Soft Opening

The first few months in Bay View

We finally opened the doors on April Fool’s Day. The first few weeks were a mixture of neighborhood people, curious foodies, and tire-kickers. I’d let the staff know to expect that, because restaurant review websites were popping up like crazy back then (remember Yelp and UrbanSpoon?), and there was a contingent of people wanting to be among the first to get their opinions out for everyone else to see.

My instructions to our staff were to bend over backwards for anyone from the neighborhood, anyone from the business, and anyone who was nice. The people who weren’t nice deserved good service, but not to worry if they weren’t happy. I knew that the negative people would come and hopefully not return, probably telling their friends all about how bad we were. Their nice friends, knowing that nothing would make them happy, would expect as much, wouldn’t care what they thought, and would come anyway, and their high-maintenance friends would be duly warned and probably not come to the restaurant, sparing our staff the grueling experience of trying to please them. In time, through attrition, we’d fill the place with nice people who would be a pleasure to serve, and the nasty ones we’d filtered out would go to the next new place and give them gray hair. Generally speaking, the strategy worked as intended.

It was fun. I woke up every morning and couldn’t wait to get to work. Every day had a rhythm. Angela and I would open up around 8am. She’d make coffee and assess the cleanup job the cooks and dishwasher had done the night before. I’d go downstairs, pop the locks on the walk-ins and dry storage, make sure the produce delivery had arrived, put it away, and then load up what I needed to get started, grab a chef coat, apron, and a stack of kitchen towels, and back up the stairs to the kitchen. I’d start with the stocks, soups, and slow-cooked items like Bourguignon or cassoulet, running down and up the stairs a dozen or so times fetching the things I’d need for lunch service. Around 10:00, a server would arrive to get the dining room set up. Deliveries would start coming in. At 10:30, I’d make the beurre blanc and Bearnaise sauces, turn the grill and fryer on, and put the final touches on the day’s lunch menu and my mise en place before the doors opened at 11:00. In the beginning, it was just me and Angela working in the kitchen at lunch. In addition to making all the desserts, she did the cold lunch items and I did the hot. We had a server who also fixed drinks, and we did a turn of about 25-30 guests Monday through Friday. As business picked up, we had Andrew come in at 11am and help cook so the food could get out quickly.

After lunch, I’d take a look at my sauté station and get it set up for dinner service. This might mean making sauces, compound butters, breaking down chickens and ducks, cutting fish, cooking vegetables, making the Dauphinois potatoes, and, if I had time, meeting with wine and liquor reps to place orders. The other cook and cold person came in around 3pm and started getting their stations together. I’d brief them on the evening’s menu, but happy hour began at 4pm and dinner service at 5pm so there wasn’t a lot of time to talk. On weeknights we’d average two and a half turns, about 50-60 guests, weekends three turns plus a few more late tables, especially if the weather was nice. Saturdays and Sundays we were only open for dinner, so Angela and I got a little bit of a break.

We were busy, and Angela and I were running on adrenaline. Things were going fine, people were liking what we were giving them, the staff was slowly stabilizing as we turned over and traded up. We were about three or four months into it when I stepped on a piece of ice someone had dropped on the floor.

I felt something in my knee pop. It didn’t hurt at first, and I more or less ignored it. As we made our way through the first turn, I could feel it gradually swelling and getting more painful. By the time Angela was greeting the second round of guests, I was in a lot of pain and could hardly stand. Rachael, who’d come with me from The Legend, looked at me and told me to go sit down until the orders started coming in. I did, then cooked a few tables, but realized that I couldn’t even remain standing, much less turn and bend over to pull things out of the oven or reach-in. I was getting in the way. I must’ve looked bad, because Angela came back and told me she was taking me to the hospital and I should go out and wait in my truck. I did.

In our business, it’s uncommon to have health insurance (I didn’t), and because I owned the business, I wasn’t eligible for Workman’s Comp. I was so worried about how I could pay for an ER visit I told Angela that I wouldn’t let her take me to a hospital, so she took me home and stayed with me. By that time, of course, my leg from six inches above to six inches below my right knee was swollen about twice it’s normal size and getting black and blue. She wrapped it with ice packs from work, I took a bunch of Aleves, downed with a glass of Wild Turkey, and settled in for the night.

