Beginning a New Chapter in Brown Deer

Mistakes and miscalculations made for a tough start

The time went fast, and the River Lane officially closed New Year’s Eve 2015. I was in there the next morning to start with the cleaning. Jim’s chef was a nice guy named Mike, a competent chef whose main ambition seemed to be spending time with his family, but he made a jambalaya I was happy to drive across town for on a Monday. Mike came by but wasn’t down for the cleaning and painting so it was more of a let me know when you want me to come in and start cooking conversation. We had a staff meeting and orientation, where we got to meet the people we were rehiring. A few dropped off; I guess we weren’t what they were looking for. A few were excited to learn something new, but most seemed like they were going to give us a try to see if they liked it or not.

We did a long-overdue and extensive cleaning of the kitchen, and repainted the entire restaurant interior top to bottom. The River Lane had been operating for thirty five years and though it was dated, it’d been taken care of, at least in the customer areas. The paint in the dining rooms was a dark burgundy, and the decor kind of New Orleans nautical, Anne Rice meets Captain’s Steak Joynt. The bar and dining room were clean, but crowded with many more tables and chairs than had been needed in some time. Combined with navy blue tablecloths, the overall ambience was dark and the carpet smelled of many years of cigarettes, seafood, and spilled butter. The place had originally been built around 1900, and was kind of a local landmark.

Jim had added on twice- a little bit too large but functional kitchen and a back dining room/patio area. In it’s heyday, the River Lane was the best and really the only fine dining restaurant in about a ten-mile radius, the food and service were excellent, and business was bustling. Things had fallen off in the last five or six years as Jim and Claire, trying to spend less time on site, delegated much of the day to day operational duties to the staff.

The restaurant had basically run its course and was slowly fading into the realm of good memories.

Accepting that we’d have to put some substantial money into it to bring it up to date, the buyout price was about two-thirds of the value of the property. How substantial we couldn’t have guessed. The dining room needed three coats of paint to cover up that dark burgundy, the carpet had to be cleaned twice to get the smell out of it. Equipment that didn’t work needed to be replaced, and we needed to update the electrical and wire for modern electronics as they had done everything by hand and on paper. All that was fairly predictable if you took a good look at things as they were. What nearly killed us was that within three months, two of the three big HVAC units on the roof died and needed to be replaced, and we didn’t have the $25,000.00 in the bank to do it. But we didn’t have a choice, so we bit the bullet and fell into debt.

We’d been open for a week or two when Angela and I realized that we had a problem with the wait staff. I was in the kitchen when one of the alpha waitresses came in at 4:00 as usual. In a few minutes I heard the coffee grinder whirring, but I didn’t think anything of it because we all like a cup of coffee and it’s not at all uncommon for the first person there to brew a pot for everyone else. But the grinder kept grinding and I got curious, so I went out front. The waitress was grinding coffee into filters then piling them on top of each other. There must've been eight or nine stacked up. I asked her why she was doing that and she told me in kind of a parochial tone “that’s the way we do it.” When I told her that wasn’t the way we do it because we grind coffee fresh for each pot as opposed to every couple days, she rolled her eyes and stopped, but we never got along after that. There were many things like this. Some really wanted to test us to see how much the tail could wag the dog, but they weren’t prepared for Angela and me. It seemed everything was a test of wills, and they expressed their unhappiness to some of the regular customers.

We were busy right out of the gate. Much too busy, in fact, for us to have our eyes on everything going into and going on in the dining room like we did in Bay View. I was trying to get the kitchen to produce our food, Frank and Angela were trying to wrangle the waitstaff, and Phil was trying to go back and forth managing. I wasn’t happy with the food, the front of house management wasn’t happy with the service, and the majority of the old staff was, to varying degrees, undermining most of what we were trying to do.

On top of that, when I came to work early on our first Easter Sunday, someone had broken in and stolen the safe and everything in it. Video was available, but the quality was inconclusive and though the police suspected it was an employee by the make and model of the car, and his general appearance, it wasn’t enough to act on. The empty safe was retrieved down the road, and we still have it, complete with evidence tag and fingerprint dust. No one was having a good time.

As soon as we realized that we weren’t going to win the old front staff over, we started replacing them. At the end of the process, only one waiter remained from the original group. Things started to right themselves, and we stabilized for a while. I was holding on to Mike in the kitchen because I needed him to be there while I was going back and forth, and he’d been working with the Mexican crew for years and they were loyal to him. I figured it’d give Mike more time to absorb the dishes and methods, which couldn’t hurt. As the months went by, I realized that Mike wasn’t really into what we were trying to do. Some chefs are creative and self-motivated; others figure out what the minimum effort is needed for them to keep their job and that’s as much as they’re going to put into it. I felt like part of him wanted to do better, but he was out of his element. Maybe he didn’t like me. I didn’t know, but every time I worked next to him I got frustrated because he couldn’t seem to put the food on the plate and make it look neat and attractive, and that’s a really basic thing. I thought he was a nice guy and there were things he did well, but at the end of the day, we were never going to be on the same page, so one night I had a talk with him and he was on to his next opportunity.

By then, I’d developed a pretty good rapport with the crew, so even though it had crossed my mind that they’d follow him out the door, it didn’t happen. These guys were actually all related to each other- two uncles, two brothers and a cousin. They were happy working together, did a good job, and apparently liked working with me and Angela and the boys enough to stay on.

Because of several things ranging from server sabotage to bad decisions I made to things I wasn’t aware of until they were real problems, business was down to a trickle. We’d put every last dime we had into replacing the HVAC and had nothing left to pay the bills with. We could barely pay Jim and make payroll. It was a very dark time and I only saw one way out- the same thing that’d always gotten me back on track… hard work and perseverance.