2011: November 1st

Darn, I just finished writing the last posting from October 15th and here it is, November already! Welcome to the November 1st posting about all things One Block West, the latest in the year-long, twice-monthly series.

The first week of this period, heading into the weekend of Saturday the 22nd was crazy! The week started off slow enough, but we could feel it building momentum all week long heading into the prime leaf-peeping weekend of the year. I spent all of Monday and Tuesday just trying to dig out from all the paperwork that didn't get done the week before because we were so busy.

Tuesday and Wednesday we prepped like crazy for a private dinner for the local chapter of Accademia di Cucina Italiana on Thursday the 20th. This group, dedicated to preserving and promoting Italian cuisine, holds several themed dinners each year at restaurants all over the world. All the chapters hold their Ecumenical Dinner, the highlight dinner of their year, at restaurants at roughly the same time of year. Each dinner has the same theme; this year the theme was fruit and cuisine.

If you know anything about modern Italian cuisine, you know that fruit has very little place at the Italian table, with the exception of the traditional bowl of fruit and the occasional fruit dessert. Savory cuisine using fruit is rare. Worse still, the timing of this dinner at the end of October does not coincide with the availability of many of the most interesting fruits. And so it was quite painful to come up with a worthy menu featuring fruit, but it was equally a pain for all the chefs all over the world who were doing the same thing I was. In the end, I arrived at a menu that pleased me, although I overheard one self-important attendee exclaim for all to hear that he was underwhelmed with the menu. I did the best I could on the quite restricted budget that the group gave me.

I loved the antipasti: goat cheese-stuffed, prosciutto-wrapped grilled figs; crostini topped with caramelized onions, melted Gorgonzola, and fresh fig jam; and grilled focaccia topped with sausage and grape “olivada.” Olivada is the Italian equivalent of tapenade (or vice-versa) and we modeled the red grape version on the cherry version we did so successfully this past spring. I love the sweet-tart aspect of this delicious condiment.

Our secondo was a porcini, roasted grape, and walnut risotto which we made with verjus instead of wine. It was very difficult to balance the acidity of the verjus with the sweetness of the grapes, which roasting only enhances. In the end, I think we did pretty well.

The primo was a whole loin of Berkshire pork stuffed (roulade style) with macerated dried fruits and porcini mushrooms. I went heavy on the cherries in the stuffing because I wanted to pull out the very cherry aspects of the Tuscan Sangiovese-Syrah blend that we served with the pork. On the side were sautéed local cavolo nero and a mostarda, Cremona-style. Rather than domestic pork, I wanted to serve wild boar at this course, but that would have blown the entire dinner budget.

When I serve vegetables at an Italian dinner, I always cringe. As an American, I have the American taste for cooked but slightly crunchy vegetables. [For the record, I like my vegetables more cooked rather than less cooked.] Except in very modern Italian restaurants, there's no such thing as crunchy vegetables. Still, I let my taste guide me and served the cavolo just wilted and sautéed briefly in olive oil with garlic.

For dessert, our guests finished with an orange crostata, cooked upside down very similar to a tarte Tatin, but made with a polenta genoise batter. I developed this recipe many years ago using blood oranges (not in season until December) and it is always a hit.

And so the dinner on the 20th was the crowning glory to an otherwise miserable day in the restaurant business. Last edition, I mentioned that the 13th was a day from hell. The 20th nearly went down in the books as another. I came in around 6:30am on the morning of the 20th to complete all my taxes (sales, meals, Federal withholding, state withholding, and unemployment). It's always a pleasure to do this; one of the highlights of my month. If you didn't read that last statement with dripping sarcasm, go back and do it again and keep doing it until you get it right.

The first thing I did was to pay my meals tax, the easiest of the five taxes to compute. I generated the QuickBooks report stating my tax liability and went to cut the check for the amount due, which was in excess of $87,000! WTF! I started poking around and then I remembered that a couple weeks earlier, I had performed some database maintenance. Intuit sent out a newsletter that recommended tweaking the database for performance. Containing nearly ten years of data, my database needs some performance tweaks. So I followed their advice...and got screwed.

Poking around on the forums, I could see Intuit techs recommending to never do what I did and yet the bastards sent out a newsletter advising us customers to do exactly that. In the end, it took an hour of my day that didn't contain a spare hour to figure out how to make the reversing journal entries to fix Intuit's stupidity.

So you can imagine my frame of mind when one of the front of the house employees came to tell me that we had run out of table cloths. Now, a restaurant just doesn't magically run out of table cloths. They go out on tables one by one and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the pile of clean ones is shrinking and to take corrective action before it becomes a crisis. And there went another half an hour of my day while I scheduled an emergency delivery.

Going into a busy lunch and dinner, our dishwasher was out again, so I had to get a fill-in guy, one whose speed is not the greatest. For a multi-course wine dinner with tons of wine glasses in use, speed is requisite. Add more stress to an already stressful day. Topping this, I went to pull a bottle of one of the wines that we were serving at the dinner to make sure that I noted the correct vintage on the menu. I saw only two bottles on the shelf. More was supposed to come in with the delivery we got first thing in the morning, but it did not. Arrgghhh! Scrambling, I found another wine in stock to substitute, a much more expensive wine. I could hear the meager profit on the Italian dinner tinkling down the drain.

So just to top off the night, I tasted the risotto just as the antipasti were going out the kitchen door and I found that it was totally overcooked: one of the line cooks had par-cooked the base earlier that afternoon and had failed to cool it adequately, so it kept on cooking into mush. You have never seen three guys scrambling so fast to pull off risotto on the fly—they work at a sedate pace on Iron Chef compared to what we were doing. Oh and just to keep the day interesting, the rest of the restaurant was fully booked all night and we had to juggle tables left and right to send out the 25 plates for the Italian dinner amongst all the others.

Friday the 21st was super busy, but it seemed like a slow night when compared to Saturday the 22nd. On Saturday, the first ticket hit the kitchen at 5:14 and the last entrée left the kitchen just after 10:00. And in between, we cooked as fast as we could all night long. Exhausted just does not begin to describe it. When the young servers and line cooks are dragging along slump shouldered, well, use your imagination about the state of the chef. I honestly cannot tell you one thing about dinner service on the 22nd: it was and will always be a total blur. I vaguely recall that we did a 9-course Chef's Tasting that evening, but can't even conjure up one dish that we served. It was that busy.

I had great plans for pesto the week following. Beth and I had already talked and she was going to pull all her basil on Monday the 24th to bring to me so I could convert it to pesto, some for her, some for us. Likewise, I was going to cut all my basil and add it to the pile. No such luck. We got a snap frost Saturday night/Sunday morning. I first noticed it when I took the dogs out first thing Sunday morning, a little frost on the low spots in the yard. I kind of got this sick feeling in my gut and didn't want to walk around the corner to look at my garden, but I did anyway. Sure enough, the basil was limp and black. And not even the hint of a frost warning from the weather people!

