’s lunch specials and put them on the special board,
early today. I’m usually 10:00a I find myself back inside in my office typing
out a rough sketch of tonight’s menu before the bookkeeper comes in and
shanghais the computer. A constant stream of phone calls interrupts. My
peaceful time is over. 10:05a Frieda, the lunch server comes in and starts on
her usual routine: opening the side doors; turning the lights, fans, and air
conditioner on; brewing the tea, prepping limes and lemons, setting up the
bar condiments, putting ice on the bar and the front server station,
vacuuming, and cleaning the deck. 10:10a One of my seafood guys calls me (never have
just one supplier)—he has 4 dozen small (called “prime,” go
figure) softshell crabs at fairly high prices. But, he knows that I have been
begging for crabs because the market is so tight. I take all four dozen in a
gamble that I can move them over the weekend. I’m risking a lot of
money on a highly perishable product. Field of Dreams flashback: “If
you buy it, they will order it.” Yeah, right. 10:15a The phone rings again. It’s Aaron,
afternoon prep cook, wanting to know when to come in. Given the load today, I
say 10:25a Still working on the menu and not making much
headway for all the distraction. Something prompts me to call AJ (he’s
a block closer than Franco) for rosemary. He’s not in but the waiter I
reach says sure, come on down. On the way out, I grab a second cup of coffee
(I’m really tired after two long, long days with little sleep) and head
down the block. Scratch that, halfway down the block, Ben yells at me that
the guy at Village is on the line saying he cannot find any rosemary. 10:35a No progress on the menu and the bookkeeper has
arrived. On her way, she swung by my house and picked up my daughters Lillie
and Ellie so that they could come see me. No time now, we open in 25 minutes
and I have to get this menu drafted so we can plan our prep day. 10:45a I print a draft (really a draft, “Grilled
Wahoo (Done how?)” and head off to the kitchen, just 15 minutes before
opening to check the lunch set up and make sure my station is set the way I
want. Like most chefs, I am very particular about where things go and how
they are set. When I am really busy (and lunch is usually busy: no
reservations, everyone comes at once, and they’re all in a hurry), I
have no time to think about where things are or hunt them down. Same thing,
same place, every time, grab it without looking. 10:50a Two women are camped out on the deck waiting
for us to open. I had hoped to spend a few minutes with my children before
lunch started. It’s not to be today. As a restaurateur, I love early
tables—that’s revenue from tables that would otherwise be
unoccupied. As a chef, sometimes I need a few more minutes to get my act
together just before opening. As a father, I never get to see my children and
am angry at this intrusion on our time together. 11:03a The women come in and the server confusedly
tells them that we don’t open until 11. Then she proceeds to give one
of them a menu cover absent the menu inside. Granted it is hard to get going
this early in the morning, but we aim to be both more accommodating and more
alert. 11:10a The order comes back for two Warm Grilled
Chicken Salads – no surprise, our best selling lunch entrée – and
we are thankful that it is an easy dish to prepare. We’re still not
really functional at this hour. Because the ticket is a grill and salad
ticket, I have nothing to do so I mince ginger and slice lemongrass for the
marinades for dinner. I choose these tasks because they are easy to interrupt
should I need to work on a lunch ticket. Meanwhile, as I see Ben working and putting on
gloves, my head wanders to worrying about our next visit from the health
inspector which could come at any time. Although we maintain excellent
standards and all our cooks have their ServSafe sanitation certificates, I am
constantly chiding the cooks to be conscious of food safety in every task.
