More about the fall menu

Last night was great!  It was a relatively quieter evening for us (although some tables still turned 3 times) and the timing was really good so the kitchen could get in its groove.  The food looked and smelled delicious and customers gave us great feedback.  I am really happy with this menu...

Fall Menu

New Menu Time.  Aaahhh, if only the process was as delightful as the product!  Tomorrow, we start the new menu.  Alex and I have been working on it for weeks.  We have talked food non-stop for weeks.  Which, on the outside might sound delightful, but really, there is a limit to everything!  We have haggled with each other (okay, you can have Tripe Soup but I get Vegetable Tagine with Cous Cous - I'll let you all figure out who was on which side of THAT conversation), we have dissected and reconstructed, we have priced and priced and priced and hunted down suppliers trying to make it affordable yet still be able to pay the rent and staff.  All round, the process is, well, a process.

Yeah, the new menu is here!  

Tomorrow, we'll serve fall food and it is beautiful.  We have worked hard to make a creative, comforting, luxurious menu.  Please come and let us know how we did!

the teen years

This week, as I sat at my daughter's gymnastics class, I listened to a small group of parents talk about how lucky they were to grow up when they did because they couldn't really get into too much trouble. Whereas, they pontificated, today's kids are surrounded by bad influences, scary and dangerous options and are hard to keep safe.

Really? I am somewhat amazed by this thinking. In some ways, I wonder if it reflects an abdication of responsibility: nothing I can do, the world is a bad place. Or maybe it is meant to be a justification for what I think of as overparenting: constantly breathing down your child's neck and denying them the freedom to explore who they are and what they believe in.

Regardless, I think these parents are terribly wrong. The teens I know today are far more responsible, aware, thoughtful, and safer than I was as a teen or any of my cohort seemed to be. I have the pleasure (and occasional frustration) of working with a lot of teens. They make up a significant portion of restaurant workers. So every day I get to spend hours with a variety of teens and listen to their stories and adventures. I am amazed at how clever and creative they can be.

Last night, one of our teen dishwashers proudly showed me his band t-shirt. He had been in a 'battle of the bands' and a t-shirt had been created of all the participants. It's a great shirt! Now, the night he was in the battle of the bands, he had tried to find another dishwasher to cover his shift. He couldn't and so had to leave from the stage and come straight to work. We figured he would probably ditch work and hang out with his buddies, riding on the high of performing, and find a different job. He didn't. He showed up and worked the night. As it was a Saturday night, we were really grateful!

We have one teen who has been with us since he was 14 years old. He is about to turn 18. He has learned all the kitchen jobs, he will jump in and wash dishes or be left to prep an entire catering with little supervision. He works at the Bistro, plays basketball, goes to a tough school that requires a lot of him, has a girlfriend and will drive to pick up his little brother from a friend's house late at night. He is a good kid. Of course, he still talks back to his mother which drives me nuts but we're working on it!

I guess my point is that teens are lovely and hanging out with them is pretty great. I think most of the kids I know are perfectly capable of navigating our "big and scary" world. Alex and I have been rewarded time and time again for trusting all the kids in our lives. I don't fear my kids' teen years: they will do inappropriate things, they'll be crabby some days but generally, I think they are pretty great people and I'm looking forward to doing fun things with them.

Having said all that, our new 14 year old dishwasher walked out in the middle of his shift last night!

bumpy road

Some nights at the restaurant sail along beautifully, people come in, get seated, have drinks, eat food, laugh, have fun and life is good!  Other nights, are bumpy, odd and tiring.  Tonight was a bumpy night.

People came but so many came at once!  Some people were late, others were early and so they showed up at the same time and the kitchen got slammed.  We couldn't move appetizers fast enough to make room for mains.  Sometimes what happens is that we put so much pressure on the kitchen to get stuff out that they put it out too quickly and the food isn't perfect.  