Such is the natural progression of the seasons, I suppose. The turning of the seasons is now well evident in the market. On the 25th, Beth brought celery root to the market, joining sweet potatoes, collards, celery, komatsuna, several new varieties of apples, and daikon, all harbingers of winter. I haven't given in and bought sweet potatoes or parsnips yet. We're going to have those vegetables with us for a very long haul and while I am eager for my first taste of both, I know that I will be sick of them before very long. I bought the last tomatoes and the last summer squash of the year on the 29th and that is something of a miracle. Many years they don't last that long.

Business slowed dramatically the week after the 22nd, the last leaf-peeping weekend of the year, so it turned out. In a continuation of the trend during recent weeks, we had more dishwasher woes—our long-time dishwasher continued to be late and started to escalate interpersonal problems with other employees—so I interviewed and hired a new one who cannot start until November 8th. And our dish machine was leaving spots all over the glassware because of a broken rinse agent line.

This week also saw a hatchet job review on Yelp, a one-line, one-star review that states in essence "everything sucks at One Block West." Yelpers will ignore it because it is so ludicrous and devoid of content, but still, unless it was a drunk comment by one of my competitors, somebody had a bad experience with us and there is nothing I can do to make sure it never happens again, because I have nothing to work with.

Can you believe there was snow in the forecast for last weekend? Snow? In October? While the fall foliage is still beautiful? As I have mentioned over and over, the dreaded S-word in the forecast is enough to kill business dead in its tracks. Sure enough, we had no business on either Thursday or Friday leading into the Saturday storm.

Saturday was a different story however. I drove in to work in a couple of inches of mush, but with no difficulty and we opened right on time. The only exception to this was our dishwasher who called at 9:30 saying that he couldn't get to work. I hadn't yet notified him of his termination, keeping him on in the interim until the new dishwasher started on the 8th, but that phone call put a quick end to his 5-year career with us. A dishwasher who does a fantastic job with the dishes and who is quick but who cannot come to work is no kind of dishwasher at all. It is sad that we had to part this way after five years, but his personal life was starting to disrupt our business.

During the morning, we had the power go out several times, to the point where I turned off the computer to keep it from crashing and rebooting. But come 11:00am, our power was on steadily. I could see from comments other business owners were making on Facebook that working power was a precious commodity that morning. Trees, still laden with leaves, were snapping all over town, bringing down power lines. Somehow, we dodged the major bullet and as soon as we opened, people started coming in to get warm. And to drink. We sold more wine for lunch than we do during a lot of dinners.

Before I get into dinner, I do have to give props to the local ABC store which was open despite no power. They couldn't retrieve our order off their voicemail but were very accommodating when we sent an employee to see if he could get some liquor for Saturday night service. We called ahead but with no power, they had no phone. They suspended all the usual ordering BS and helped us get enough stuff on the spot to open for dinner. I know what a giant pain in the ass it is for them to process transactions manually and then to go back and enter them into their system after power was restored, so my my hat is off to them for helping us out.

Our dinner reservation book hovered right where it had been all week: almost empty. We would lose a table because of the weather only to have someone call again to reserve a table, but going into dinner at 5:00, there was no net change in the book. It looked to be a slow, miserable night, a fitting ending to a slow, miserable week. And anticipating this, I ordered very lightly for the weekend and we prepped only minimally. There is no sense in buying or prepping what you cannot sell.

Nothing really happened on Saturday night until about 6:30 when the phone started ringing for reservations later in the evening. At about this time, our already booked tables started coming in and then all of a sudden, the servers were starting to hustle a bit. It wasn't a huge crowd, but it was a lot busier than we expected and we started running out of things by 7:00. Customers were most understanding and the vibe in the dining room was great. To top it off, we sold more big ticket wines that night than we usually do in a month. Sales were great despite the weather. What looked like a money-loser week turned out to be OK. Whew!

Now that business has slowed, renovation of the bar continues and is nearing completion. With the exception of some minor trim, the bar is entirely painted. Very soon now we'll have it back in service, hopefully by the November 15th posting. Until then, I hope you eat and drink well.

2011: October 15th

Welcome to the October 15th edition of my twice-monthly series on One Block West Restaurant during 2011. This is the 20th posting of the 24-part series. I have to admit that I am sitting here writing this long after the 15th of October based on notes I kept over the past couple of weeks. I apologize for not getting this out in timely fashion, but we have been at the peak of our crazy fall leaf-peeping season and there have barely been enough hours in the day to get prepped for dinner service. There surely have not been spare hours to write and I have been running on the verge of exhaustion for weeks.

During this season, we're like bears gorging on all the food we can find to put on fat to carry us through the lean months. Because of Thanksgiving, November is a lean month and soon enough, we'll be staring at each other wishing we had something to do other than scrub the kitchen. December will bring a burst of holiday parties (we hope; the past few years have seen companies flee from having parties). Then come January, February, and March—the starving time for us and many restaurants. But enough looking forward to the dreaded months and on with the tale of the bounty of October.

While there is a big Catholic church here, Winchester has never struck me as being a big Catholic town. Still, we can almost always count on fish being the big seller on Friday nights with meat and grilled items dominating sales on Saturday night. So I was pretty perplexed to start off this two-week period with an all-meat Friday night followed by an all-seafood Saturday night.

For me, selling all the meat purchased for Saturday night on Friday night is scary for two reasons. If Saturday is a typical meat night, there won't be enough meat to satisfy customers. And if Friday's fish doesn't sell on Saturday, the fish is not going to hold until we reopen on Tuesday. No worries this time. Saturday, October 1st saw nothing but seafood sales. Whew!

The week leading up to and the weekend of the 8th is a blur. This is not unusual because generally during October we are running at almost double our normal volume. But what is unusual is that the 8th saw us host two birthday parties simultaneously, while the rest of the house was packed. I have got to say that the evening of the 8th went extremely smoothly—both our front and back of the house teams are very professional and handled it well.

During the week leading up to the 8th, my partner Ann's birthday, we put a lot of work into designing and executing the menu for her birthday party. This year our instructions were "Around the World in 8 Courses," sparkling wine first course, red wine for the remaining courses, savory dessert course, and all courses to be comfort food. And she gave us a list of the eight countries. I've been cooking a long, long time now and have cooked a lot of food from all over the world, so this wasn't the challenge that it might seem. The hardest part was nailing down which country would have the starter course paired with sparkling wine and which would have the savory dessert course paired with Port. After that, the menu was straightforward.

The day before the dinner, I knew Ann would be stopping by after lunch when the guys and I would be sitting down to walk through our prep lists. And knowing that she had been asking (in vain, I might add) about the menu for days, I put together a totally bogus menu complete with prep notes on the side of it. Just for grins, I included baklava as the dessert course because I know she hates sticky sweet desserts. And that fake menu might have happened to have been nonchalantly placed on the table where she might view it. And Nosy Nelly that she is, she asked if she could look at it. It was funny to watch the contortions on her face especially as she got to the baklava course. She was getting torqued just reading the menu! Ann, honey, don't ever play poker! You have more tells than Carter's has liver pills.

