Birdies in the Dining Room

I got a chuckle at lunch last week. An older woman came into the restaurant bitching volubly about the parking job of another customer. The old woman whose parking job was the brunt of the whine very discretely flipped the other woman a bird! Right in the dining room, yet discretely! You go girl!

"I want my money back!"

Cooking an order of mussels at lunch reminded me of a grumpy old man at dinner several years ago.

He came in solo for dinner and ordered an appetizer of mussels for his dinner. Maybe he wasn't hungry; I'm thinking he was looking for an inexpensive (read "free") meal because a minute or two into his mussels, he summoned the server to the table to complain that several of the shells contained no mussels at all and that he didn't want to pay for them, oblivious (more than likely intentionally so) that said mussels had fallen out of the shells to the bottom of the bowl.

I ended up comping him for the mussels (and the three loaves of bread) that he ate knowing that he'd never come back and that he'd go pester some other restaurant. And sure enough, we've never seen him since. I still chuckle about the old guy from time to time when I remember him. He's the kind of customer that makes for a good story at our Christmas party.

Truth in Advertising

Here's a new one on me. We get all kinds of excuses why people need to cancel reservations, but never heard this one before.

"I need to cancel my reservation because my husband's being a big jerk!"

WTF!

An event at lunch today reminded me that I have a whole treasury of WTF stories to tell. Here's what happened today, followed by three more.

Worth the Detour? Customers called ahead this morning to reserve a table for lunch, telling us that several people had recommended that they have lunch with us. When they arrived, they made a point of telling us that they were from out of town and that many places recommended us for our creative cuisine, and that they had come all the way across town from the Visitors Center to dine with us. After all this, the three customers ordered three soups and two side salads, but tried none of the creative cuisine. WTF!

Our Famous Buffalo Burgers. One Saturday at lunchtime, I was in the front of the house when in walked a couple that I had never seen before. The man queried, “We read about you someplace. Do you still have those buffalo burgers?” I thought he was joking because at that time we had never had buffalo burger or any other kind of burger on the menu. I thought he might be confused with buffalo at dinner, knowing that NY strip of bison had recently come off the dinner menu (we rotate through various meats on the dinner menu somewhat at random). I replied, “No sir, I’m afraid we have no bison today.” He turned to his wife and said, “I guess we drove two hours for nothing!” and they spun on their heels and walked out the front door. WTF!

Nothing to Eat on the Menu. Customers drove 20 minutes from a local inn where they had viewed our sample menus and on arrival, the husband told me how much they were looking forward to dining with us and chatting with me after their dinner, how much our menus stood out amongst all the others, etc., etc., fairly gushing. Five minutes later, they got up and left, claiming that they couldn’t find anything to eat on the menu. Generally this is a price objection, but this couple was staying at the most exclusive and most expensive inn in the area. WTF!

One Party, Two Tables. On a busy Friday night, we had a reservation for 8 people for which we set an 8-top. When the group of eight women showed up, one of them approached the host and asked if they could be seated at a table for six and a table for two. That raised some eyebrows. We couldn’t move the six people to a table for six, so we seated the six at the 8-top and put the other two at an open two-top on the far side of the dining room. Once seated, the same woman who requested the separate tables came back to the host and asked if we would include the two-top on her bill for the six-top. They proceeded to have two entirely separate dinners, with no communication between the two tables, the woman at the six-top paid, and then all eight of them got up and left together. WTF!

Aren't we humans silly at times?

Timing Courses and Miracles

Last night after dinner, we were standing around talking about timing courses, pondering the eternal question, "When should the next course be served?" This question, like so many others, has no one correct answer. Each table has its own answer (and often each person at that table has a different answer) and expectation. Deviate from that expectation and the customer will not have as positive an experience as we would like. Deviate significantly and your service will be labelled as poor, even though the timing of getting food to the table rarely has much to do with the service staff.

Some people want their food out of the kitchen as soon as possible (especially at lunch when time is limited); others want to linger. I'm a lingerer. I like to have food come out of the kitchen slowly so that I have time to relax and get ready for the next course. I really don't like my next course on the table as soon as the previous one is cleared. But in Winchester, I'm definitely in the minority; this town wants its food on the table now.

At One Block West, it's on the shoulders of the front of the house staff to pace the meal for the customers. And it's a tricky job to interpret just what pace the customers want and relay that to the kitchen. My hat is off to those servers who do it well.

In some restaurants, the kitchen dictates the pace of the meal: I know very highly regarded restaurants that put up a course every 20 minutes unless the servers tell them to slow down. While that may work for them, it doesn't work for me. I was a customer a lot longer than I have been a chef and I've always looked at it from the customer's point of view. The customer sets the pace; so at my restaurant, the servers pace the meal. And our average customer wants his next course on the table not more than about five minutes after the preceeding course is cleared.

What can cause the timing to be longer than the table would like?