I didn’t sleep, but in the morning, when I couldn’t even bend my leg to get up off the couch, I realized that it wasn’t going to get better without care. I told her that maybe the VA would see me, so she loaded me up and drove me to the ER there. She wheeled me through the whole process, from the paperwork to the x-rays. After several hours, they told me that I’d torn a tendon and my next stop would be an ortho consult. They scheduled it for the next day, gave me a bottle of painkillers, and instructions for Angela to stop somewhere and get me a walking cane. After all that, we went to work.

I managed to make it through the day with a lot of help from everyone else, and we went home, I got medicated and as tired as I was, managed a little sleep. The next day it was back to the VA, where I was told I could either get it surgically repaired or go the physical therapy route. Since I had a few friends who’d had knee surgery and hadn’t heard a lot of positive things about it from them, I opted for the PT. I was now officially in the VA system, so everything was pretty well organized and I got started with PT in the morning, then to work (with the cane) as soon as I was done. Maybe it’d have been better to rest my leg more, but I was terrified of failing with the restaurant so I sucked it up and worked hurt.

Over time, my knee improved, and I left the cane in my closet. PT eventually wrapped up, and I was able to work my regular shifts with occasional breaks and a couple painkillers if it bothered me. What I wasn’t aware of at the time was that I was now walking differently. The slight limp I’d developed would have long-lasting effects, but I was too busy to notice or care.

We’d begun to hit our stride, great media reviews had been coming in, and our front of the house A-Team was forming.

We had Phil and Gosia, and a couple other servers who worked lunches and filled in on their nights off. Phil is a total professional. He brought a quietly confident efficiency to the dining room, making sure every detail was attended to and need met. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of wine and spirits, and could make cocktails when the bartender was busy. His recommendations were spot on, and he was excellent at reading his tables. Over time he proved to be a good leader and trainer. As if that wasn’t enough, he also understood what the kitchen needed to know and how to communicate it without causing unnecessary chatter or confusion; a rarity among servers.

Gosia had emigrated from Poland. Raised in communism, she had a no nonsense approach and incredible work ethic, she was never late, and didn’t suffer fools gladly. All that was underneath a quick smile, bright eyes, and an engaging personality, which made her a stone-cold killer on the dining room floor.

We’d go through bartenders on a fairly regular basis, the two best and most memorable were Jerome and Yesh.

Jerome hailed from Bordeaux, and was hired for his joyous personality and charm. The first thing he told me was that he had no experience but it’d always been kind of a dream of his to tend bar in a bistro, so he wanted to give it a try. He wasn’t the most capable bartender, of course, but he was so charming no one noticed. It didn’t take long for him to generate a following of people who’d come out and eat at the bar whenever he was working. His day job was as an English teacher at a local high school, where his American wife also worked as a French teacher. He was going to law school when he worked with us; now he’s a successful attorney at a prestigious downtown law firm.

Yesh was born and raised here, and she also came to us with no experience but a strong desire to learn. Like Jerome, she has a great work ethic and an engaging personality. She’s very intelligent but would occasionally do things or make silly mistakes that were more endearing than serious. On her first shift, she had to look up how to make a gin and tonic in the Mr Boston book; a few months later, she flooded out the entire kitchen and basement because she forgot she was filling a mop bucket and went out to stock the bar. I was at my desk under the basement stairs when it started raining water from above, and when I ran upstairs she was sloshing around trying to mop it up. We always got a good laugh out of that one. She eventually left, got married, went to work in NYC at the UN, then got another job working for an environmental organization. The last time I heard, she was living in Chicago and had just had a baby girl.

There are many characters from those days. It was very much like a family. Angela and I are intensely proud of them and what they’ve made of their lives. It brings us great pleasure seeing some of them open their own businesses and become successful in their own right. For me, next to working with Angela and our sons, there’s nothing more professionally fulfilling than seeing someone I’ve helped along the way have a good and happy life.

The joyride was just getting under way. There was momentum and buzz, and we were riding the wave of new restaurants that were opening in that span of two or three years. It was hard to see anything getting in the way of our success, and then I got my first lesson in triple net leases…