The inspector knows this and knows that our restaurant is not a problem
location and this coupled with understaffing at the Health Department keeps
our visits to a minimum. Health inspections are always trying affairs. Even
though we maintain much higher standards than any home cook, because we are
preparing food for the general public, we are held to much higher standards. 11:15a While the chicken is on the grill, Ben and I
chat about the wahoo (one of my most favorite fishes, and that is saying a
lot) that will arrive later today and we decide on a roasted garlic cream for
it. We had some left from a grouper special on Wednesday night, but not
enough for tonight. In any case, we have to roast garlic for Shawn’s
mash, so we’ll kill two birds with one stone. 11:20a The chicken goes out and we continue prep for
dinner. 11:35a AJ calls to let me know that he doesn’t have
any rosemary. Bummer. 11:40a Half a pound of minced ginger later, potatoes
on to boil, garlic roasting, I step out in the dining room to check the first
table and I greet a new 3-top. After shaking hands with the new table, I note
that the callus on my knife hand hurts. All professional chefs have calluses
on their hands from their knives and mine hurts. This is unusual, but I guess
it means that I have been chopping a lot with my knife recently. As executive
chef, my time in the kitchen is really limited. 11:45a I refill my speed bottle with grapeseed oil, a
task that both Ben and I forgot to do earlier. We like to use pure olive oil,
but the price has gone through the roof, especially when combined with the
relative strength of the Euro versus the dollar. I prefer olive oil simply
because it is higher in mono-unsaturates than grapeseed, but grapeseed is a
good second, with even less saturated fat than olive oil. Grapeseed has a
nominally higher smoke point which is good, because we smoke a lot of pans. My kids are in the kitchen now and hanging on
everything that Ben does. They’ve seen Dad in the kitchen all their
lives, so I guess that watching Ben is something new. It is a great and
unexpected treat to have them in the kitchen now that school is out, for I
rarely see them otherwise. 12:00p Last few tickets cooked, I head out to the
dining room between tickets to check on progress. I’m in the dining
room as much as I can be so that I can talk to customers and also check on
the front of the house. As a small restaurant in its infancy, I do not have
the cashflow to hire a maître d’hôtel so I have to run both the front
and the back. Customers really do love the fact that I care about their meals
and of course, I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t love
talking with customers and taking care of them. It’s early yet, too early to tell how busy
we will be, but my gut says it is going to be slow. Lunch doesn’t
usually get cranking until 12:25p So far, so slow. Ben and I continue to prep for
dinner in between lunch tickets. Recently, other restaurateurs have
complained to me about slow Fridays. Knock on wood that only our lunches are
slow recently and not dinner. In As for the general economic climate, people are
spending money, but I fret at times over the general public’s
fickleness, the feast or famine nature of this business and managing cash
flow through the famines, and the disturbing reservation trend. More and
more, customers, even regulars, are calling at the last minute for
reservations or just walking in. This makes it very hard for us to prepare
enough food and have enough staff on hand. I think most customers do not
realize that our food is purchased at least 24 hours in advance of their
visit and that calling the same day does not help us plan. Still, we are
grateful for the business, no matter when they call. 12:35p Working on a red wine reduction that I will
finish with veal demi-glace and At this moment, the radio, tuned to the station
of the moment, gives a forecast for potentially violent thunderstorms for the
late afternoon, and both Ben and I groan at the thought of yet another happy
hour canceled on account of inclement weather. The radio is our friend, our
connection to the world. We work in a windowless kitchen and the music helps.
I can generally tell who is in the kitchen by the radio station. Hip-hop,
oldies, or increasingly more frequently, [b]light rock signals that our
dishwasher has set the station. WINC or Q-102 generally means it’s
Shawn. Classic rock or talk radio means Ben. I never set the radio but
sometimes I make them change the station. My preference would be NPR for the
news and classical music, but when I’m on the line and the tickets are
lined up, I need some hard edged AC/DC or U2 to cook to. The dishwasher comes into the kitchen and starts
work. 12:40p Lillie and Ellie leave with the bookkeeper who
has completed most of her work for the day. She drives off to drop the kids
by the house and pays the restaurant’s phone bill. 12:45p Another customer comes in and upon looking at
the wine list exclaims to the server and me “Boy, your wine prices sure
have gone up!” To which both the server and I reply that we just
reduced prices on the bulk of our wines. In fact, we reduced prices between
10 and 25 percent because of the volume of wine that we are selling.
I’d rather sell more wine at lower margins than less wine at higher
margins, simply because I believe that no meal is complete without a glass of
wine. 12:50p Back in the kitchen, I pick up on an outside
call. It’s a telemarketer trying to sell me something. “Do you
know what I do for a living? No sir. I’m a chef.” This one is
brighter than most and says without hesitation “You must be busy
cooking lunch. When can I call back?” “I am not interested in
your services.” I get inundated with these calls every day. We’re
in the don’t-call databases, but there are so many loopholes for
business-to-business calls that I cannot see any reduction in call level.