I hear that she was pleasantly shocked to see the following menu upon the table when she arrived:

USA: Lobster and Truffle Macaroni and Cheese; Lobster Jus
Thailand: Roasted Duck Noodle “Soup”
Argentina: Arroz con Pollo Argentine Style
Spain: Piquillo Stuffed with Patatas Bravas-Chorizo Mash
Morocco: Lamb Kefta Briouat; Chizu
Italy: Gnocchi con Sugo di Cinghiale
France: Yellow-Eye Bean Cassoulet with House-Cured Duck Confit
Greece: Lemon-Pistachio Halvas Cake; Fresh Figs; Candied Walnuts; Port Reduction

And on top of this 8-course dinner, my friend Dennis had a party for his 30th birthday for about 25 of his family and friends. Saturday the 8th was memorable for being the day that I spent 17 hours working in the restaurant kitchen. Long days I am used to, but 17-hour ones are few and far between. Those extra couple of hours mean the difference between highly fatigued and absolutely crushed. Kids, if you think that a 10- or even 12-hour day is long, don't ever think about getting into the restaurant business. Those are short days for us.

I couldn't even rest the next day because I had to do my annual cooking demonstration at Arborfest at Blandy Farm, the State Arboretum of Virginia, just east of Winchester. Although my demonstration was only an hour, it took nearly six hours out of my day, my only day off a week, to plan, pack, travel, set up, demo, tear down, travel, unpack, and get home. This is not a fair trade-off for demoing in front of a dozen people. Last year there were upwards of 100. This year, a dozen. Not worth my time doesn't even begin to describe my feelings at giving up a precious day off. What Ann had to say about it cannot be printed.

I did get some down time on Monday the 10th, however. Although Monday is my day at the restaurant to get stuff done (accounting, repairs, busy work, etc.) without the intrusion of customers and the phone ringing off the hook, I decided to take this Monday off to go have a mini family reunion at my aunt's out in Wild Wonderful. Lunch was fantastic: fried chicken livers, turnips, collards, spoonbread, and so forth! I haven't had a mess of fried chicken livers in decades. They were so awesome! I kept snagging them as my aunt Susan would pull them out of the frying pan. Props to her! Are you intimidated at the thought of inviting a chef to dinner? Don't be. We eat anything and everything and are ecstatic that we didn't have to cook it!

Despite the rest on Monday, all the paperwork that didn't get done came back to haunt me during the week as we were jamming towards the Balloon Festival weekend, traditionally our biggest weekend of the year. Each year, the Balloon Festival at Long Branch, just east of town, draws thousands of people to the Valley and as one of the top restaurants in the Valley, we get inundated with customers. As luck would have it, our front of house manager took this weekend off to be best man in a wedding, so we were down a really good person for the weekend.

Leading into the big Balloon Festival weekend, Thursday the 13th was another day from hell in the restaurant business. Days from hell come along every so often and when they do, they're memorable. It started innocently enough, with Travis and me chatting in my office in the early morning about the night's menu. As we were discussing what to do with the bucket full of butternut squash bells (the seed cavities), we both heard water coming from upstairs and not a little water either, a veritable flood.

A hot water supply line to one of the upstairs sinks burst and the water had nowhere to go but down, through the freshly painted ceiling in the bar. The landlord's lackeys got the water turned off and we got the bar cleaned up and some of the damaged ceiling tiles removed, but we were without water for 90 minutes while we were trying to prep for lunch. Ever tried to cook without water?

In the midst of cleaning up the mess, we received a delivery from our specialty goods supplier. This delivery didn't help my mood one iota. In fairness, my sales rep emailed me the night before to let me know that we would be short a pasta because of issues with the manufacturer. And he called me first thing to say that a cheese I needed for my cheese plates was going to be short. And then the driver arrived with the cheese for our grilled cheese sandwiches—totally rotten, squishing around inside a plastic bag, a molten, disgusting, black and green mess. I just about went ballistic at that point. This supplier has always done right by me over a decade of doing business and I know that this trifecta was an anomaly, but still, I was left scrambling and I don't like it. I know we will take heat from some customers because of this. This just goes to show how dependent restaurants are on their supply chains.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, the lunch server showed up and it wasn't the one that was scheduled. The normally scheduled server's boyfriend died suddenly during the night and we were all left coping with that. To top off the staffing issues, our dishwasher did not show up and we got slammed for lunch. Dirty dishes were piled everywhere, limiting the space that we needed for prepping what was looking like a busy dinner service. I finally got a fill-in dishwasher, but he didn't arrive until 6pm, an hour after dinner service started. The cooks and I were washing dishes when we should have been prepping for dinner.

Something ridiculous happened during lunch. We had a big party that I believe might have been a bridesmaid's luncheon. One of the mothers ordered a Greek salad and it was duly delivered to the table. When I got a break between tickets, I went to the table to see how they were doing. I hadn't even opened my mouth when this woman stood up and started shaking her finger at me and screaming, "These olives have pits! I sell food for a living and you should buy pitted black olives, not these things!" I was just in the mood to tell her to fuck off, but thankfully I mastered myself and went back to the kitchen in silent anger.

I really do want to know what company this rude woman sells for, if only to make sure that I never buy a thing from them. Seriously, if you sell food for a living and you don't have the tact to address issues in private, I hope you're getting a good draw because your commissions can't be very good. Oh and one other thing, lady [the first draft had a slightly longer word here], for your horiatiki in Greece, they rarely pit the olives for you either. Get over yourself.

The tale of this day is like a late night Ronco commercial: "But wait, there's more!" We supply gorgonzola cheesecakes to Linden Vineyards to pair with their dessert wines for their special cellar tastings. I had been expecting them to reorder for several days and when I hadn't heard from them, I started making a batch of batter that morning just to stay ahead of the curve. Sure enough, no sooner than I put the first batch of cheesecakes in the oven, they called asking when they were going to get cheesecakes. Miscommunication of the first order and probably my fault! They booked a reservation for dinner so that they could pick up cheesecakes afterwards in preparation for a busy weekend at the winery. No pressure! I baked cheesecakes all afternoon and through dinner service and managed to send them home with a credible supply. You try getting slammed for dinner service and baking batch after batch of time-critical cakes at the same time!

Dinner was slammed from the moment we opened the doors. The phone rang all day with people trying to get in. Everyone decided that Thursday the 13th was the day that they needed to eat with us. We had to schedule our reservation book very carefully because we were down a server (the one whose boyfriend died) and because we had a big party coming in at 7:00. It's a careful dance to get big parties seated and get their orders into the kitchen without affecting the flow of the entire restaurant.

Around 6:00 this party called saying that they were going to be 30 minutes late and asked if it was OK. At the last minute with no ability to rebook their tables, what are we supposed to answer? "No, you can't come because you are going to screw up everything for everyone." A table that represents 20% of my dining room is like the 500-lb gorilla; it can come in any time it wants to and there is not a damned thing I can do about it except grin and bear it and know that it is going to f-up everything for everyone.

