Restaurant Widow

Where am I?

Things have been crazy in the Widow household lately - good crazy, but still crazy.  I will be back with more frequency in about a week.

Husband is getting down to the wire studying for his Top|Somm competition, which takes place Sunday in San Francisco.

We leave (very, very early) on Friday morning, and are staying at the Hotel Monaco, which looks awesome.  Of course, the first thing I did was make reservations for Zuni Cafe (you can read about my previous dinners at Zuni here, in 2005, and here, in 2007) on Friday night.   

The rest of the time, I plan to buy lots of fun Japanese products.  And fret.

Don't Forget to Join the Potluck at Goodale Park Sunday!!

The Mooncussers are playing, and I'm making shrimp and grits!  I'll see you there! 

The show starts at noonish.  Please bring your own utensils and drinks!! (I am pretty sure I'm supposed to say "but not booze" right here).  Also bring a dish to share, if you are so inclined!

 

All Sides on WOSU::Breakfast in Columbus

Please tune in to WOSU 820 am tomorrow morning at 11am when we talk about Breakfast in our fair city with documentarian Rick Seback, Breakfast with Nick Blogger Nick Dekker, Best Breakfast & Sandwiches owner Tom Spangler, and Chef Kevin Caskey from Skillet!

Join Me for the Mooncussers in Goodale Park this Sunday!!!

It's another hot summer, and there's nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than lay in the shade at Goodale Park listening to some awesome tunes and enjoying some delightful grub.

If you haven't been to a concert at the Goodale Park Music Series, then you are missing out.  I went to the first show of the season last Sunday and thought to myself "why don't I do this every Sunday?"  Even though it was hot, there is tons of shade and a nice breeze was blowing.  It was great.

So, what's this potluck thing?  Well, everyone can participate.  Bring a dish to serve 16 people - you don't have to make it, it doesn't have to be fancy.  Remember church potlucks as a kid? My favorite was always the bucket of chicken.

My theme is going to be Southern Cuisine; I'm not quite sure what that means yet....but there will definitely be cornbread. 

The band will be the Moocussers, and word on the street has it some special guests will also be showing up!

I hope to see you there!!!

Here's a slideshow from the Lonely Bones show last Sunday...(which features mostly dogs because I suck at taking pictures of crowds of people)

No Reservations, Heartland airs TONIGHT!!!!

Please don't forget to watch No Reservations tonight!

 

Anthony Bourdain and Michael Ruhlman ate at Kihachi (you can read more about the shoot here).  The show also visited Clever Crow Pizza (which is also awesome) inside Circus Bar in the Short North.

Green Egg Update::The Basics

I've been getting lots of requests for a Big Green Egg update! We are still adjusting to it - it's pretty amazing how it holds heat, and how easy the heat is to control.  It's so efficient, in fact, that you sometimes forget how efficient it is, and end up overcooking things.  Not us, of course - we would never overcook anything. ever. ahem...

So far, I think the biggest lesson we've learned is the dryness of the charcoal makes a huge difference in the outcome of the product.  We've been using lump hardwood only, and even if the charcoal looks and feels completely dry and light, if it has rained recently, the charcoal will produce a ton of smoke.  If the charcoal is brand new, and just came home from inside the grocery store, the charcoals will light with ease and there will be almost no smoke.  So this pretty much means we will have more smoky dinners than we will have non-smoky ones.

All of the meat products which have come off the grill have had great flavor, even if they've been overcooked and are a little dry. I haven't had a ton of luck yet with vegetables; they've end up too smoky.

Today we had our first true success, I think.  I suppose I should say Husband had his first success, because I did nothing but ate the delicious results.  

The amazing thing about the BGE is the vent system which allows really great control over the heat.  There is a vent under the fire and the chimney top of the egg has a daisy wheel vent; vent the top just a sliver, and you can hold the temperature at 225 for hours and hours - I think we've had it going 8 hours at least on just one small pile of charcoal.

The use of charcoal has been another learning curve.  With any previous grill, you just dumped the charcoal in and that was that.  The egg actually doesn't want a ton of charcoal.  Only a single layer is necessary, and not even a solid layer at that.  There has to be a good amount of air flow all around the charcoal, especially moving vertically.