This is very frustrating because these people are tying up my phone lines
that customers might be trying to use to reserve a table. 12:55p Seafood delivery, right smack in the middle of
lunch, wild Copper River salmon from Alaska, huge sea scallops, lump crab
meat, and 13 pounds of wahoo. I hate this. I have no time to check the
merchandise for freshness or correctness and worse still, I only have one
door to the restaurant, the front door. These deliveries disrupt my dining
room. In this case, the driver didn’t drain his boxes before bringing
them in and soaked the floor all the way back to and into the kitchen. I
mopped the floor and the dining room. Once the driver got outside, I asked
him gently to drain his boxes next time. I got an insolent remark and a
rolling of the eyes from him. Had he shown even a tiny bit of remorse it
could have ended there. I called the supplier and told the owner that the
next time it happens, his driver becomes my employee and he’s going to
mop my entire restaurant before I let him go. 1:00p Shawn drops in, wasting time before an
appointment. This is her normal shift to be working, but now that her kids
are out of school, she has moved from lunches to a couple of dinner shifts
for the summer. She loves to cook. 1:30p My neighbors come in for a rare lunch together.
I spend ten minutes chatting with them once their lunch is out and while
other tables trickle in towards our 1:50p I’m in the kitchen cooking a couple of
tickets when a server comes in and says “Somebody’s here for
you” and leaves without giving me any more information. I’m busy
and I’m never in a rush to see anyone who just happens to drop by in
the middle of lunch or dinner. Restaurant people know that you drop in before
lunch, between lunch and dinner, or after dinner. 2:00p We close the kitchen. There is some flexibility
in when we close based on customer demand and how much we have to prep for
dinner service. Today there’s not much demand and we have a lot to do,
so Ben packs up lunch right at My lunch tickets complete, I leave the kitchen
to see who my mystery visitor is. It is one of my ad reps who is trying to
get me to commit to a long term program with him, which I will not do until I
see the results of the test program that I am running with him right now. My
meetings are short and to the point; I am busy. We are done in less than five
minutes. 2:05p Somehow, I remember to call my bank about a bad
check that a customer wrote to me. The note I received from the bank was
Greek, something about a “Returned Deposit Item.” In addition,
the bank forgot to send me the check so I have no clue who bounced it.
Whoever it is will never be able to write me a check again. But anyway, after
calls to my bank for three consecutive days, I find out that many
notifications like mine went out without checks. I am told that the person in
charge is “in training”—not a comforting statement coming
from a bank—and that they will get me information as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, I am out the money and all the bank charges for the bounced check.
As bad as this seems, I do like it when I get checks from my good customers.
This saves me a lot of money in credit card transaction fees. 2:10p Next on my mental list is revising the dessert
menu for this evening. We have wonderful berries from the farmer’s
market (strawberries, black and red raspberries, and incredible blueberries).
What I have found is that customers want to know that they have the option of
a healthy fruit dessert, but when it comes time to order, they want the
high-fat, high-sugar dessert, such as our Chocolate Bread Pudding or the
Bailey’s Irish Cream Cake. 2:15p The dining room is clear, unusually early for a
Friday. Off come my whites, necessary, but hot. When I’m cooking at the
range, the long sleeves take a lot of direct hits from grease and spare my
arms from burns. The white color reflects heat and my station, the range, is
truly hot. It is routinely 110-120F during dinner service and at peak dinner
on a busy Saturday, with all 10 burners cranking and the ovens roaring at
700F plus, I’ve seen the thermometer go above 130F. On my way by the server station, I write a note
for the service staff that we just picked up Ketel One vodka at the request
of a good customer and I drop into the bar to write its price on the price
sheet. 2:20p Another trip through kitchen to taste my
reducing red wine and garlic cream sauces. Both are ready and I finish the
red wine sauce with a liaison of 2:25p Back in the office again, I review and print
dessert menus and then take them up front for the servers to place into menu holders
before dinner. I then start to review the dinner menu, in this, my brief down
period before gearing back up for dinner. It’s a constant battle
against typos and to make sure that the wines recommended match the food.