As I mentioned earlier, it is rarely the server's fault that food does not arrive quickly at a table. But, it does happen on a busy night that after clearing the appetizer course that the server or the assistant fails to fire the entrée course. I generally see the appetizer dishes coming back into the kitchen and will ask what table they're from if I'm not told. There's really very little excuse for the server not firing a table, but if you have ever waited tables, you know that on a busy night, your head is spinning with the next 10 things that you have to do right now. My hat is really off to good servers; they make a nearly impossible task look easy.

But when I'm busy plating, picking up food for one or more tables, or have my back to the door, a table getting cleared and not fired can get by me. As a failsafe, I can also see that a ticket is not progressing normally across my rail. That's when you'll hear me screaming for a runner to give me a status update on the table and woe unto him or her who does not hightail it into the dining room and get me an answer in the next 45 seconds.

I kind of pity this poor bastard, because if it is really busy, servers are going to be asking him for stuff in passing, he'll get flagged down by two tables needing something, the telephone will need to be answered, somebody will spill a drink that needs to be mopped, and he'll have the chef screaming at him if he isn't back in the kitchen in fifteen seconds. And you thought working in a restaurant was an easy job!

I've also seen tables get slowed down because the server forgot to turn in a ticket or a server in her haste will set a ticket down on the counter and it will blow off and under the counter before anyone notices. We are a small restaurant that uses handwritten tickets: a point-of-sale system makes no sense when our menu changes every day. And I surely don't miss going to bed at night with the racket of the ticket printer going off in my head.

From my station in the kitchen, I can see part of the dining room and as often as I can during service, I step out into the front server station to survey the tables. I'm running the seated tables against what my ticket rail tells me. If I spot a table without menus and without food and for which I don't have a ticket, I know there's a potential problem. Often, they've ordered cocktails and dinner and have asked the server not to fire the ticket until they've finished their cocktails. But I have caught a couple missing checks this way. The servers involved no longer work for me.

As for tickets blowing off the counter, we require the servers to hand them to the expediter (usually me) before leaving the kitchen. And that's about it for the servers causing delays.

Sometimes the food doesn't arrive at tables as expected because the tables have unreasonable expectations of when it should arrive. This usually happens when the table does not order a first course. When a table orders a first course, this gives us the time to start cooking things that take a long time so that they can be cooking while the table enjoys its first course. For example, roasting one of our really large 8-ounce quail stuffed with foie gras and prunes takes about 20 minutes, about 25 with resting time. If a table orders this dish without a first course, it's going to be about a half an hour before it arrives at the table.

In our point-and-click world of instant gratification, a half an hour is an eternity and surely the restaurant's service is pathetically slow if it can't get a quail on the table in less time. So, we discuss cooking times in our pre-shift meetings and I warn the servers of the potential issue when they bring in tickets like this. We try to anticipate this at the table and to set expectations about when the food will be out: "The quail takes about a half an hour, perhaps you'd like to order an appetizer to tide you over while you wait?"

Sometimes we fail to meet expectations because the tables don't tell us that they're in a hurry. We can expedite food through the kitchen, but only if we know that you want it to happen. So, if you're in a hurry, let us know. But be serious about it. I have seen way too many times a table inform us that they're in a big hurry which generally causes us to fire the second course at the same time as the first course, only to have the table dawdle over the first course for 20 minutes. In this case, we bring the second course to the table when it's done even if the first course is not finished. If we trashed the second course and recooked it, chances are very high that the table would finish the first course immediately and then be fuming at us for taking forever with the second course. Don't cry wolf. Be very explicit about your needs, as in, "We need to leave at 7:45 to catch the 8:15 show."

Sometimes tables confuse us. This past weekend, a table pre-ordered chocolate soufflés for their third course. They dawdled forever over their first course, so we slowed the soufflés down, even though they take about 25 minutes to cook. Normally, we'd start the soufflés just about the time that the second course goes to the dining room, so that they would be on the table about five to ten minutes after the second course was cleared. Rather than lingering over the second course as they had the first, the table bolted their second courses and the plates came back to the kitchen just as we were firing the soufflés. About fifteen minutes later and ten minutes before the soufflés were done, the host of the party informed the server that they were getting "impatient." All I can say is that we did our best to match the pace of the table.

Sometimes, one customer will spoil everything for the entire table. At times, we offer vast bone-in beef rib steaks known as Cowboy Steaks. Cowboys are so big that they take about a half an hour to get to medium rare. And well done cowboys are on the grill over the hour mark. We now refuse to cook cowboys over medium out of self defense as the following story illustrates.

We seated a table of eight people, all separate checks, and one of the guys ordered the behemoth cowboy well done. The server informed him that it would take over an hour on the grill and he replied that he didn't mind, but from the expressions on the faces of the other diners, it was clear that they did mind, but steak guy was oblivious. The server reported that they were OK for the first half an hour, but even though we kept them supplied with loaf after loaf of bread, the grousing started. By the time the food finally arrived, the whole table was in a really foul mood, starving no doubt, and grumbling vociferously about how slow the service was. It didn't improve the mood at all that all the tables around them got food in a timely manner. And in the end, the table punished the server both verbally and by tipping poorly.

