A Day in the Life of Chef Ed Matthews
It's interesting looking back at this journal from the perspective of 2009. I have a daughter in high school now; blogging wasn't even a remote idea back in 2004; I start at the restaurant at 7:30 in the morning now instead of 9:00, probably because I have taken on all the bookkeeping myself; we have a much more competent crew now and none of the players are the same; email and all that is handled at work now that we're wired to the Internet; Atkins, both diet and man are dead……
Friday June 25, 2004
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 7:15 and 7:30. Once I gain some consciousness, I realize that the kids and the dog have been unusually quiet this morning, good for me. Everything is blurry, even more blurry than my usual morning state. Even without my glasses, I can sense from the light level that it is overcast, not a good state of affairs for our Friday Happy Hour, of which the last 2 out of 3 have been rained out. The next thought to cross my brain is that my legs hurt, really hurt. Last night was hard. We moved a lot of food, for little money. A hoard of people descended upon us with only a few hours warning and it was a painful experience all around. Back to right now, it's odd that my wife is still in bed, meaning she must be working tonight. We won't have a face-to-face adult conversation until Sunday afternoon, after I wake up, unless she is working on Sunday, in which case, it will be another week.
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 Village Square or Franco at Il Violino.
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 noon to reserve a table. We already had a busy night and a lot of the dining room was booked, but we got the 20 in. Still, I had no opportunity to order food for these 20 people. All the ordering is done at least a day in advance. And I remember how painful this party was. Someone in the party who likes food booked the reservation without considering that many of the others would have been a lot happier in one of the chain steak houses. A majority of the party was not well mannered and took out its anger on the service staff. Also there was sticker shock. We sold a lot of appetizers instead of entrées, our less expensive entrées (there went the pork) and no alcohol, which subsidizes the food costs. A bad situation in all: meager food sales, no alcohol sales, angry and demanding customers, and very poor tipping. Our only consolation is that everyone in the business has night(mare)s like this and tonight was our turn.
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 1:00am before I go to bed. Generally I have to boot one of my daughters off the computer. Strangely enough, not today. And no mail of importance.
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 entrées, 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 11:00am or later getting the lunch specials on the board. On the board go things that I want to sell for lunch because I don't have enough quantity to run for dinner or I have designed them as lunch specials. We often test new lunch dishes as specials. Today, we have two wild boar pies left from last night's dinner. They will be even better today for resting overnight in the refrigerator. I hope they go at lunch because they are really good pork pies, but I know that the name will scare a lot of people.
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 3:00pm.
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 to 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 12:30 or so on Friday. While I am working the dining room, the bookkeeper is in the office paying bills, clearing checks, entering sales receipts, and double checking server reports in preparation for tomorrow's [Saturday] payroll. Early in my restaurant career, I found that if you pay employees on Friday, they party the money away and don't show up for their shifts on Saturday.
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 Winchester, restaurants are a two day a week business. People eat out on Friday and Saturday and if one of those days is bad, we are guaranteed an unprofitable week.
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 Dijon mustard as a sauce for the leg of lamb special. I punt on the idea of rosemary in the sauce and opt for a bouquet garni of oregano, basil, thyme, and savory instead. The sauce needs hours to cook and I will not have a chance to go beg rosemary from Franco after lunch and still have time to reduce the sauce before dinner.
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 cancelled 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 (top 40) or Q-102 (country) 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 2:00 close. Their son is a chef and is looking for a job out in Montana. We talk shop, especially about how we manage reservations to avoid getting overwhelmed by tables all at once.
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 2:00 with my blessing. This involves unloading all the lunch food from the refrigerators on the cooking line and moving that food to the big walk-in refrigerator, plus giving all the dirty pans and utensils to the dishwasher, and wiping down and cleaning the refrigerators, counters, and range.
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 farmers 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 Dijon mustard. Both sauces are classic French technique in stark contrast to the Asian-inspired soy-lime-ginger sauce for the fresh sockeye and the classic Vietnamese lemongrass and star anise treatment for the pork. I have studied most of the major cuisines of the world over the past 20 years and I feel free to borrow liberally from them.