Today, I struggle with the name of the pork dish. If I call it Vietnamese, it
will scare people away. Things that are foreign are not good draws for them.
In any case, I sure hope the meat truck comes early enough to marinate the
pork porterhouses that I ordered at 2:35p Back to the kitchen with another draft menu. I
decide to stick with the Vietnamese nomenclature and have the servers sell
the dish. I also decide to turn some of the marinade into a glaze with which
to finish the chops, so I put some of the marinade in a pan and start it
reducing. I spend the next few minutes making a prep list from the revised
menu and then working through items on the list. 2:55p Ben gets free from what he is doing and starts
thinking about breaking down the salmon and wahoo. We confer about portion
sizes. I ask if the dishwasher has left for the day. I
don’t see him in evidence and there are still some dishes to be done.
It’s not unusual for him to take several smoke breaks and be gone from
the kitchen for a while. I don’t like this, but dishwashers are hard to
find. I am biding my time until I find someone else. 3:00p I realize that I am starving and my last meal
was around This COD business is a real problem, especially
if I don’t know when the delivery is coming and I happen to be out
running errands. Today, we got shorted by a case of wine, an important case:
our house chardonnay—not an uncommon problem with this distributor. I
am especially upset going into a summer weekend, but resigned to it.
It’s just part of the frustration of dealing with this distributor. As
a sorry consolation, I already have a deal in the works to private label a
chardonnay from a local winery as our house chardonnay. While I am writing the check, Aaron, prep and
salad guy, shows up as we discussed on the phone earlier. Frieda has just
finished all her work and asks if she can come back at 3:10p Back to the kitchen to finish the pork glaze
that started reducing about 30 minutes ago, while Ben breaks down wahoo and
sockeye. Glaze done, I throw some lettuce, feta, and cucumbers in a bowl sans dressing and head out to the
deck to have two minutes to bolt down what passes for lunch. This could be my
last meal until the same time tomorrow, but I will need some protein or I
will crash hard during the dinner rush. I’ll try to throw a piece of
fish on the grill later before dinner gets rocking. My ever present leash,
the phone, is with me. Two bites into the salad, a server, Shannon, calls to
check on plans for happy hour, given that the forecast is for thunderstorms.
I tell her that it looks OK now and we should plan to go forward with it. I
will answer the phone four more times in the course of trying to eat my
salad. 3:15p Ben will break off from dinner prep now to do
his Friday afternoon setup for happy hour. Aaron will finish prepping for
dinner and will set the line. Setting the line means getting everything out
of the walk-in and into the reach-ins that we will need for dinner service,
as well as readying the appropriate pots, pans, utensils, and garnishes. 3:20p One of my calls during my attempt to eat lunch
is from Jim Law at Linden Vineyards, one of the pioneering winemakers in 3:35p I wander back in the kitchen to check on
things, when the front door chime sounds. It’s 3:55p 4:00p Before I get to my office, Lacey, server
assistant, arrives as does 4:05p Back in my office, I happen to glance the way
of my appointment calendar and see that I have committed to demonstrate cooking vegetables at the Winchester
City Market on the Old Town Mall tomorrow morning. I had forgotten and am
totally unprepared mentally for this, but I will just wing it as I usually
do. I start to print menus for tonight. We try not to waste trees so we keep
the number of menus to a minimum. Our crunch time tonight seems to be 14
people at 7:00, so I will print 14, plus four more in case of walk-ins, plus
one for the menu box outside, for a total of 19 menus. Our other weekend
server, Katie, comes in at this point. 4:17p I head outside again to hang the menu in the menu
box. I see Ben working on the grill getting it ready for happy hour and But, now I am really
starting to worry about the meat truck because the leg of lamb special is in
jeopardy. I hate to be in a position where I have to order meat for Friday
night because this supplier is notoriously late. I try to order the bulk of
my meat for the Wednesday delivery to ensure that I have enough to get
through the weekend. But of course, who could predict that we would have a 20-top
descend upon us on Thursday night and eat all the pork in the house? You win
some, you lose some. 4:25p The bottom falls out outside and the wind
starts blasting. I run out to lower the umbrellas on the deck and I notice
that none of the staff bothers to help. Back inside, I bring the menus from
the printer to the front where the servers can put them in the menu covers.