That's it for the servers and the customers mucking about with timing the courses. Most of the time, the problem lies with the kitchen. Remember that if you feel like stiffing your server because the "service" was slow. The server is pretty much at the mercy of the kitchen in the vast majority of cases.

One weekend recently, we were down several employees because of illness. On a Saturday night, I was running the kitchen by myself and I had a line cook on dishes. The front of the house was really thin too, or I would have pulled an assistant back to the kitchen. I had no time to plan for this; it just happened. Fortunately, or so I thought at the beginning of service, the weather was foul and the reservation book was very light. Easy enough for a skeleton crew to handle.

Wrong! The front door opened and tables started walking in seemingly out of nowhere. Servers were bringing multiple tickets to the kitchen at the same time. I can move food out of a kitchen and for the first 90 minutes of service, I held my own, but at the point where I had tickets hanging on my rail for all but two of the tables in the restaurant, even my maniacal pace wasn't enough. Tables were having to wait about seven minutes longer on average for first courses and about fifteen minutes longer for second courses. Fortunately I was only in the deep weeds for about 45 minutes. Often, when a kitchen is slow, it's because it's short staffed.

At other times, food has to be recooked. A table will linger a lot longer than expected and we will have to pitch their food and start over. This causes a delay in the second course. Sometimes the table doesn't mind and sometimes they do. It's really a crapshoot.

And we do goof in the kitchen. One of the downsides of handwritten tickets is that sometimes we cook the wrong food, as in we cook a rockfish rather than a rack of lamb because we read "rock" on the ticket instead of "rack." That doesn't happen very much any more because we go over this situation in the pre-shift meeting and try to clarify the ticket with the server before the server gets out of the kitchen.

And handwritten checks let the servers write where they will. Sometimes for large parties, if the party orders out of order, the items ordered can end up at random locations on the check. One server in particular is prone to putting the last seat of the party all the way down at the bottom of the check where the dessert course generally goes. And in our haste, we miss that item and have to hold up the entire check while we recook it. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's generally my fault. Now that I have worked long enough with this server, I'm much more prone to go through his check with a fine-toothed comb for big parties.

And, stuff just happens in the kitchen. The grill flames out and leaves nasty soot all over something and we have to pitch it and start over. Or as a cook turns to plate a piece of fish, another cook bumps his arm and the fish ends up wrecked against the floor tiles.

In all these cases when we screw up in the back, I believe in honesty with the customers. I tell the servers to let the customers know that we dropped the fish, that we're sorry, and we're recooking the check as fast as possible. Sometimes the servers tell us that the customers are so engrossed in conversation that they will never even notice an extra seven minutes for us to put up the food. But most of the time, customers appreciate the honesty.

So far, I have only touched on events that cause the food to be delayed to the dining room. But as I mentioned when I talked about my own dining preferences, it can be an equally grievous sin to get the food to the dining room too fast.

I must confess that on a really busy night, our natural instinct in the kitchen is that we just want to get that ticket off the rail, especially towards the end of the night when we are beat and just want a cold drink and to get off our feet. That's when we have to reign ourselves in and slow down.

Besides making customers feel rushed when the next course is served just as the previous one is being cleared, it creates havoc for the service team. The servers need time to change out silverware for the next course, to do wine service for the next course, and so forth. Jamming the food out of the kitchen ruins their service dance.

Knowing all the things that go into creating a great experience and all the things that can and do go wrong with timing food to the dining room, sometimes when I step out of the blindingly bright, overly noisy, and insanely hyperactive kitchen into the dimly lit, peacefully quiet, and calmly romantic dining room, I'm often amazed that customers are oblivious to the chaos that we have been through and I'm shocked as hell that we have pulled off yet another miracle. Here's to all of you out there in the miracle business!

Karma

I just returned from my bank where I had to get change for our cash register and all the paper bills that they had were slick new ones. If you've ever handled paper money at all, you know that these things are a bear to count because they always want to stick together.

All these sticky bills reminded me of a customer some years ago, a Brit who brought three others to lunch, a guy who was not a very nice person, who was haughty, demanding, and condescending, just the kind of guy you want your daughter to date. NOT! Just the kind of person that the servers love to hate because they know that they will have to put up with a lot of grief for little to no tip.

After a few beers, his party of four had run up a lunch tab of nearly $100, $97.20 to be precise. At the conclusion of lunch, he put some cash in the bill presenter and left. We were too busy to count the cash as he left saying "keep the change," almost always a sure sign of a lousy tip. We weren't in a hurry to count the cash anyway as we didn't want to get irritated over the lousy tip that we were certain was coming.

After all the lunch customers left, the server asked me to guess how much tip the guy left and I guessed $105 for the total, or $7.80 in tip. She shook her head and said, "much lower" while handing me the bill presenter which contained a crisp $100 bill. It was about 20 minutes later as I fished the bill out of the presenter that something felt funny about it. And surely you have guessed by now that it was not a single hundred, but two glued ever so tightly together.

And folks, that's a big lesson in karma.