This big table took me to task the next day via email for a variety of service faults and issues with the food. While some of the issues I will stand up and take the heat for, a lot of the blame rests with the big party for showing up 30 minutes late. You can't explain to a customer that it really is his fault; you just have to man up and take it and know that under the circumstances, no other restaurant could or would have handled it any better. This business takes broad shoulders and a flame-retardant suit. A cape and superhero powers don't hurt either.

Happy, happy, happy was I to climb in bed and put this day behind me. And exhausted was I the next day as we prepped non-stop all day to get ready for dinner service. My body is used to two big nights a week, Friday and Saturday, and yet, we had already had two huge nights, Tuesday and Thursday. We get through our weekends largely on the adrenaline rush of being slammed. When you are already dog-tired, there is nothing so painful as dealing with 8-10 hours of prep work with no adrenaline rush.

In the last month, we have seen something very unusual for Winchester. We have been slammed with walk-ins after 8pm on Fridays. This has historically been a town that stops dining around 8pm and to have a big rush between 8 and 10pm makes us feel like we are in a big city. This is nothing for DC or NYC, but I assure you that after almost 10 years in this location, it is quite unprecedented for this area. I sure hope the trend continues.

Finally, I'll wrap this up on a humorous note. We got a call asking to book a table and we booked it. And then the customer started asking for directions, whereupon it became clear to both parties that the caller was trying mistakenly to book a table at a restaurant in Winchester, Hampshire, southwest of London. This has happened several times before with customers booking over the Internet, but never via telephone. I haven't a clue how you dial internationally using the access code for the US and not realize that you are not dialing England. No clue at all.

Thanks for reading along and stay tuned for next month's edition when we recount the highlights of leaf peeping season. Saturday the 22nd was a doozy. Until then, eat and drink well.

2011: October 1st

After walking the dogs in the gusty rainy cold this morning and driving to work, my hands are cold all the way down in the knuckle joints. It's pretty toasty back here in my office right next to the ice maker which is roaring and putting out lots and lots of hot air. I'll warm up soon enough, but the chill, my days which have been starting in the dark for a few weeks now, and the first blush of orange color on the maple trees remind me that fall is really, truly here. There is no denying now that October is upon us.

Hi everyone and welcome to the October first posting from One Block West Restaurant, a twice-monthly update on what is happening at the restaurant in 2011. The entire series can be found here. I feel like the world has speeded up in the past few weeks; it seems only yesterday that I just posted and here I am doing it all over again. This is what happens when business picks up: things become a blur here with one day blending right into the next.

Just after I published the September 15th posting, I found out through the grapevine that our local Taste of the Town had been held. Not only were we not in attendance, we didn't get invited. I'm not really upset by this: we had a nice calm evening here at the restaurant instead of having to prep a lot of food and schlep our stuff out somewhere under less than ideal circumstances. But it makes me wonder what kind of event it really was when the top-ranked restaurant in the area wasn't invited. My customers seemed unaware that the event was held as well. General lack of planning I'd say.

On Tuesday the 20th, we launched our brand new fall lunch menu, a menu that has changed fairly drastically. The middle of September turned unusually chilly and that drove us to launch the new menu with its emphasis on comfort foods earlier than we had planned. The entire process took about a month, which is really quick considering all the pieces that go into changing a menu.

We started from the old menu, ruthlessly striking out any dish that didn't sell well enough. That saw the demise of some great dishes; but how great is a dish if nobody buys it? After this, we started looking at ingredients and when we found an ingredient that was used only for a single dish or one that was going bad before we could use it all, we either reformulated the dish or struck it off the menu.

Then with the help of our customers on Facebook, we brainstormed a bunch of new dishes. Then we took a hard look at each of those dishes to see if they were feasible to make with the equipment in our kitchen and to see how many new ingredients the dish would require us to have on hand. Dishes that cause us to bring on new ingredients don't often make the menu: we have very limited space on our line to store them.

We spent a day or two developing and testing recipes. For example, although we might wing a batch of roasted red pepper bisque the first time, we want it to taste the same way for each subsequent batch. So we record the ingredients and the process that we use in our recipe binder and then we tweak that recipe until we are happy.

And I spent considerable time sourcing new ingredients. For example, the grilled cheese sandwich to accompany the roasted red pepper bisque required a new cheese. Although we have something on the order of 20 cheeses in house at any given time to support our menu and our cheese plates, we didn't have a melting cheese suitable for grilled cheese for the simple reason that most melting cheeses are generally not distinctive table cheeses worthy of a cheese plate. I said most. You would not kick the melting cheese that I found off your cheese plate; you'd probably ask for more.

My task in sourcing the cheese was daunting. From among the thousands of cheeses my suppliers have on offer, I had to find one that is distinctive and delicious in flavor, that melts well, that comes in sizes we can handle (10 pounds or under), whose name is pronounceable by most Americans, whose name would help sell the sandwich and help underscore its uniqueness, and finally, that is economical enough to put on the menu at a price that is attractive to our diners.

After sorting through hundreds of cheeses, kicking out the blues, the goats, and the real stinkers, I came down to a very short list. And sight unseen, I felt like I hit a home run with the cheese I had ranked as most likely to work, Valfino from Roth Käse of Wisconsin. It has a beautiful golden paste like a great alpine cheese, nice beefy aroma from the washed rind, buttery flavor, first place award from the American Cheese Society, affordable, great name, and melts so well. But customers would judge. And they did. I never had a chance to ask about the cheese when doing table visits; customers were gushing about how good the cheese was before I could ask. Home runs don't happen often but they're a beautiful thing when they do.

The cast of the new lunch menu definitely takes its cue from the season. Butternut squash, pumpkin, wild mushrooms permeate the list. And the food forms are comforting: grilled cheese, bisque, risotto, ravioli. The dinner menu changes every night, so the seasonal transitions are gradual. Butternut squash appears at the farmers market and so it goes on the dinner menu. My seafood broker calls to tell me softshells are in each April, and so they go on the menu.

By contrast, the lunch menu changes only a few times a year. And so in cooking the same lunch menu for weeks at a time, we build up this great yearning sense of anticipation for the seasonal changes and when they happen, sometimes they happen in a drastic fashion, almost cathartically. And so it did this time. The fall lunch menu bears scant resemblance to its predecessor. Our yearning for fall foods is sated now, but given that the cycle is both natural and inexorable, we'll soon start jonesing for fresh asparagus, shad roe, and baby lettuces, all things that spring brings to the table. This constant anticipation is what keeps this grueling business fresh for me—there's always something new around the corner and I can't wait to see what it is, get my hands on it, and cook it!

One seasonal change that I dislike is that once the weather cools off, seafood sales stop almost dead in their tracks. We sold 50% less seafood in September than in August and last night, Friday night September 30th, the typical Fish-on-Friday night, we couldn't give seafood away. In accordance, I buy less highly perishable fish this time of year and I really cut back on the number of fish offerings on the menu. There is no sense in trying to sell something that customers do not want. Yet, there are still a few customers who love seafood and know that it is one of the areas in which our kitchen excels, a few who still order it. But this time of year every year, I have to listen to some smartie in the dining room say stupid stuff such as "Why don't you have a good selection of fish? What's the matter? Are you going out of business?" Yes, people often say things in public at a restaurant that they wouldn't say to their friends. Why is that?