Timing is tricky and we try to make it right.  Some tables are gracious and can see that we are trying very hard to make it all work but other tables are cranky and snipe at us.  Once this starts to happen, we get kind of disheartened and we have to work really hard to make sure we don't snowball into being grouchy ourselves.  We feel so bad when it doesn't work as smoothly and we want to make it right!  

Of course, once we have refires on food, or food takes awhile to come out because the timing is bad, we can't get tables out in what would have been a perfectly reasonable amount of time if we hadn't got off track in the first place.  Then, we wind up with tables having to wait to be seated.  

Sigh.

In all of this though, people laughed and drank and ate and for the most part seem to enjoy themselves

Tomorrow is another day and we'll get back at it and make it fabulous!  

Performing Happy

Saturday was a tough night.  My apologies to all the lovely customers.

Almost exactly 16 years ago, Alex and I got married.  We bought our first house and, for Christmas that year, I gave Alex a gift certificate to the Humane Society for a dog.  It was early spring when we felt ready to go and pick out a dog.  Actually, 'ready' might be an overstatement - I called our friends and asked that they come with us because I'm a big suck and would wind up crying incessantly over all the dogs we couldn't take home.  Alex and Brent went inside while Jaik and I waited outside.  A little while later, Alex and Brent emerged with a small, black dog that didn't look anything like our predetermined decision to seek out a black lab.  She wanted to run so Alex started to run with her and she immediately laid down.  She laid there for a minute and then got up and started to run again.  This scenario repeated itself several times.  We realized that when she felt unsure about the situation, she laid down.  Clearly, this was the dog for us.  It also turned out that her birthday was our wedding day of five months previous.  It seemed like a great fit.  The "Dog of the Day" at the Humane Society was named Lily which we thought was a pretty name and took it for our new dog (anyone who has seen our yard will know that Alex has a big thing for lilies and we have many of them.)

Lily came home with us and fit in quite well.  She was incredibly well-behaved. We figured out she had been abused by a silver-haired man (had an intense fear of them) and she had been abused with shovels and brooms (she feared both.)  We spent a lot of time giving her lots of love.  She only barked when someone came to the door, she loved to run at the park and she slept through the night.  After a few weeks, we came home one night and she had had diarrhea all over the floor.  She went into the cupboard under the sink and got out the paper towel, pulled off bits of it and tried to 'clean' up the mess.  That night was the beginning of her being very sick.  She had parvo-virus and was incredibly sick.  For weeks, Alex had to carry her up the stairs at night and we would steam her in the bathroom.  One vet told us that we should put her down (while simultaneously telling us we needed to brush her teeth and selling us very expensive toothpaste!)  In the end, she recovered and lived a healthy and happy life, full of trips to the park and very exciting canoe trips (often involving a lot of wildlife!)  

Saturday, Lily died.  

She had been increasingly unwell.  Lily was deaf and mostly blind.  She had trouble walking and she insisted on being outside all the time.  She was often confused and would bang into things.  She was a coming to the end but of course when it happened our hearts melted.  Alex took her to the vet and made the decision that she was in too much pain to keep alive.  We all cried a lot.  

Then, Saturday night at the restaurant is upon us.  There is a lesson in performing!  We both felt like we had been hit by a truck: dazed, confused, sad, and hurting.  But, when you go for dinner, these are not the kind of people you want to hang around so we had to suck it up.  It was hard but in some ways, it was good for us.  We definitely weren't at our best but we made the evening flow and except for being a bit disconnected, I think it went okay.  So, my apologies to the customers that I didn't visit a lot with (girls from California - really wanted to know more of your stories!) and for being distracted (guy at 2A whose wine order I forgot!) Thanks also to the staff who were wonderful.  Especially Roger who was almost as sad as we were.  

Fortunately, we are all well-versed in performing happy.

 

Sound Energy

Tonight, I noticed that it is noisy in the restaurant. Now, for those of you who come to the restaurant, this really isn't going to be a shock. It is a... vibrant space.