Mr. Delaware

In standing around telling war stories to the staff last night, none of whom have been with me for the entire tenure of the restaurant, though some are close, I remembered an encounter in the very early days of the restaurant with a diner and his wife from Delaware. I'll never forget this guy because he was mad as, well, a wet blue hen and just dead wrong too.

Dinner went pleasantly enough and the server and I had an amiable enough chat with the couple who were on summer vacation and chose to stop in our town and dine at our restaurant on the last night before making the short drive back home to Delaware in the morning.

The problem started shortly after the presentation of the bill to the customer. He looked at the bill for several minutes and I could see the wheels spinning in his head. At lot of customers want an explanation of their bill, even though it is all spelled out on the check, so the server went over to the table and asked if she could help with the bill.

She went through the bill line by line with him and assured him that the bill was correct. Then he pointed to the penultimate line of the bill, the one just before the final total, the one labeled "ST" for sales tax. When she explained that that amount was sales tax, I could see that he was starting to get a little angry and I started heading to the table to remove the server in case it escalated, which it did.

He had me explain the sales tax rate, which is 10%, half to the Commonwealth of Virginia and half to the City of Winchester in the form of an additional meals tax. He complained that the tax rate was unfair. I agreed with him that I thought that it was a bit excessive, but that I had no choice—as custodian of the Commonwealth, I am required to collect the money and send it off to Richmond. I don't exactly relish being tax collector for the state, but it goes with the territory.

He stated, "I'm from Delaware and we don't have sales tax and I'm not paying this." I tried being nice and agreeing with him that not being used to paying sales tax, our tax must come as a shock, but that I had no choice in collecting it.

What I was really thinking is that this guy is just coming off a week on vacation outside of Delaware and given that he was about 50 years old, chances that this was his first exposure to sales tax were nil. He was just being a jackass.

I persisted in trying to persuade him to comply for another minute or so, but he kept dialing up the volume and getting more and more angry. Finally, I had enough of this customer acting like a five-year old and I had other things to do, so I said to him, "Sir, you have two choices. You can either hand me that credit card and I will charge it for the full amount of your meal including the sales tax or I can call the police and they can take you to a judge and you can have your chance to prove to him that the Commonwealth's sales tax is unfair."

I actually had to call across the dining room to ask the server to bring me the telephone before he handed me his credit card in a big huff.

Judging by the lack of tip that he left, I guess they don't tip in Delaware either.

Mr. Delaware, wherever you are, thanks for the memories and the chuckles every time that I think of you, and, oh yeah...good luck with that crusade to rid the world of sales tax.

New Year's Eve Redux

This was my 7th New Year's Eve at One Block West and it was certainly different from all the preceding ones. For starters, you guys nearly gave me a heart attack by waiting until the very last second to book. It was looking like we'd be empty. On Tuesday morning (the 30th), we only had four tables booked and customers could pick and choose the time that they would like to dine with us. By that evening however, all the prime tables were gone.

In fact, we couldn't get any work done on Tuesday for answering the phone. If you'd really like to help us out, remember that when we are serving meals is a really bad time to call us for reservations. Oh yeah, if I answer the phone when you call during meal service, that means we're really busy and that none of the front of the house staff has any time to answer the phone. While I'd love to chat about your grandchildren and your last visit to the restaurant, perhaps we could do it some other time?

By 5:00pm on New Years Eve, we were essentially fully booked and stopped taking reservations. We could have seated a lot more customers, but almost all our tables were deuces (couples). What is this, Valentine's? I've never seen a New Year's Eve when we didn't have a lot of boisterous big tops, large parties. Strange.

Another factor limiting the number of reservations we accepted is that because business has been so slow since the stock market tanked in November, we have really cut our staff back. We no longer have the staff to handle vast numbers of customers. It's a shame really because that means that we had to turn away customers that we would have otherwise been able to serve during normal economic conditions. But, it is always better to serve fewer people well than more people less well. This rule will always serve you well, as financially painful as it may seem in the short run.

Because we had no book for New Year's Eve until late on the 30th, I didn't bother, for the first time ever, to put together a special prix fixe menu. We usually do a 4- or 5-course dinner featuring a lot of luxury foods: lobster, oysters, caviar, foie gras, you get the picture. This year, we just did our normal à la carte menu.

When people book for New Year's Eve, they always ask "What are you doing?" meaning "What kind of neat stuff is going to be on the menu?" This year, I could tell just from the tone of voice on the phone that customers were asking "How much is it going to cost?" And I could sense the relief on the other end of the line when I said that we were doing our standard dinner menu. I even asked one woman if I had given her the correct response, to which she replied, "Oh, yes! We don't have a lot of money to spend this year!"

One thing I hadn't planned on was the weather. During the course of the day, unbeknownst to me because I was buried in the kitchen all day prepping, a massive cold front swept through giving us ambient temperatures in the teens with 20- and 30-knot winds blowing snow horizontally. Not knowing this, I prepped an average quantity of delicious Leek, Parsnip, and Potato Soup (I snuck [yes, I know the past participle is 'sneaked' but that sounds so stupid] in some smoked sea salt for a touch of je ne sais quoi) to serve as a first course. We blew through all the soup in the first four tables and scrambled to make a Champagne Asparagus soup on the fly during the middle of service as a replacement.