And now to the more mundane. In the past two weeks, contractors have performed two semi-annual preventative maintenance chores for us. First our hood cleaning company came in and pressure washed the hood, the grease baffles, and the ductwork from the fan on the roof all the way down to the kitchen. It is vital to remove greasy residue before it becomes a fire hazard. And just after this, our fire suppression vendor came in and performed preventative maintenance on the fire suppression system mounted in the hood above all of our cooking equipment. This was our semi-annual checkup to make sure that if we should have a fire, that the suppression system would activate and spray down the equipment with a smothering blanket of foam.

I started repainting the bar in a continuation of renovating the restaurant, but business has really picked up and that is slowing me down. I can only really do work between lunch and dinner, but if we are busy enough that I have to be in the kitchen helping the line cooks to prep, painting doesn't get done. It's good to be busy and no complaints on that front, but it will be equally good to get the bar back in service.

Here's a question for you. Our online reservation form asks if the customer wants us to confirm the reservation via telephone or via email. If a customer specifies email, we email a confirmation to him. So why then does he turn around and call us to find out if we have booked his table before bothering to read his email? Just asking. I understand if you miss the confirmation because it got hijacked by your spam filter, but if you don't even look for the confirmation, I don't get that at all.

In the past two weeks, I've been sitting out on the deck while doing my menu planning, taking advantage of the cooler weather. It's high migration season for both Monarch butterflies and Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds and we've had no shortage of either. The Monarchs are attracted to sweet perfume of our fall-blooming native clematis (Clematis virginiana) which covers the back wall of the deck and some of the front screen behind the roses. At one point, I was counting Monarchs by the tens as they touched down on the clematis vines on their way south. The hummingbirds seem very attracted to the lantanas in the window boxes and to some of the verbenas, all of which are in full bloom now. I'm seeing multiple hummingbirds every day now and have since late August. In fact, we're seeing so many of the little creatures that we have delayed ripping out the lantanas and replacing them with pansies, so as not to remove what appears to be a welcome food source.

On Friday the 23rd, the fluorescent light in my windowless office went kaput. Ever try to type menus in the dark or otherwise run a business in the dark? Naturally, it had to happen at the busiest time of week when I just didn't have time to worry about it. And equally naturally, it couldn't have been something simple such as a bogus switch or a bad tube, both of which I have replacements for. And even more naturally, I had just taken all my electrical tools and parts back home after using them in the renovation of the dining room. It just had to be a bad ballast, which takes more time (especially in the dark) to replace.

Being the good Boy Scout, I have a couple spare ballasts in stock for emergencies. But no, the spare ballasts were too big to fit in the existing fixture. So early on Sunday on my one day off a week I had to go to Home Depot to get a new ballast. Surprise! The Department of Energy has banned T12 (inch and a half tube diameter) ballasts. Awesome! I had to buy a new T8 (one inch tube diameter) fixture and all new tubes. Now I have to stock two different tube sizes. Thank you DOE! It's not such a horrible thing; I'm just grumbling. T8s are much more energy efficient than T12s and that's a good thing, though payback is about 6 years out. In the course of remodeling the dining room, I did switch out the incandescent bulbs for CFLs which have an equally long if not longer recapture period. In any case, we are trying to be as green as we can be. Still, hanging and wiring a light fixture in the dark is a pain in the rear!

Tuesday the 27th was pure bedlam. Two of our servers were on vacation, one in Florida and the other at Myrtle Beach, taking advantage of a long Sunday to Wednesday break. Naturally I should have anticipated being down two people that we would be slammed. And we were. Out of nowhere, Tuesday night was busier than the preceeding busy Friday. And we were seriously understaffed. But we got the job done and most customers were extremely understanding of our plight. Still, there was one table that got its nose out of joint, but not a thing we could do about that except apologize.

A good bit of the last two weeks has been consumed with a political issue. The Winchester City Council is considering a proposal to raise the meals tax from 5% to 7%, for a total of 12% tax added to your restaurant bill when combined with the 5% state sales tax. The 2% increase would theoretically be earmarked for the school system as an additional source of funding. Naturally, the local restaurateurs (and a lot of other people in the city) are up in arms about increasing taxes, especially one that we feel is unfairly punitive to our business segment, but mostly because we feel we're being taxed enough as it is.

As a small businessman, I dislike this revenue generation tactic intensely. I have a budget and I have a revenue stream and I constantly have to adjust my expenses to meet not only the budget, but the actual revenue. So it really pisses me off that the School Board does not have to do the same thing. They will couch it in sweet sounding sound bites about it being in the best interest of our children, but I call bullshit. School Board, City Council, act like you're running a real business and quit taxing us to solve your lack of resolve and willpower to make hard decisions.

And finally, we capped off a successful two-week period with our September wine dinner on the 29th, a dinner featuring the wines of Paso Robles Rhône Ranger Barrel 27 winery. I generally select more subtle wines for wine dinners, but it was really a lot of fun for a change to create some big, big food to compete with big, big wines. For those of you who care, here's the menu:

Honeydew Soup with Thai Basil and Black Pepper; Prosciutto-Wrapped Grissino
Honeydew Gelée on Cucumber with Honey-Lime Greek Yogurt and Crispy Prosciutto
Grilled and Marinated Honeydew Wrapped in Prosciutto
2009 High on the Hog White (Grenache Blanc and Viognier)

Wild Boar Terrine with Pancetta and Pistachios
Cornichon; Honey Mustard
2007 Right Hand Man Syrah

Bison Short Ribs
Porcini Risotto; Bison Gravy
2007 Bull by the Horns (Petit Verdot, Syrah, Tempranillo)

Steuben Yellow Eye Bean Cassoulet with House-Cured Pork Confit and Saucisse de Toulouse
Crispy House-Cured Pork Belly
2007 Head Honcho Syrah

Chocolate Fig Clafoutis
Nutella Powder
2008 Hand over Fist (Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre)

And now that October is here, our silly season has officially begun. The next several weekends will be loco with all the tourists coming out to enjoy the fall weather, the gorgeous scenery of this beautiful valley that we call home, and the hopefully spectacular leaves. Please come and join the party, but remember, for the next month, weekend reservations are essential.

2011: September 15th

It's hard to believe that there are only six posts left after this one in this year-long series of twice-monthly postings on what happened during the year 2011 at One Block West restaurant. Sitting out on the deck working on my menu in the late afternoons in the midst of a shower of golden falling leaves, I am reminded that summer is behind us now.