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 10:30 last night.
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. Winchester is all about portion size—the bigger, the better. I'd rather serve small portions and encourage people to order more dishes. I want them to try more things on the menu. Ultimately, I'd like to go either to a multi-course prix fixe menu with smaller portions in each course or to a tapas-style menu, where all the items are very small. This is how I like to eat: many very tasty small bites of food with interesting wines.
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 4:00pm yesterday afternoon. This too is not unusual. I am so busy that I often have no time to eat and when I have time, I'm too hot to eat. I start to think about something that will appeal to me—trust me, restaurant food is unappealing if you cook it all day, every day—when a wine delivery comes in. In the state of Virginia, by statute, wine is COD and I have to sign the check.
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 4:30. I really want people to come at 4:00, because we open at 5:00, but she has finished almost all of the set up work for tonight already, so I agree. It is very, very hard for me to have sympathy for employees who work 40 hours a week or less when I work more than 100 hours every week.
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 Virginia. We discuss our recent wine dinner and a few other details about wine purchases. He's a good guy, a good customer, and makes fantastic wine.
3:35p I wander back in the kitchen to check on things, when the front door chime sounds. It's Devon, the new server candidate that I interviewed yesterday. I tell him that he is hired but that I have to find/negotiate shifts for him and that he is to start training on Tuesday. He seems bright enough and asks intelligent questions. Clearly he has served before. We run through a few basics and I spend longer than I can afford with him, but it is important. He takes copies of all our menus home to study, a very good sign to me that he wants to become invested in this job.
3:55p Devon departs and I still need to do the special board and hang tonight's menu in the menu box outside. Customers insist on specials on the special board, even in a restaurant where the menu changes daily. Why? I'm not sure. Hanging a menu outside in the menu box is important because it shows people what we are about, even if they are not interested in eating or happen to come by on a day when we are closed. In addition, it spares people the embarrassment of coming in and then leaving again if the menu is not to their liking. Our prices are fair but not inexpensive because the best ingredients cost a lot of money, but still our prices are higher than many people in this area want to pay. Also, many would-be customers are looking for a steak and potatoes place, which we most definitely are not. I start heading to my office to print menus.
4:00p Before I get to my office, Lacey, server assistant, arrives as does Shannon, server. They are responsible for the happy hour crowd outside. The weather looks OK and they start getting ready. Shannon is a little wary of the forecast and asks if we can bring things out as needed, rather than stock the bar entirely before customers get here. Her point is a good one—if it pours suddenly, it will not be easy to haul a whole bar setup in. Her plan is solid and I concur. I like it when my employees think on their feet.
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 Shannon busy cleaning tables. I also see pitch black sky on three sides of us and simultaneously hear a huge clap of thunder. It is amazing how quickly this storm came on. I make the slash-across-the-throat sign to the two of them and they retreat back inside. Another happy hour, three of the last four, cancelled. I have a huge investment in the deck, grill, bar, tables, chairs, and umbrellas that I am hoping to pay for this summer. I really cannot worry about the weather and just have to take it on faith that things will improve down the road.
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, Shannon tells me that Shawn is here wanting to know about the leg of lamb. I know that Shawn loves lamb and I was prepared to make it for her, but I tell Shannon, sorry, it came too late for me to cook.
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 Old Bay containers, put the white wine and balsamic vinegar bottles back on the shelf where they belong, dump my dredging flour dishes, and wipe down my area. I won't really get serious about packing up until we are done with desserts and I am sure nobody else is coming in.
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. Virginia's archaic ABC laws frown on bars, which have real trouble selling the minimum amount of food. It is common knowledge that many bars cook their books to keep their licenses, showing far more in food sales than they actually sell. As a restaurant whose income is largely food sales, we never have a problem meeting the 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 farmers 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 Old Town mall that will take me away from the store all morning and the prospect of facing our busiest dinner of the week without a dishwasher.