It was so cold that in the kitchen, I had to hold the beurre blanc for the flounder next to the grill to keep it from solidifying. Beurre blanc is a wine and butter sauce that uses the milk solids in the butter to emulsify (thicken) the sauce. In the summer, we cannot keep a beurre blanc anywhere near the range or it will separate and be ruined. You may have guessed by now that we have neither heat nor air conditioning in the kitchen.

Looking back, I wonder why I just didn't do a four-item menu consisting of soup or salad, flounder or filet mignon. Those items account for the bulk of our sales for the evening. I know that our Fall Salad is a winner because it has been on the menu for many weeks, really unusual because our menu changes every single day. But customers cannot get enough of this salad of Asian Pear, Butternut Squash, and Cajun-Spiced Pecans with an Apple Cider Vinaigrette. And so it was last night: more than half the appetizer orders were for this salad.

I really put a lot of effort into designing really neat dishes, such as Prosciutto of Salmon, for the menu and sometimes, such as right now, I wish people would get out of the soup or salad and a steak frame of mind. Or to put it differently: why are customers paying me for dishes that they could get anywhere? Granted my ingredients are the best and we execute well, but shouldn't they be paying to see what I can do that separates me as a chef from the rest of the pack? Oh well, whatever pays the bills.

The evening went extremely smoothly except for the aforementioned soup crisis, a minor grill fire (nothing really, the flames never got above 14 inches high), and that we ran out of cut filets in the middle of the evening and I had to do my 90-second beef tenderloin dress out drill.

The mellow pace of the evening let me make one early reconnoiter of the dining room and a late one. I really enjoyed meeting many new customers and seeing some long time customers again for the first time in a long time. The last customers left around 10:30 pm and a good solid hour of breaking down the dining room had us out around 11:30. And so, I was at a New Year's Eve party in plenty of time to actually see in the new year. That's unprecedented in the last seven years, but I kind of liked it for a change.

Happy New Year to you!

Low Country Cooking Class

Recently I posted about how much I like to cook Cajun and Creole food. For my latest cooking class/dinner/party, I decided to tackle Cajun's cousin Low Country food, cuisine that's indigenous to the South Carolina coastal plain from Pawley's Island in the north, down to Savannah in the south. I haven't spent much time in this area, but as a Southerner, I have an innate feel for the basics of the cuisine.

Our menu was:

Shrimp and Grits
Pilau
Smothered Quail
Collard Greens
White Chocolate, Caramel and Pecan Bread Pudding

To keep this post from becoming book length, I'm going to give an overview here and deal with each dish on its own in subsequent posts. You can follow the links in the menu above to the article on each dish. And see the post entitled Grits 101 for the basics on grits.

The first thing to know about these dishes and recipes is that they are my own. I've tasted many versions of each of these dishes and these are my versions, informed by my sensibilities and the ingredients available to me in my locale. That is to say that I am treading on some sacred ground here: I'm not a native Sandlapper and I know that your grandmother makes the best version of each of these dishes. People have started small land wars over the "correct" version of shrimp and grits, for goodness sake. I have no wish to be involved in your little wars, so I make no claims about these dishes other than you will enjoy each and every one of them.

My shrimp and grits is made with very coarse grits from Anson Mills in Columbia SC. The all critical sauce for the grits is made from shrimp, shallots, green onions, Surry sausage, garlic, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, loads of fresh thyme, fresh parsley, lemon juice, white wine, and sweet butter. Sure, this is not how your grandmother makes it, but I love it.

I make my pilau in quasi-risotto style; well, maybe I should stop beating around the bush. I make it jambalaya style. I start with a mirepoix of onions, celery, and poblano peppers sautéed with Surry sausage, garlic, fresh thyme, and crushed red pepper flakes. To this I add Carolina Gold rice, tomatoes, salt, pepper, and chicken stock, stirring and adding more stock until the rice is done. I know others insist on having separate grains of rice; that's just not for me. Here's Randy chopping onions for the pilau.

Smothered Quail is what we would call in my family Fried Quail. This is my favorite way of eating both rabbit and pork chops. I dredge the quail in seasoned flour and brown all sides, then remove the quail from the pan, and make a light brown roux from the drippings and additional oil as necessary. Then I add water to make a gravy and put the quail back in and simmer until tender, about 20-30 minutes. Onions and pork products always help the gravy; yesterday we used Surry sausage. I seasoned with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, and fresh thyme.

I can't eat anything cooked in gravy like this without rice (hence the pilau) and a big pile of greens. My preference is turnip greens (which we call turnip salad), but in the market on Saturday, we had nothing but collards, which also suit me fine. At the restaurant, we chiffonade collards, blanch them, and sauté them quickly in olive oil and garlic. But that just won't do for a good Southern dinner which requires long slow cooking of the greens with smoked pork products.