This summer wasn't a bad one in terms of business; up over last summer. Of course, business couldn't be much worse than it was last summer. I'm pleased to say that our month 9 (the two weeks on either side of labor day) was well up over the same month last year and was the best month 9 we have ever had. That said, month 9 is always one of the slowest of the year because of back to school, back to college, and all the last-minute vacations around Labor Day. If you've been reading along this whole series, you will remember that we use 13 4-week accounting months in our year so that we can compare the same 4-week period each year, hence month 9.

Our month 9 was up in spite of the nearly week-long rain from tropical storm Lee. For three days, our dining room was empty. But while that was bad for us, it was just awful for our winemaker friends who really don't want any significant rain during harvest season. Rain dilutes the fruit which then yields dilute wine (we'll skip the discussion on chaptalization and on saignage in this post) and promotes rot. Wineries in our area got between 3.5" and 8" of rain from Lee; no no bueno.

The slow rainy time gave the crew and me lots of time to focus on our Duck Dinner on the 10th, a private dinner arranged by a group of friends to whom we served 5 courses of duck. I love doing these dinners because duck is such a versatile red meat. It can substitute for almost any other red meat including beef or pork. These multi-course dinners force me to break the duck into parts (rather than roasting them whole) which is a very good thing. The huge muscular legs need a long slow braise to bring them to unctuousness while the breast (particularly that of the Moulard breed that we use) wants to be grilled or roasted to medium rare to bring out its almost steak-like quality. Roasting a duck whole is a sure way to undercook the legs and overcook the breast.

The menu:

Terrine de Fois Gras on Savory French Toast with Asian Pear Confit

Baby Greens with Asian Pear, Duck Cracklings, Duck Confit Threads and Duck Fat Vinaigrette

Duck Posole: Duck Leg and Hominy Stew

Cassoulet of Local Bird Egg Beans, Duck Confit, and Smoked Duck Sausage Topped with Grilled Breast of Moulard Duck, Garnished with Armagnac-Poached Prunes

Duck Egg Crème Brûlée Flavored with Lemongrass and Thai Basil

In addition, the slow time gave me time to focus on the new lunch fall lunch menu, which promises to be the first major overhaul of that menu in about three years. We're looking at launching the menu on either the 20th or the 27th. We're still sourcing ingredients, tweaking recipes, and costing the plates. Once that is complete and we have all the necessary inventory in house, we will launch the new menu. The servers have also been involved in the menu development process as much for their input and insight as for their training on the new menu. Things just work so much better when the whole crew is on the same page.

I am a huge fan of all things local and I go out of my way to source as much for the restaurant locally as I can. These past two weeks have really taken some of the wind out of my local sails, so to speak. First, a local farmer approached me about his beef. Although lots of local farmers can supply beef, what is unusual about his operation is that he has a herd big enough to supply restaurants AND he is selling cuts, not carcasses, in restaurant-sized quantities. I was super excited to be able to buy local beef where heretofore this really wasn't an option.

The first batch of short ribs came in and we braised them as we always do, to make a gravy out of the braising liquid and to serve the almost falling apart ribs over polenta. Ribs usually take about 4 hours to braise. After 5, these were still tough and even after 9 hours, they were tough and stringy to the point where I couldn't serve them. I donated them to the local rescue mission.

The conversation in which I told the farmer about his beef was difficult for both of us. Like most people, I don't like to deliver bad news and like most people, he doesn't want to hear bad news. But in an effort to help him grow, I owed it to him to lay it on the line. And I did, gently and politely. He was extremely apologetic and we are going to continue to try to make the relationship work, but damn, I wish this story had turned out so differently. I'm not sure which of us is more disappointed.

The second thing to shake my confidence in local goods was a blind tasting that we did on the 10th of Virginia Cabernet Francs, of which I have already written in a prior blog post. Bottom line: four of the seven Francs had severe technical flaws and the other three were just OK, but not OK enough for any of the tasters to want a glass to drink. Usually after these blind tastings, each taster will pour a glass of his favorite to drink. We opted for a bottle of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon instead. Sad, sad, sad.

Moreover, during this period our microgreen supplier threatened to stop bringing us product, again. He's done this once before. For small farmers, getting products to market is a real challenge and it takes commitment, not only to make the deliveries, but to continue to deliver even when things get difficult. Things are often difficult when you are just starting out in a new business and trying to grow your client base. Initially, because you are new, things go great as people try you out. But then, business dips as you find out who your loyal customers are, and you have to redouble your efforts to build from that base. Same thing happens in the restaurant business as well. Our microgreen supplier doesn't seem inclined to commit to that.

It's a shame really because he grows an excellent product and because I have no other local supplier of microgreens. It's also a shame because as his client base expands, I could be a reference account, someone other chefs could call to hear good things about his product. But now, I may have no choice except to say that while his product is unimpeachable, he is unreliable. And nobody in this business needs an unreliable supplier.

Yet another local farmer called me this week with great plans to get into the pastured poultry business and grass-fed beef business. While I wish him well, I don't have high hopes. I have heard this story all too many times in the past. Farming is a tough, tough, tough business. I shared with him that we have almost no use for chickens, no matter how good. We are a high-end fine dining restaurant and customers who cook chicken at home as their primary protein source are not about to order chicken when they come out for a special dinner.

This past week we took delivery of more rabbits from another local supplier. I was sitting out on the deck last Friday morning shelling a half a bushel of bird egg beans for the cassoulet for the Saturday night duck dinner. In the hour that I was shelling beans, one refrigerated truck after another from all the big institutional food distributors rolled by going to all the other restaurants down the alley. And then my guy rolls up in a beat old truck with a cooler in the back, full of local rabbits and chicken feet for chicken stock. The juxtaposition of fresh beans, local proteins, and a beater truck against refrigerated tractor trailers of frozen and canned goods struck me as somewhat pathetic, especially since some of these restaurants claim to be using fresh and local goods.

On Sunday the 11th, I went by the restaurant before noon to pick up a batch of mini gorgonzola cheese cakes that I am supplying to Linden Vineyards for their tasting room, with an eye towards delivering them before their first cellar tasting at noon. It was not to be. We suffered our fourth ceiling collapse from water damage from the upstairs apartments, the fourth in two years. This was only a minor collapse in that we lost 3 or 4 ceiling tiles, but the thing that irritated me is that I just spent six months renovating the dining room only to have this happen.

In total disgust, I called the landlord at home and asked to have the mess fixed. Then I walked out and fumed all the way down to Linden. Half a bottle of gorgeous Petit Verdot 2006 helped reframe my mind, but when I arrived back at the restaurant at 4pm, some of the mess had been cleared, but water was leaking faster than ever. I could see this from outside: water was flowing down the front of the building. I called the landlord's son, the one who phoned me earlier in the afternoon to say that all was well, and unfortunately I had to get pretty forceful to convince him that the problem had grown worse and that it was unacceptable to wait for the plumber on Monday. Later that evening they did get it repaired and they did get the ceiling replaced and repainted by our opening hour on Tuesday, but I am still not happy.

Finally, I got some down time yesterday to type up some of our recipes. We actually do have recipes for some things that we make frequently for the purpose of ensuring consistency from one batch to another and for training new employees. But a lot of them are hand scrawled in a tattered old folder. It felt good to get these typed up and placed into a 3-ring binder. The restaurant business does not afford a lot of time to do simple housekeeping like this, yet it has to get done.