So far, we have not tried baking anything - we really need to get the heat diffusing insert.  I cannot wait to try pizza, and a reader asked me the other day if I had tried pies yet - a friend of hers bakes really great pies in her BGE, apparently!  Imagine how great a nice apple pie would taste with just a touch of smoky flavor.

Our best successes with the BGE have been fatty pork products (not too surprisingly), such as pork shoulder.  The "bark" on the outside of the shoulder when it comes in from the egg is amazing, and the meat inside is always delicious, even, as I've said, if overcooked.  

So, what's next?  Why, my very own bacon, of course!!

This post has been brought to by the Hamilton Parker Company, they sell Big Green Eggs!!

My Life in Bistro Aprons::the Cheap and the Honest

I was waiting on a large party, who came in to meet for their monthly gourmet club.  As is our custom, I added an automatic gratuity.

A gentleman came up to my manager a while after paying his check.  He explained that he hadn't realized at first that the gratuity had been included, and had filled in an additional tip when he signed his credit card slip.  He wanted to be sure the extra tip wasn't added.  But he would take the refund in cash, if possible.

"Oh of course," said my manager.  "We'll take care of it, no problem." Knowing the table had divided the payment, and that each person had paid about $80, my manager said "what was it? $16? $17?" (knowing what a fabulous server I am).

"Um," said the man. "No, it was $9."

"Oh," said my manager.  "Was everything okay? Was your server okay? Was there something wrong with your service?"

"Hey now," said the man, not unkindly.  "Don't go putting words in my mouth.  I didn't say anything about the service! Lisa was great!"

(beat.)

"I'm just cheap!" said the man.

My manager cocked his head at the man, plucked a ten dollar bill from the cash register, and said "Okay then. Keep the change."

My Life in Bistro Aprons::Trials of Being a Famous Waitress

I hesitated writing that, because there are certainly some people who will just instantly start whining and saying "you're so full of yourself," blah blah blah. So I'll just take the wind out of your sails by saying that I mean that in a non-arrogant, self-deprecating way. And if you do send me that email, it means you clearly didn't read beyond the title. so bite me. I'm in a bad mood this morning.

I am not the most naturally graceful person in the world.  This comes across both physically and personally.  I am extremely awkward.  

Physically, I have this theory (completely scientific) that my sense of spacial reasoning, as it pertains to my body in the world, stopped developing when I was about 12.  At the age of 12, I was about 5'5" tall and weighed somewhere around 87 pounds (I know, it's hard to believe, but I really was a knock-kneed thing). My brain doesn't seem to understand that I've grown both up and out significantly since then.  Add to that the fact that I flail my arms around spasmodically, and with a 70 inch wingspan, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Socially, I have always been incredibly awkward.  I have a habit of saying the most bizarre things that seemed to fit in my brain until they come out of my mouth and then they just sound completely absurd.  I was also a bullied child (I still hate you, Lara Vance, and I hope all of your kids cry every single day when they get home from school about how everyone is mean to them, just like I did when I wanted to be your friend and you wouldn't let me sit at your table at school lunch and I had to eat in the bathroom. Yes. Just like in Mean Girls. It happened to me too) and everyone called me ugly my whole life and barked at me and told me I was a dog.  So I pretty much grew up assuming everyone was making fun of me at all times.  

I also grew up in the country, and was basically alone for most of the time.  While this did wonders for my imagination (probably it was too good for my imagination, for I struggle with its overactivity to this day), it made me even more socially inept than nature made me.

Combine this with my 5 cats and it's a wonder I'm married, huh?

So there you have it: I am a completely clumsy, flailing, awkward, weird mess.  This would be perfectly fine if I never had to encounter people I've never met who know me from my online persona.

And so it is that inevitably, whenever I encounter a reader in real life, I will do something completely and ridiculously embarrassing.  Compounding all of this is the fact that the more I think about my clumsiness, the worse it becomes.  

It would naturally happen that every once in awhile, I meet a reader or twitter follower while I'm out and about or waiting tables.  Whenever this happens, an enormous feeling of dread washes over me, because it always means that something horribly humiliating is about to happen.