We ended the meal with a glorious bread pudding, puffed up to almost four inches in height. Here you can see Tim whisking the custard before we added the stale bread to soak. Into the mix went caramel, white chocolate, pecans, and the guts of a vanilla bean. Quipped one of the jokers in attendance, "A vanilla bean is what we use when we run out of vanilla extract!"

You've seen the photos of some of the husbands in the class at work, but none of the wives. And what were the ladies doing during our class? What they do best: playing the role of technical advisor from the back row! It wasn't really so, but I managed to catch them chatting while the guys were whacking and stirring things.

Fish, Anyone?

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Freight Station Farmers Market this morning to shop and to sample the fish that I was cooking. Beth Nowak (to the right) sells fish that her brother Jim catches in Alaskan waters and she supplied the samples that I cooked.

Beth gave me some Salmon, smoked Sablefish, and an Idiotfish to work with. Idiotfish is the colloquial name for any of several Rockfish/Scorpionfish that range from the northern US west coast up to Alaska, across the Aleutians, and down to Japan. More on Idiotfish in a subsequent post.

Idiotfish, also known by its Japanese colloquial name kinki, is a high oil (good omega-3 source), white fish. It has a fairly fine texture with an oil content similar to sablefish. It's very tasty and because of the oil can stand up to big flavors. Here it is as Pimentón-Crusted Idiotfish with Chorizo, Tomatoes, Olives, and Almonds.

Here's a piece of salmon (it looked like the tail of a red salmon, but the species doesn't matter) in a red Thai curry with Thai basil and kaffir lime.

Not shown are several dishes including a chowder made from fish stock (from the bones and fins of the Idiotfish and the skin of the Sablefish), smoked Sablefish, parsnips, leeks, onions, Yukon Gold potatoes, bay leaves, thyme, and heavy cream.

Beth was handing out a series of recipes that I developed for her many, many years ago. Ask her for a copy next time you're at the market, if you want tips on how to cook fish. It also goes through standard chowder procedure at length.

Blandy Farm Demonstration

Yesterday, I made my annual visit to Blandy Farm, home of the State Arboretum of Virginia, located just outside Winchester in Clarke County, to help entertain guests visiting Arborfest, an annual fundraising event for the benefit of the Arboretum. I've been doing this for five years now and it's become a fall ritual for me. We were blessed with very warm weather, maybe a few degrees too warm standing in the sun, but with almost no wind. Finally, my poor little butane burner didn't have to battle the wind.

As every year, I brought along a helper; this year, daughter number one Lillian, who, as you can plainly see in the photo, is in full-on teenager ("I am so bored; I would rather die than stand here.") mode. Imagine her reaction when she reads this! She is a loyal One Blog West reader. If you know the grounds at Blandy at all, you can see that we are in the courtyard of the Quarters, the only place that I can get a good windbreak against the prevailing westerlies.

This year, we were blessed with four snaggle-toothed devils and color commentators right in the front row! I think these four young gentlemen kept us all entertained for about an hour. I know that I couldn't get a word in edgewise. I'm pretty certain that they ate the vast majority of the samples!

In years past, I've done demonstrations with various themes. This year, I decided to highlight some of the October dishes from our menu this past weekend. I wanted to show that October is a month of real contrasts: while we have abundant winter squash and apples, we are also still blessed with great tomatoes, squashes, peppers, and eggplants.

The first dish I demonstrated was one that I devised for our Saturday menu from items that I scavenged at the local farmers market, a dish that I called, for lack of imagination, Fall Salad. It consists of roasted diced butternut squash, diced Asian pear, and Cajun-spiced pecans, all tossed in a dressing of highly reduced apple cider, honey, maple syrup, membrillo, roasted shallots, Port, rice vinegar, and canola oil. Pardon the photography: the sunlight was brutal.

I also demonstrated a salad that the food editor at Northern Virginia magazine really likes, so much so that it was featured in their September edition. The salad consists of bias-sliced Surry sausages, walnuts, bias-sliced celery, micro-celery, dried cranberries, roasted local apples, and balsamic vinaigrette.

Back to the more summery aspects of October, I demonstrated a dish that I call Swordfish Sauce Vierge, after the sauce popularized in the 1980s by Michel Guérard. Vierge means virgin, in this case referring to a raw uncooked sauce. Doing my own thing with it, I have converted the sauce to almost a chopped salad to serve as a base for my swordfish.

After tasting the mixture of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, olives, capers, basil, garlic, parsley, olive oil and lemon juice, one of the attendees commented "It's like a raw puttanesca." and in a sense, it is. And it was certainly a perfect vehicle to showcase the beautiful heirloom German Howard tomatoes and Corno di Toro peppers that I brought.

To quote Amishland Heirloom Seeds about these tomatoes:

The locals here in Amish country also call them "Pepper Tomatoes". I have never seen these exact same tomatoes grown anywhere else. Prolific harvests of 5-1/2 inch long, weirdly pointed paste tomatoes that weigh about 5-8 ounces (although this year they were huge and averaged more like 10-14 ounces). These are very meaty with a good, rich flavor. They have virtually no seeds, maybe 6 or so per fruit. An old scarce variety great for canning, paste, or sauces. Also delicious right off the vine in salads. Just the best all purpose tomato I have ever grown. Very resistant to disease and bugs, as well. Still seen here in Amish country, but elsewhere it is a really rare tomato.