For the first year, we fretted about the sound. Handily, Alex's dad is a physicist with a little subspecialty in acoustics (dinner conversation at the Svenne household can be intense!) We had many conversations with him about how to address the issue. After that first year, we lost interest and oddly enough people simply adjusted. In fact, I think for the most part, people crave the energy created by the sound. A musician friend of ours from New York told us to not change a thing about the sound, she said that the acoustics were fantastic and it was a great vibe.

So many of the sounds are organic to a restaurant. There is no door to the dish pit so you hear the plates being stacked and the pans being sprayed; the servers' station is out in the open so you hear glasses rattling, cutlery being polished and dropped into the bin, and the ice being scooped into jugs. The kitchen is sitting in the middle of the room so you hear the pops and sizzles of cooking and the crash of the pans into the bus tub (you can also hear the conversation of the chefs which I had to remind them of tonight as they were on a long-winded rant...)

You also hear the music and we love music! Our lives are full of music. And, we LOVE to dance. Our best folk festival musical moment this year was being dead tired, 2 a.m. Sunday morning, squished in wall to wall people, dancing to So Called, a crazy hip hop klezmer band. It was delicious! What this translates to at the restaurant is constant music. We have many playlists and are always on the prowl for new music that fits different times of day and different moods (feel free to send suggestions.) We also dance a lot: Alex, the staff, me. In fact, I am sitting and writing this at the bar right now and it is 11 at night after a very busy Friday, and Alex and Clint are dancing away on the line.

Two nights ago, it was very quiet in the restaurant. I think that night is what spurred this post. It was eery. The joint was jammed full, including big parties, the music was turned up to "party" playlist, and NOTHING. I couldn't get the room buzzing to save myself. Every time I went to say something to someone, I felt like everyone in the room was leaning in to have a listen cause they had nothing else going on. It was at that moment that I realized many things: the acoustics of the space contribute to the noise; the volume and choice of music contribute to the noise; all the restaurant sounds contribute to the noise; but, the customers engaging with each other and us make the place hop! We can't generate the volume of sound that lively, happy, chatty people enjoying each other and their food and wine can create. Tonight, I experimented by telling the dishwasher to be extra quiet, polishing the cutlery gently, turning the music down, and none of it really changed the fact that it is loud in our restaurant. Loud with people. And, I love it!

chat with youngest daughter

Our youngest daughter is going through a phase right now.  She needs a lot of attention and energy and is very stressed out by Alex and I being away from her.  She cries when I leave for work and she calls me every night before she goes to sleep and demands that I come home.  Fortunately, I've been parenting long enough to get that I just need to hang tight, give her lots of hugs and love, and we'll move to a different stage.   

Today, as part of all this anxiety, our daughter told me that she was coming to work with me tonight.  Well, she is pretty young, and many of her sentences start with the words, "I want..." and so I explained that, in the restaurant, everything is about the customer.  I wanted her to hear that when we are in the restaurant, we have to only think about the customer (and taking a moment to plant seeds in her 5-year old brain about empathy!) which means that it would be a very boring and tedious place for her to spend time.  She was actually pretty quick to catch on that this sounded dismal and moved on to a new topic (she also didn't cry when I left for work tonight - secretly feeling sorry for me?!)  However, the exchange left me thinking about the dynamics of the restaurant.

When you are working at the restaurant, it is like you disappear.  There is absolutely no "I want."  From the moment you walk in the door, you are constantly scanning to try and figure out how to make life better for customers: are the tables in the right spot so that the (minimal) leg room is maximized? are the lights at the right brightness for the time of day? is the music at the right volume? is it the right kind of music? is the air conditioning too cold or not cold enough? do they have drinks? what is the drink special tonight? can we call their mains or are they wanting to pause after their appys?  The questions are endless and they flip through your head all night long.  You forget that your feet are screaming.  Sometimes you remember to re-hydrate and have something to drink. Occasionally, you remember that you need to pee.  

But, most of the time, you disappear.  And, you know, it's okay.  It's kind of a neat experience.  Not meant for the pre-school crowd but it is definitely a cool way to look at the world for a few hours and definitely makes me think about life differently.