Here's an example:

- this follows in with a karmic reaction which happens whenever I yell at a coworker.  I used to have a coworker, a server assistant, who was a lot like me in the bull-in-a-china-shop department.  His contributing habit to clumsiness was that his head and body were never pointed in the same direction.  I frequently found myself saying "JOE!! Head and body in the same direction!!"  It was on this particular day when I discovered I should never say that, because it means that sometime in that shift I will fall down in grand fashion (I just re-proved it about 2 weeks ago).  So I had yelled at Joe.  It was a busy night and hot.  I was sweaty and looked precisely like an adolescent pig, what with my face all round and pink and sweaty (this was before having my thyroid treated. now i still get all sweaty and gross, but it's not quite as bad as it used to be). So already I'm looking fabulous.  Plus I am waiting on not one but two tables of readers I've only just met for the first time, plus an old coworker who I hadn't seen in awhile and since she had seen me, I had put on quite a bit of weight (because I've been mean, and gotten horribly cruel satisfaction out of seeing others put weight on, I know that I deserve the same derision), and I was already feeling embarrassed.  So here I am: plump, sweating, busy - seriously weeded, actually, because in addition to always doing something embarrassing, readers always seem to come on the busiest nights, just so that I can further humiliate myself by providing really crappy service.  I am standing at a table talking and see that a foodrunner is coming around the corner to drop food at the table.  In preparation to allow the foodrunner access to the table, I make the fatal error: I  back away from the table without looking behind me. It just so happens, at that exact moment, Joe the assistant is also walking behind me, in a hurry.  I back directly into him and somehow I fell onto him and we manage to fall in grand, and I mean grand fashion.  Huge fashion. Like, my shoes fell off.  Of course the entire dining room fell silent.  To add insult to injury, I was on the second floor of the restaurant, so the sound of my bulk succumbing to gravity was magnified by the fact that there was nothing to absorb the rumble.

My coworker, who was downstairs at the time, was kind enough to inform me that my fall sounded like a herd of elephants running through the dining room (I miss you Crumpet, there's no one here to keep my on my toes!!)

And so, be aware that should we ever meet, I am certain to spill water on you, drop a plate of food in your lap, fall onto your table, snort milk from my nose, or spastically pour a drink on myself for no apparent reason other than my arms moved of their own free will. Because that is just the kind of girl I am. 

Full of grace.

(ps i love you babe, even when you call me princess grace)

My Life in Bistro Aprons at le Potemkin Cafe::Cost Benefit Analysis

(I've decided to use the South Park disclosure - wouldn't it be totally ironic if I received a copyright infringement notice for using a fiction disclosure? - "all characters, even those based upon real people, are fictional."  I think that should take care of it.)

People frequently ask me why le Potemkin Cafe closed.  I can, and perhaps will, one day, write a manifesto on how it was doomed from day one, and then back up the claim with at least 150 specific examples, but one huge component was the inability to control the most easily-controlled expenses.  Which are the easiest to control? the ones for items which don't bring you any money. The things you don't sell.  The things which you have to buy but get you basically nothing. Except praise at your exquisite taste in over-the-top expensive plateware.

 

The picture above features a cream pitcher used in le Potemkin Cafe. I forgot to include something to give scale, so please just trust me when I tell you this pitcher is about 4 inches high at its tallest point, and probably holds 3-4 ounces of cream. (just under half a cup). I borrowed it one day, and now it sits in my house as a reminder.

I'm unsure of how much education to offer here on the topic of restaurant economics.  Let's just say that after an eternity in the restaurant business, I know to ask "how much would it be to...." when I'm about to ask if we could possibly have enough water pitchers for every server in the building to have their very own.

Profit margins in restaurants are extremely thin. razer thin. This is why so many restaurants have failed in the recession.  It isn't just about getting butts in chairs, it's about making money on what those people buy.  You can only lower your prices so much, and then you have to reduce quality. And then there's nothing left you can do.  You can't lower prices, you can't reduce, you just have to close.  It's sad, but it's the reality.

One way to prevent this is to control costs very tightly.  When I worked at le Potemkin Cafe, we (the servers) used to compare how Chef Napoleon did things compared to our previous employers.  

An example: a restaurant I worked in when they opened 11 years ago opened with amazing food and wine and horrible, crappy, industrial-issue silverware.  But they couldn't afford nice silverware.  I think it was about 3 years ago when we went in to eat at this restaurant, and the entire staff was thrilled and buzzing over the purchase of their beautiful new silverware.  Imagine - waiting 8 years for new and pretty silverware. 