And that is the story from OBW. I'm looking forward to our upcoming wine dinner with Barrel 27 Winery of Paso Robles, CA on the 29th and I'm sure that will feature prominently in the October 1st posting. Until then, eat and drink well.

Virginia Cabernet Franc

I had my faith in the Virginia winemaking community shaken pretty severely this past Saturday night when several of us sat down to a blind tasting of seven Virginia Cabernet Francs. The tasters reaction tells the tale: after tasting blind, not one of us wanted a glass of any of the Francs to drink. We opened a bottle of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

Technical flaws abounded. One was so contaminated with Brettanomyces that it was undrinkable. Three were overripe fruit bombs with no backing acid or tannins; the grape varietal was indiscernible. One was so tannic we wondered if it was destemmed at all. Two had a nose bereft of fruit, but with hints of latex rubber.

But surprisingly, what I didn't taste was a lot of green fruit. This is a welcome change from prior tastings in which green vegetal flavors predominated. But then, 2008 and 2009 were pretty decent vintages for reds in Virginia. And hopefully we have learned that Franc's crop has got to be restricted.

I hear people state frequently that Cabernet Franc is Virginia's red grape. It is almost a mantra for some of these people. What I do know about the grape is that it is relatively easy to grow, tolerates a cooler climate, ripens early, and crops heavily. Are these people mistaking something that grows easily in Virginia for something that makes good wine?

While our samples did not include a couple of the best Cabernet Francs in the state, it did represent some well known wineries that should have made good wine. And that is scary.

After ten years of seriously tasting Virginia wines, if I had to pick a grape that could become a signature for this state, it would be Petit Verdot. But I wonder. If we can't make good Franc, why would we make good PV?

Winemakers, are you listening? I'm trying to be a cheerleader for the industry with my wine list and its focus on Virginia. But you have to give me something to work with.

Spanish Roulette—Padrón Peppers

For years, I have loved padrón peppers, originally from the town of the same name in Galicia in far northwestern Spain. I've eaten these delicious treats at a few select tapas bars over the years, but padrón peppers are still really hard to find in the US. We are lucky to have a couple of growers here in Virginia and a couple more on the east coast from whom we can source them each summer. As you can see from the photo, they are small green fairly nondescript peppers.
The reason they are so highly prized as a tapa is that when fried in a little olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt as in the photo below, they are absolutely delicious. But there's a catch. You play Spanish roulette with these peppers: most are mild as they can be while some are pleasantly spicy (but not quite as spicy as a jalapeño). I've found that the older (i.e., larger) and more drought-stressed the peppers are, the spicier they are. This batch seems to be running about 20% spicy and 80% mild.
They're worth growing at home if you can find seeds and if you ever see them on a restaurant menu, worth eating.

2011: September 1st

Earthquakes and hurricanes, oh my! Welcome to the September first installment of my year-long twice-monthly update on the restaurant. Let me start by saying what a crazy ride the last 16 days have been! Despite my praising the restaurant gods for the strong business in the previous installment, they took revenge on us in this 15-day period, launching first an earthquake and then a hurricane at us. Read on for more details.

On the 18th, we held our annual Harvest Dinner, which we have done each year since at least 2006 to honor the hard work and excellent products of our primary produce providers, Gene and Beth Nowak of Mayfair Farm. In the early years of this dinner, I didn't tell customers that the dinner would be vegetarian, surprising some of them after the fact when I inquired whether they realized that they had eaten no meat for dinner.

In the last few years, I have advertised the event as a vegetarian dinner. Our loyal customers have come to understand that I am very creative at vegetarian menus and that they are going to have a wonderful dinner despite the lack of meat. Plus, we have a big following of vegetarian customers for whom this is their one big fancy dinner of the year. Where else in this region can you get a creative multi-course vegetarian dinner paired with great wines?

This dinner was unique for another reason as well: it may be the only dinner that I have ever done in which looking back in hindsight, I wouldn't change a single dish. My feelings about this menu are unprecedented:

Hors d’Oeuvres: Roasted Red Pepper Canapés and Grilled Vegetable Hummus Canapés

Watermelon Gazpacho with Focaccia

Cantaloupe Carpaccio: Honey- & Lime-Marinated Cantaloupe with Blackberries and Blackberry Mozzarella

Scalloped Beets with Gorgonzola and Toasted Hazelnuts

Eggplant Burrito with Queso Fresco and Salsa Fresca

Fried Peach Pie with Crystallized Ginger Cream

This has been a really tough year for vegetables, so what we had for the dinner was fairly limited, the highlights being watermelon, cantaloupe, beets, eggplants, and peaches. What we didn't have at our disposal this year was a lot: green beans, tomatoes, summer squash, potatoes, and corn. It has just been too hot and too dry for these vegetables.

This dinner really forced me to focus on delivering vegetables such as beets and eggplants that are not crowd-pleasers in a way such that they would be appealing to most diners. And it forced me to focus on using fruit in courses in which I would normally use vegetables. All in all, it was a great exercise for my creative mind and I thought each course was spectacular in its own way. And the funny thing about this menu is that I didn't sweat over it. Like all my really good menus, I just sat down and wrote it down on a piece of paper and that was it. No handwringing, no sleepless nights, just five minutes of writing out a menu and done!

I am particularly proud of the eggplant filling for the burrito; had I tasted it blind, I would have never guessed it was eggplant. To make this silky purée, I peeled and grilled eggplants to get a good char on them, then chopped them and added them to a big pan of sautéed onions, poblanos, garlic, minced cilantro stems, and cumin. After cooking for about six hours, I let the mix cool and added raw sweet corn and more chopped cilantro. The contrast of silky eggplant purée and crunchy sweet corn was phenomenal. I was likewise pleased with the other dishes: the cantaloupe carpaccio in particular may be the best salad I have ever devised.

The scarcity of many vegetables this summer is a testament to the wicked weather we had in midsummer. After the hottest July on record—remember the 104-105F temps?—how weird (and how welcome) was it to have to put on a sweater after dinner on the 22nd of August?

At about 1:45pm on Tuesday the 23rd, I was sitting at my desk catching up on a pile of paperwork delayed from the week prior because of the prep necessary for the Harvest Dinner. All of a sudden, I heard this big rumbling roar and catering platters started falling off the shelves just outside my office. Earlier in my life, I spent a lot of time in California, so I knew we were having an (a totally unexpected) earthquake. Been there, done that a bunch of times in the past, and it's really not much fun.

I started to make my way to the dining room to escort our remaining tables out of the restaurant. The floor was heaving so much that it was like trying to walk on one of the crazy carnival floors where everything is out of kilter. By the time I got to the dining room, the tremors were largely over. The only damage, some stuff to pick up and put away and a lot of frayed nerves in the dining room—it could have been a lot worse. I've seen a lot worse firsthand.