Sorry for that digression on tomatoes, but they are so good that they merit digression. The final dish that I demonstrated was what I call Prosciutto-Wrapped Medallions of Rabbit. I boned out a rabbit loin (to remove the backbone and ribcage), sprinkled the loin with thyme, salt, and pepper, then wrapped it in prosciutto. After searing it on all sides, I roast it at the restaurant, but for the demo without an oven, I sliced it into medallions and cooked them in a pan. I served the medallions of rabbit over a bed of chiffonaded Swiss chard and topped with a Surry sausage jus.

Photos that I didn't take courtesy of Sharon Mesa. Thank you, Sharon.

Welcome Back!

Yesterday was the first day that we were open after our annual August vacation. The first day being open after having closed for a week is almost like opening day of a new restaurant.

When I walked in first thing in the morning, the cooler was bare. Throughout the day, case after case after case of food came in and had to be stocked, prepped, and brought onto the cooking line. Is it any wonder that we were still prepping for lunch even after the first tickets came in?

We open for lunch at 11am and there is no way to get the line set from scratch between 9am when the morning crew arrives and 11am. We depend on having basic items such as salad dressings, toasted nuts, garnishes, basic sauces, etc. being left from the day before. In reality, we probably only prep about a third of the lunch menu daily, depending on sell through from the day before. Yesterday, it all had to be prepped from zero.

It can't all be done in our small kitchen with our small crew in a two-hour window. So what to do? Like most rational people, we prepped the most commonly ordered items first, when we could. Of course, when the seafood delivery doesn't show up generally until 11:30 or so, what can you do? Open without seafood and prep like hell when it does arrive.

Customers, however, are not rational in their ordering patterns. Nor cognizant of the fact that the day after a week-long vacation is a killer prep day for us. So what happened? Naturally, we had a very early rush before 11:15 (for me, this is just starting to be breakfast time, so early rushes always surprise me) and trust me, we were depending on that hour between 11 and 12 to keep on prepping. And equally naturally, the early customers shotgunned the menu: they ordered everything totally at random. And of course, we were set for the dishes that sell the best historically. Mr. Murphy must have been in the dining room coaxing customers into their aberrant ordering pattern yesterday.

We ended up prepping several of the dishes as they were ordered at lunch yesterday, but we never managed to get totally set. We'll have to go back and catch the remaining items this morning.

The afternoon shift was one long grind, prepping eleven appetizers and ten entrées in a three-hour period. The hardest part for me was finding time to think through the menu to determine what we needed to do all while prepping feverishly. Granted, our dinner menu changes daily so we're used to a lot of work in the afternoon, but still, only about a third of the menu changes daily, so that the whole menu turns over about every three days. Having to deal with 100% turnover is tough.

And in the afternoon shift, we're used to having all the prep at hand that the morning crew has left in the cooler for us: minced garlic and shallots, prepped herbs, diced onions, carrots, celery, poblano peppers, and so forth. When the morning crew doesn't have time for this such as yesterday, it slows down the afternoon crew. And some of the braised dishes that take long slow cooking have to be started by the morning crew. Those dishes will just have to wait until later in the week.

To top it all off, I have developed an obnoxious little cold that has left me almost voiceless. My 12-hour shift in the kitchen compounded by the cold was draining. I'm not complaining mind you—being in the kitchen beats the hell out of doing paperwork in the office. And that, friends, is why I am blogging right now; I'm procrastinating in the face of a vast mound of paperwork. It's the same story today in the office as it was in the kitchen yesterday. Yippee! Good thing I love my job.

A Thrill a Minute

All I wanted was a bit of hot tea. Really, it was 7:25 this morning and all I wanted was a spot of tea. Was that so much to ask? Apparently. I guess the restaurant gods had it in for me this morning.

While my computer was pulling down the overnight emails from my server, I went to make a cup of tea as I am wont to do daily. I've been off of coffee for a while; I guess I'm just bored with it or with our selection of exactly one kind.

Anyway, I went to get some hot water from the dispenser tap on the coffee maker and all I got was a dribble. Not good and so much for my plans to get anything positive accomplished today. I remembered that last night our sous chef was cleaning up a coffee spill—would you be surprised to learn that we make coffee without a pot under the brewer nozzle at least once a month?—and I warned him that the machines are hard-connected to copper and not very mobile. I asked him to be very careful not to pinch or break one of the supply lines.

This all flashed through my mind in an instant and I might have cast some mental aspersions and/or epithets in his direction. Sorry. I had to turn on all the lights and move a whole bunch of stuff to trace the copper water tubing. It sure seemed intact.

I then thought to check the water on the bar gun which comes off the same supply tube. No water. OK, I figured that he shut off the valve on the supply line for some reason. Nope, it was wide open. Major aspersions and epithets now as it looks like this might not be a trivial problem. Into the kitchen, and you're already ahead of me here, no water at all.