And that restaurant is still open.

On with this cream pitcher.  Now, just as a point of reference, there are loads of cream pitchers a restaurant can buy.  My personal favorite is something like this. It's simple, with clean, straight lines. No useless decoration, it's something which won't easily become dated.  As a matter of fact, this was the cream pitcher in a restaurant where I worked in the year 2000 (which, incidentally, is also still open), and I still think the pitcher looks nice after 10 years. 

This little pitcher costs about $3.35 each, purchased in a case of 36. I know for some restaurant mangers, even this will seem way too expensive, but I think it's worth it for that extra bit of charm. The least expensive cream pitcher, which you will certainly recognize instantly as the one used at many, many restaurants, costs around $1.10 at Wasserstrom.

Now, compare that to the cost of the cream pitcher at the top of this post, which cost $26 each.  yes, you read that correctly: twenty-six dollars.  Does that illustrate any point to you?  Every time a server breaks a pitcher, which trust me, is going to happen at least once a month, if not more, the person who was stupid enough to shell out $26 for a cream pitcher is going to have a small aneurysm. 

Why would anyone purchase a $26 cream pitcher for a restaurant before it's ever sold anything? I have no idea.  No realistic idea, anyway.

Other examples: enormous, old-fashioned, bulky menu covers were ordered for the restaurant.  We had three different varieties - a large wine list cover, a multi-page cocktail cover, and a regular dinner menu cover.  These menu covers were ordered to the tune of $30,000 from what we were told.  In under a year, the faux leather covering of the menu began to wear away from the cardboard underneath. Just the action of ordering these menu covers before opening shows a lack of understanding about the restaurant business, because you can usually get a liquor company to pay for most of all of your menu covers if you mention liquors by brand name.  

Each dinner plate, and we used about 4 different styles, depending on the dish, cost an average of $38. EACH. I don't know how many of each plate we owned, but I can tell you that in the back room were stacks and stacks and stacks of extra plates that we would never need no matter how busy we would ever become.  By the time the restaurant had re-branded itself and purchased an entirely new and different run of plateware, we calculated there might be as much as $100,000 in un-used plateware sitting in storage, wrapped in plastic wrap.

We used sugar cubes instead of packets, and of course, not the plain old square cubes, but the rustic-looking ones that fetch a higher price.  The Winds Cafe has used these sorts of sugar cubes forever - I remember going there in high school and being completely charmed by how cool the sugar looked, white and raw rough sugar cubes, sitting in a glass jar (this was years before raw sugar become de rigueur in restaurants and coffee shops. Every so often, our CdC (Chef du Cuisine) would trot off to Whole Foods, where he would pay $8 for a 7 ounce box of rough-cut sugar sugar cubes.  Now, these same cubes can because purchased for as little as $2/pound if bought in bulk.  CdC was paying $18/pound by going to Whole Foods.  That is nine times as expensive.  Bear in mind also that this is something for which we don't charge - it just comes with coffee, and the price should be built into the coffee, but when you are talking about paying $18 a pound for sugar cubes, if you want to maintain a 30% food cost, you have to calculate somewhere that you need to recover $54 from your sugar cubes.  And of course, you have to factor in that for every 10 people who plop a cube into their coffee or tea, there is one child who eats all of the cubes or a little old lady who folds them all into a napkin and stashes them in her purse.

My Life in Bistro Aprons::the Detritus

There are a few strange things about restaurants that those of use who have worked in them forever know, and probably no one else does. I am sure there are things like this in every profession; in fact, I'm probably one of those cliches and don't even know it. Tonight I walked into a bar where I had never been and felt some strange need to announce this fact to the bartender when I realized I was being pointlessly precious, a quality I absolutely loathe in everyone else, and was ashamed of myself.

Some not so great things happens in restaurants. Weird things happen.  Okay. I'm going to stop trying to explain and just list some facts.  Proceed with caution, some of the following might be a bit mature for some of you.  Don't say I didn't warn you. I know there are two ones. It's late. What do you want from me?