I wouldn't have thought that such a dinky earthquake would have affected our reservation book, but it did. The east coast facilities directors of a well-known retail chain were to have dinner at the restaurant on the night of the 23rd, but with the earthquake, unknown impacts from aftershocks, and the impending weekend hurricane, they decided that they should remain looking after their stores that week. Who can blame them? On top of this, we had four other tables cancel. The result: a really bad night for us. We had twice as many cancellations as customers in the dining room. And so this business goes.

On the 25th, we started being unable to process credit cards. Between scanning the last credit card of Wednesday night service and batching out (the process we go through to get paid after we add the tips to the transactions), the terminal stopped dialing out. Thursday morning, I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting the problem before I called both the telephone company and our merchant processor, the people from whom I get the terminal and its software and who authorize and process the credit cards.

I ended up spending 90 minutes on the phone with the help desk of my processor before we determined that it was either the hardware or the phone line. At 7:30am, do you know what a great feeling it is to get a live and knowledgeable human being on the phone to help with your problems? Once we determined the problem, she ordered a new terminal for me to be overnighted and set me up to process transactions via our office computer. And then, she went in and manually added all the tips to my transactions for the night before so that the servers could get paid. This is customer service and this is why it never pays to do business with fly-by-night low-cost merchant providers. This is why I will never leave my provider.

Back in the old days when the credit card terminal bit it, we had to get out the old-fashioned slider and the carbon receipts. Then when we got a replacement terminal, we would have to type in all the information from the paper copies—a serious pain in the rear. Now to be able just to process credit card transactions via a secure server over the web is fantastic. The Internet really has transformed how we do business in so many ways.

The local telephone company—the one that I pay for service—came right out the same morning and tested all the lines coming into the restaurant. All four of them had an issue that required Verizon to come out and fix. Presumably something happened on the incoming lines that fried the modem in our credit card terminal. In stark contrast to the responsiveness of the local telephone company, Verizon said that it will be up to a week before they could look at the problem. That is BS, but in point of fact, they did come out two days later and claim that nothing was wrong. After installing the new credit card terminal, we are still having problems as I write. I have escalated to Verizon management. I dislike Verizon intensely and will never willingly pay them for anything.

And now for a completely different subject. We don't sell beer at OBW: for every beer we sell, we sell hundreds and hundreds of dollars of wine. We have nothing against beer; we really like beer and we have always stocked microbrews by Troëgs because they are consistently tasty and made just up I-81 in Harrisburg, PA. But with 70-plus wines by the glass, our focus is intentionally on wine and on showcasing local Virginia wines.

In addition to the micros, we have always had one of the BudMiller light beers in the cooler too, just for the odd request, but mostly to make beer batter. The big beer distributors have always had a problem with us; we don't sell enough beer to be worth their while.

The original Miller distributor in town was great and we had no problems getting Lite. Then they sold out to a big northern Virginia distributor that made it clear that they didn't want to do business with us, so we left for the local Budweiser distributor who was super accommodating with us. This past year, they too sold out to a big distributor who just couldn't seem to service our account. They missed delivery dates and kept trying to deliver in the middle of dinner when I wasn't free to just run to the office to cut a check. It was all too easy to see how valuable a customer we were to them. I use the past tense because I just pulled the plug on them and all American light category beers.

As one of the cooks said, if we don't stock them, maybe customers will try a beer that actually has flavor. As I say, if we don't stock white zinfandel, why should we stock light American beer? So, now we are searching for another beer to add to our mix. Change is constant in the restaurant business.

Speaking of change, we just switched to new coffee cups. And the change was not nearly as simple as you would imagine: buy new cups, wash them, put them in use. These new cups are significantly larger than the old ones which proved to be too fragile and too expensive to replace. Our former coffee cups did double duty as soup cups for lunch, but the new cups are as large as our old soup bowls. So we had to rethink our lunch soup strategy and then our coffee pricing. These cups were causing our cream usage to go way up and as you know, cream is really expensive. So we had to bump our coffee prices just a bit. The new saucers are offset so that the cup sits off to one side affording us the room to put a small biscotto on the plate with the cup of coffee at least as some compensation for having to raise prices. And then, the new cups wouldn't fit where the old ones did, so we had to find a new place to store them. And finally, we had to reprint the lunch menus with the soup revisions. So many consequences from one simple change!

Speaking of storing things, years ago I thought that a fine dining restaurant should try to be all things to all people, and so I bought all five common kinds of sweetener for our table tops: white, brown, yellow, blue, and pink. And I have seen over the years that we have reordered white, brown, and yellow, but never blue or pink. Accordingly I have let the blue run out and the pink is on its way out. We get the odd complaint that we don't have the blue sweetener, but it's rare. Removing these two items from inventory frees up the space for two cases in dry storage. And this amount of space is a precious commodity that I can surely use for other things.

On Saturday the 27th, I did a tomato and garlic demonstration at the Tomato and Garlic TasteFest at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. Despite the cloudy breezy conditions, there were a good 150-200 spectators for my demo and everyone seemed pretty good natured about huddling under the tent as it rained, fallout from Hurricane Irene. Everything was so much better organized this year and I even had a microphone this year which made life so much better for me and the audience.

I made fresh mozzarella and an insalata caprese from that, the pasta/fish sauce that I call Ed's (caramelized garlic, tomatoes, artichokes, capers, and basil), and my new favorite appetizer, the PLT, a pork belly, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on focaccia. I have noticed that people in this area are really scared of pork belly, thinking that it is tripe or intestines or other offal rather than the uncured side meat (bacon) that it really is. A couple of whiffs of the frying pork belly and a small taste later and I converted dozens of people to the pork belly legion! The dining room was full of people at lunch that day asking for pork belly sandwiches—not on the menu anywhere—and we were happy to comply. Pork belly is surely a gift from the food gods.

And this nice lunch crowd was our bright spot of the weekend as Hurricane Irene plowed up the coast. No matter that all we got was a little breeze and barely any rain, the damage was done. Each time a hurricane is forecast anywhere in our vicinity, the weather people might as well forecast a blizzard for the impact is the same: no business as people panic and scurry to the store for emergency supplies and glue themselves to the television watching the weather just like the rubberneckers at a traffic accident.

We were fortunate to lose only two nights of business. The last hurricane that came through we lost a full week and my heart goes out to those folks down on the coast who have lost a whole lot more than me. Some even lost their entire businesses. So sad; I know how hard they have worked.

Finally, as a per[qk] for our customers, we hold a random drawing randomly to select customers to attend a Mystery Basket dinner at my house. Each guest brings three ingredients. When all are assembled, we have a grand unveiling of the ingredients and we start to cooking, making a menu from all the ingredients. This past Sunday was the latest such dinner and we all had a blast. It's kind of like the Food Network show Chopped, but I've been doing it for more than a decade, long before anyone every dreamed up Chopped.

And, that's about it for this edition. Stay tuned for the 15th when I will have more information about our forthcoming dinner on the 29th with Barrel 27 Winery of Paso Robles, CA.