Now that happy hour is canceled, Ben’s prep is for naught and he puts
his stuff away. He and Aaron can finish setting the line. We have a definite
deuce for 5:00, so we will have no down time tonight as can happen when the
first table arrives at 6:00. 4:30p Back in the kitchen to check progress. Final
garnish prep is going on and I spy a bundle of rosemary sitting on the
counter. For some reason, Katie has chosen today to bring in some rosemary
from home. Things are going well in the kitchen and I have other things to
do, so I head out again. As I walk out of the kitchen, Frieda who waited
tables at lunch, but who will assist Katie tonight, arrives. 4:35p I talk informally with the staff about
tonight’s menu and answer any questions. They are all smart and
understand by now how I cook, so mostly they are just trying to understand
ingredients and meanings and pronunciations of terms. 4:45p The servers are dividing the tables amongst
themselves (we’re too small for a front of house manager) and making
table assignments, while the assistants are finishing setting tables for the
correct number of people. Meanwhile, one of the assistants is in the back
whipping butter and piping it into bowls for dinner service, filling the
olive bowls, and polishing silverware. 4:50p After a quick pre-dinner tour of the dining
room, I go back in the kitchen where I grab a couple of pieces of beef saté
from the happy hour set up and throw them on the grill. I put several pans on
the range over max blast flame in anticipation of the 5:00 tables. I bolt the
beef saté while arranging everything in my reach-in so that I know exactly
where it is and can grab it without looking. The reach-in is a counter height
refrigerator just behind my range where I store all my fish and things that I
will need to cook my dishes. Then I run through every dish on the menu and on
the special board to ensure that I have everything that I need to cook all
the dishes. 5:00p I do my Clark Kent imitation in which I step
into my office/phone booth and emerge in costume. The line is pretty well set
to go, and it is show time and still no meat. I am concerned that pork is on
the menu but not here yet. 5:03p I brief the servers on quantities of items that
we are low on, plus the situation with the pork. I waited this late to brief
them, hoping that the meat truck would show. 5:05p It’s show time for real as the first 5:00
table comes in and is seated. The customer wants our “driest”
white wine. I am always confused by this statement, and I hear it often,
because dry is a technical term meaning all the sugar has been fermented into
alcohol, which is the case with all but three of the almost 90 wines on our
list. The bulk of our wines are totally dry, so the customer must mean
something different. In most instances, I assume that the customer is looking
for a wine with high acidity and I recommend one of the really crisp whites,
such as a Sauvignon Blanc or a Gavi. 5:20p First order in and the meat truck arrives
simultaneously. It takes the driver 5 minutes to unload and get in the
kitchen. We take one look at the leg of lamb that was supposed to be boned
and ready to go and drop the leg special for the night, because it will take
an hour of prep and should take 24 hours of marinade. The servers tell me
that the driver is standing around in the dining room waiting for a check.
This is the third delivery in a row after my dinner hour has started and I do
not pay during dinner. After 20 minutes of waiting and despite an invoice
marked “pick up check TODAY!,” the driver leaves without a check. 6:25p It’s been a nice steady pace so far,
ticket after ticket, but nothing too stressful. But no dishwasher in the
house and I heard from Ben who heard from Frieda that the dishwasher may have
quit. When Frieda next comes back into the kitchen, I ask her. She says he
told her that he quit in the parking lot after lunch and that she asked him
if he told me and he replied that he did. He did not. 6:30p Time for the dishwasher, but he’s a no
show. We have a slight lull in tickets so it’s all hands dishes.