1. The employee bathrooms in restaurants are a strange and horrifying place. You probably don't even realized they exist.  Here are a few facts about these tiny chambers of hell: 

• there is never adequate lighting.  I'm not quite sure why this is - I have never been able to figure it out, but there you have it. They are always dim. Either there is no mirror or the mirror is clouded and the only light is behind you so you always end up looking ghostly and hollow and strange.  
• Many restaurant employees come from parts of the world where they don't have things like sewer systems.  When you grow up in a country with no sewer systems, you develop of habit of keeping everything possible out of the toilet, so as not to take down whatever septic system is in place.  So everything man-made - wait, that doesn't make sense - everything man made but not including human waste - goes in the trash. it can be horrifying.  I will spare you any further details.  
• There is always a box of cornstarch on the back of the toilet.  This is because there is a very specific condition restaurant workers get when they have to move in ill-fitting polyester clothing in the blistering heat and humidity for hours and hours on end.  The only treatment for this condition or set of conditions is cornstarch. and even that is pushing it in August.  
• The toilet paper will never, under any circumstances, be on a holder.  There probably won't even be a roll holder in the bathroom.  Really picky chefs and managers keep secret stashes of toilet paper in their filing cabinets for emergency usage.

1. Somewhere in the kitchen, there are at least 2 completely secret and creative places for hiding towels.  This is a well-honed skill that clever line cooks learn on about their third night on the job, when the supply of clean kitchen towels runs out at 8:15 on a Saturday night and you get your first steam burn because you're trying to eak out the last bit of use out of your last towel, which unfortunately you just used to toss the spaghetti from the steamer into the saute pan and now it's damp and you've just used it to pull a pan out of a 500 degree oven, and, well, you make a mental note that when the linen order comes in Tuesday morning, you will casually hide a few kitchen towels away for times such as these, in a place so secret that if another cook should ever discover your trove, well, let's just say they better bring a buddy when it's cigarette time.
2. No one will ever, ever read your resume, no matter what you say.  If you have a job in a good restaurant, it's because you know someone.  The only time your resume will be read is by the staff of that good restaurant when some poor sap comes in all hopeful and smiley because they've passed the first level of the sommelier certification and they know everything. The staff will read and critique every spelling error and stupid sentence and laugh at you. They will be laughing at you even as you walk out of the building and across the street.  This is because we restaurant people are mean, and horrible, and cruel. And we have wicked tongues which it would be a complete shame to waste.
3. It is possible to be a functioning alcoholic for a long, long time.  Possibly one of the saddest things during my restaurant tenure has been the number of alcoholics I have worked with over the years. A bar or restaurant is a really dangerous place for someone with substance abuse problems, which lots of people in the restaurant industry have.  You are constantly surrounded by enormous amounts of alcohol. You constantly have cash. You constantly have access.  It can spell the end pretty fast for some people.  I remember a manager I worked with who, every 20 minutes or so, would walk into the bar to the soda machine, where we kept a stock of 4 ounce cone cups for the staff to drink out of.  This manager would grab a cone cup, fill it to the brim with the swill vodka from the well, and down it.  He would crush the cone cup and fancy-toss it into the trash can as he walked back out of the bar.  Managers work like 15 hour days. You do the math.
4. It's not quite so easy to be a functioning drug addict.  I worked with one manager who, aside from being a quite entertaining pathological liar, developed something of a serious prescription painkiller problem during his tenure.  At first he would just take a few Vicodins ever so often and at first, even seemed a little mellowed out.  He was in way over his head with the job he had taken, and took it out on the staff a lot.  At some point I started to suspect something when the manager began to lose a lot of weight and had a giant stock of candy in his office.  He also started to spend a lot of his time in the office with the door locked - something typically frowned upon in a restaurant, because the manager should never really be in the office, he should be out on the floor.  The office was for the hours before and after the restaurant was open.  If he wasn't in the office, he could sometimes be found smoking weed in his car. This would be amusing, more than anything, because this manager thought he was really smart and that none of us knew what he was doing out there.  This was coupled with the fact that he wasn't really used to smoking a lot of weed, so he because incredibly nonsensical.  As weeks and months went by, he began begging various members of the staff who had prescription painkillers (legitimately - one had been in a car accident, another had donated a kidney) to sell their remaining pills to him.  He was shopping doctors, driving out of state on his days off to pick up more pills.  We kept track once, and the best we could figure he was consuming at least 18 Vicodin a day, plus he was usually able to purchase Oxy.  One day, he arrived at work to announce he had been put on morphine.  We all thought this was very strange, being conscious and all.  At any rate, the manager kept going down and down. There were suspicions he was stealing - small amounts - from the servers; he was always messing up the accounting, he accepted tips from guests intended for the servers; it all became very sketchy.  It culminated when one day, after having been asleep on the banquette for the better part of the day, that he actually fell asleep, standing up, mid sentence one day while standing up against an ibeam.  He casually asked the bartender later if he had noticed anything weird about him. 
5. You will associate with, and befriend, and grow to love, people you never thought you would even know.  Over my years, I have known a beaten alcoholic housewife, well, a few of those, actually, several transgendered persons, people who have been in prison for selling crack, people who have lost all of their teeth due to meth addiction, a very nice woman who ended up being a fugitive after having killed her husband 20 years earlier, a person whose parents were cult leaders, several people who had really successful careers as musicians and actors and artists, a guy who became an exotic dancer and killed a drag queen with a samurai sword, and actually a ton of other people and things and events so crazy that I feel like I really can't even say them for fear of giving a secret away!
6. Because restaurant work is so popular among the creative class, I have always been amazed by the people I've worked with over the years.  I have worked with so many interesting and amazing people that in almost every job, we have joked about how we should have a TV reality show based upon our lives.  I have met so many artists, photographers, sculptures, glass blowers, raconteurs, cowboys, bodybuilders, writers, painters, actors, dancers, scholars, yogis - you name it, there are just so many amazing people who work in restaurants.  I've frequently wanted to do a series on RW about Getting to Know the People Who Wait on You.  "this is Joe. Joe is a really amazing graphic designer who designed the advertising campaigns for like half of the liquors we sell. But he got laid off, so now he just freelances and waits tables."  "this is Jane. Jane is the artist whose art is showing at the gallery four doors down. Unfortunately, this Saturday is our busiest night of the month, so she can't be at the gallery enjoying the opening night of her first show, she has to work. and you were going to tip her 12 percent. tsk, tsk." "This is Pierre.  Pierre is a fashion designer.  You don't know this yet, because it's top secret, but he's going to be on Project Runway. Hopefully he'll do well, because who knows if this job will be here when he gets back."
7. You can never leave your restaurant voice behind you. Cruising through Anthropologie at Easton on a Monday afternoon, you find yourself muttering "behind you" to every person you dodge around. You jump every time you hear the word "runner" when dining out.

I never had this kind of fun when I worked in a cubicle.  When we had potlucks at our corporate offices, there wasn't even an off chance someone would try to sneak in a flask of stingers or cook weed into the meatballs.  These things just didn't happen.  When I was in the corporate world, we would stand around giggling about the really really strong bourbon balls so-and-so had made at made at Christmas "oh, i'll be at work and my breath will smell boozy!" we'd twitter. We'd always joke about how we only wish there were booze in the eggnog. there was never a chance that your boss had equal parts Bailey's, coffee, and brandy in her thermos every morning.  There wasn't a chance your coworker slept in her car in the parking lot of the bar across the street last night and rummaged through her trunk for a different blouse to wear to work this morning so no one would notice. No one is going to pinch your rear end with tongs when you walk past. No one is going to sneak shots of jagermeister to you an hour before closing time. No one is going to be caught doing anything untoward in the walkin cooler. No one will be caught trying to sneak a bottle of vodka out of the boardroom. No one will honestly try to call off because they're 1.in jail. 2.still drunk. 3.still doing a walk of shame 4.lost 5.waiting to get car out of impound 6.decided to drive to michigan last night. 7.nursing a facial laceration where your girlfriend tried to stab you 8.can't imagine trying to be nice to anyone tonight without eventually cracking and stabbing someone with your corkscrew. 9.I can't list this one, but Joe, it was still be best call-in to work I have ever heard in my life. 

As much of a mad crazy world as it is, I still wouldn't have given it up.  At least once a week I find myself laughing to a coworker and saying "i'm going to put that in my book." I just can't imagine anything different.