We’re racing against the orders from the tables that are just being
seated. 6:40p We have an 8-top that showed up 30 minutes
early. Usually this is a problem, but they unwittingly reduced a logjam of
tables at 7:00. You win some, you lose some. We won one. The ticket comes
back and it’s not a good one. Only a few appetizers and mainly
appetizers for entrées. 8:00p The kitchen is at a dead stop now waiting for
dessert tickets, but it has been the silly season for the last hour and
twenty minutes, just total bedlam. Lots of tickets coming in and piles of
food going out. I barely remember any of it, except with no dishwasher in the
house, I am having to be very conservative with my sauté pans. Somewhere in
the middle of it, I take advantage of the lull to make a quick
foray to dining room, my first of the evening. I will come out of the kitchen
whenever I get a break to greet people and take the temperature of the dining
room. Tonight has all the signs of an early night. Early rush and the dining
room is very thin at this hour. For whatever reason, people ate and ran
tonight. I spend about 10 minutes in the dining room greeting all the tables.
I see a few more people trickle in, but a check of the reservation book shows
all our reservations are in. There are no late reservations tonight. 8:10p Back in the kitchen, I help out a bit with the
dishes, but by this time, Ben has them largely knocked out. Tickets for the
late tables start coming in, but we’re in slow-mo now, cooking one or
two tickets at a time, rather than six or eight like earlier. 8:30p I am in and out of the kitchen as necessary to
cook tickets and in between, I am chatting with guests in the dining room.
The night is winding down. 9:00p At 8:40 we start cooking our last table and at
9:00 their entrées go to the dining room. These guests will have come in at
8:30 and the servers tell me that we have no more tables working in the
dining room. We start to slowly pack away the dinner set up. I pack up my
Wondra and It’s a tricky business deciding when to
close, because we don’t have a fixed closing hour. Generally, if we
have had no new customers in 30 minutes and it gets to be 9:00pm, we will
close. Some weekend nights, this means that we are still cooking towards
11:00pm. But this policy gives me the flexibility to shut the doors at 8:00pm
on a snowy Wednesday in February and cut my losses. We endeavor never to turn
a customer away, but that is impossible in this business. Like as not, as
soon as you shut down the grill and oven, someone walks in. 9:20p The final dessert ticket comes in and it
contains a Pineappple OBW, my variation on Bananas Foster, flambéed fresh
pineapple over coconut ice cream. This is the only dessert that involves the
sauté station, so I fire the pan and it’s up in a minute. There are no other tables working, so it’s
time to break down the kitchen. Once we turn off the oven, the grill, and the
pots of hot water for vegetables and pasta, that’s it: the decision to
close is irrevocable. The grill takes a good 30 minutes to warm up and 45 is
better. The oven takes a solid 15-20 minutes to get to heat. They stay on from
open to close. 9:30p There are still three or four tables in the
dining room and I make my rounds among them. This is one of my favorite times
of day. I get to visit with tables and learn about my customers without the
pressure of having to cook for anyone else today. My customers are from all
over and have lots of amazing stories to tell. One great surprise tonight is that a chef friend
has got a night off and has come to dinner. We never get to see each other
otherwise. We talk shop a bit, especially about how bad the labor pool is and
how little people are willing to work for money. I mention that my dishwasher
quit and he mentions that he might have one for me. I ask what the catch is, because nobody gives up
a dishwasher unless the dishwasher is just terrible. A good dishwasher is
worth his weight in gold. Turns out that she has a felony conviction in her
past and he cannot hire her for some bureaucratic reason. He agrees to send
her my way if he can locate her number. He’s in the corporate dining world
and works with prospective employees through a Human Resources department,
something I left the corporate world to avoid. I am the HR department, the
Legal department, the Accounting department, the Maintenance department, the
IT department, CEO, and Chairman of the Board. I scrub toilets as well. Last
week I replaced the women’s toilet from the floor flange up. Welcome to
the small business world. Also I am happy to see my friend because I may
have a job lead for him. He’s just in a temporary job where he is now,
until he can find the job that he wants. 10:00p The last table leaves the dining room, an early
night for us. I shed my whites and head back into the kitchen where they are close
to having it all packed away. I help Aaron scrape down the grill, a hot and
dirty, but essential job. It takes a lot of brute force to scrape down a
grill and we are very likely to burn our hands, especially our knuckles, on
the bars. And the flying, smoking hot, carbonized bits feel really wonderful
when they land on you. Meanwhile, the server assistants have gone home
and the servers remain, finishing their chores, called side work. Side work
is no fun for servers because they are doing it basically for free. They get
paid $2.13 an hour plus tips and when there are no customers in the house,
they are still working for $2.13 an hour. No fun. They turn off the music,
the lights, the fans, the AC, dump the coffee and tea, clean the pots, dump
and clean the water pitchers, put away all the bar set-up, polish all the
silverware and glasses (our silverplate gets polished with each use and we
can go through hundreds of glasses a night), set the tables for tomorrow,
close the doors, bring in the flag, put the dinner menus away and get out the
lunch menus for tomorrow, put away the olives and the butter, clean the mixer
in which they whipped the butter, wipe down all their areas, and mop the
floors to their areas, in addition to many other tasks. 10:15p I head into the bar where the servers are
tallying up their numbers for the day. We do not have a point-of-sale system,
which could give them automatic reports, because we are so small and because
when a customer wants something out of the ordinary, I want the server in the
kitchen explaining the request to me. Moreover, with our menu changing daily,
it would take more effort to reprogram the POS system than it is worth. So,
the servers manually tote up the numbers, breaking them down by food, wine,
beer, and liquor. These categories are not so much for my benefit as they are
required information for the Virginia ABC, which requires that we maintain a
minimum food to alcohol sales ratio. The servers fill out a report that shows how
much they sold, which I later verify against the cash register and against
the duplicate checks, how much tax they collect, which I later pay to the
city and state, how much they made in tips, which I verify against the credit
card slips and report to the government on W-2s, and how much of their tips
they are paying out to their assistants. When we get busier, we will need a
full-time bartender and maître d’hôtel, and the servers will have to
tip them out too. 10:35p The servers have finished their paperwork for
the evening and I go through the credit card slips, add the tips, and double
check these tips against those that the servers claimed on their time sheets.
All numbers in synch, I submit the credit card batch to the bank for payment
and that ends my numbers for the evening. The bookkeeper will enter the sales
numbers into the accounting system in the morning and verify the taxes due
versus taxes collected, etc. 10:40p Once I check their numbers, the servers are
free to go and they waste no time in leaving. My work done, I step back into
the kitchen to see that cleanup is going very quickly with Ben and Aaron
busting out the dishwasher’s job. Even though I pay line cook wages to
them for doing dishes, we get out so much earlier (because they are competent
and work quickly) that the labor costs are a net wash. I go to my office and
make a note to call my ad rep at The
Winchester Star to place a classified ad on Monday for a new dishwasher. 11:15p All is done including mopping the kitchen
floors—all in all, a very early night for us. A typical Friday night
doesn’t see me getting home until 1 am or after. Because it is so early
and the weather is so gorgeous, Ben and I grab a bottle of ten-year old tawny
Port and sit on the deck and talk shop until 12:15, for a little down time
and to talk through menu ideas. It is simply impossible to do this during the
course of a business day. And it is so pleasant on the deck at this hour that
inertia keeps us in our chairs, not to mention the Port. 12:20a We end our night knowing that we both have to
open in the morning. Worse, I have to be at the farmer’s market by 8:30
to make my day’s purchases before opening. Argh. I turn off all the
lights, put the phones back on the chargers, set the alarm, lock the door,
and head home. 12:30a After my 10-minute walk home, I check my email,
which takes about 20 minutes as I have several projects that I am planning by
email: wedding rehearsal dinners, our monthly winemaker dinners, and some
marketing and PR projects. I surf a couple of chef sites for a few minutes,
looking to see what other people are doing. Nothing doing. 1:00a. I head into the girls’ bedroom to say
goodnight only to find empty beds. My wife is also nowhere to be seen. This
can only mean that the girls are with their nanny and that my wife is working
and that we will go another weekend without seeing each other. I drop into
the bed and grab the copy of Pierre Franey’s A Chef’s Tale
that I am reading two pages a night and read my requisite two pages. 1:15a I’m finally unwound enough to turn out
the light and catch a nap before I get up at 7:00 to start all over again. In
the 30 seconds between turning out the light and unconsciousness, I am
already anticipating the cooking demo on the |
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