It was too early to call anyone about the problem and none of the other businesses around me were yet open to see if the problem were isolated to my building or if it were a more general problem. I know for a fact that the City is working on something in the street just down the way.

At 8 am, I called the City and managed to get to the Water Department just as someone was arriving. She was very nice and was concerned that they might have turned off the water yesterday as they did a bunch of cut-offs then and the management company for our building is notorious for not paying the bill until the City shows up, wrench in hand, to disconnect the water.

We decided that it probably wasn't likely that the City disconnected the water between late last night when I left and 7:30 this morning, but that it was a good idea for someone to come over and check for a break in a main. Very nice and very responsive she was, a pleasant surprise in dealing with the City.

Minutes later, one of the guys from the Water Department came through the front door and told me that the meter had not been disconnected. I nonplussed him with the question, "Yeah, but is there water at the meter?" I followed him out to the meter to see, and I could hear before he got the cover off the meter access hole that water was screaming through the meter. I don't think I've ever seen a dial rotate that fast in all my life.

Clearly we were dealing with a break in the line between the meter and the restaurant. I ran to the back of the building where the basement stairs are located to find that the neighbors have constructed a new deck blocking the doorway. Nice neighbors, huh? As I got the door open, I could hear water pouring out into very deep water. Cruddy, but better than an underground leak in the supply main coming into the building.

The landlord and his plumber were pretty responsive and the problem was repaired at 11:55am. We opened for lunch at 11, unable to make any soup or boil any water for pasta. And we used our entire supply of alcohol swabs cleaning our hands. But, we got open with some water that we cadged off of the very understanding neighboring coffee shop.

The first table was a regular customer and he was understanding that we couldn't brew his usual iced tea. The second table that arrived at 11:50 was miffed that we had no iced tea. I would think that it is easier to be understanding than to be miffed about something over which nobody has any control, but noses out of joint they did have. Par for the course.

Fortunately, we got the lines flushed, the tea brewed, toilets flushed, the pasta water hot, and generally back in action before the bulk of the lunch traffic.

Yes, the restaurant business is a thrill a minute—and I never did get that cup of tea.

New PBS Shows

I taped two more shows yesterday afternoon in Harrisonburg for WVPT. I wonder if these shows are for WVPT Cooks or if they will air during a pledge drive, simply because we shot 15-minute segments rather than the usual 22 minutes.

I like shooting these shows because I can just show up when I am told, prepared for a specific length segment, and with minimal set up (mic check, white balance, lighting check) we start filming. It's better for me this way; I have enough to worry about in running the restaurant day-to-day. I understand how these TV chefs do it: there is no way that they can do the TV that they do without leaving the cooking at their restaurants to someone else.

The two segments we taped yesterday were both outdoors, using Tassie Pippert's really awesome outdoor built-in grill, the first outdoor segment that I've done in about three years since we last taped on the balcony at the WVPT studio overlooking the lake at JMU.

Even though we were under a shaded pergola with ambient temperatures in the low 80s and a nice breeze, the combination of the lights and the smoking hot grill made for a really sweaty experience. I tried to refrain from wiping the sweat off my face with my towel as much as possible. At one point, I got sweat in my eye: I hope that didn't translate on camera as I tried my best to ignore it. At least I wasn't wearing make up for this shoot, so nothing to run. ;)

It really takes a lot of preparation on my part to make these segments happen. I have to run through cooking the food in my mind and fit it to the allotted time frame and think about camera shots and sequencing, which is a bit difficult because I don't know how many cameras there will be and where they will be placed until I arrive on the set. I also have to worry about filling time while things are cooking.

You cannot exactly stand around and watch a piece of meat grill. Well, you can, but it makes for very boring TV. So I spend a lot of time thinking through these fills and so forth.

Also, I don't have a prep crew to set up for me. I cook the dish in my mind and I make a list of everything that I will need, right down to the towels with which I will hold the hot pan handles. But this isn't so different from what I do in the kitchen in setting up the line every night. What is different is that once I'm on camera, I cannot leave the set to retrieve something I have forgotten.

I cannot leave the set because we shoot live to video, which means if we are shooting 22 minutes of air time, we shoot 22 minutes of running video. The cameras never stop rolling once we get going. This minimizes production time and cost, because the only post production is merely to cut from one camera to another.

In years past, the video editing has been done on the fly in the control room as we were filming, a tricky business indeed (this is what they do for live events such as football games where they cut from camera to camera in real time). Live to video means there is no such thing as a screw-up: there are no retakes and no voice overs.

I enjoy shooting live to video in that it is a lot more spontaneous and much more like doing a live demo, except that the audience is a bunch of cameramen or women, maybe a still photographer, and maybe a floor director. Doing it this way, we can film a 22-minute segment in about 45-minutes, versus the 2 or 3 hours it takes to set up shots, walk through them, and film a couple takes of each. I don't have a lot of tolerance for overly scripted TV.

Yesterday, I cooked three different dishes: Grilled Tuna and Asparagus Salad; Grilled Tuna with Edamame, Pickled Ginger, and Seaweed Salad; and Grilled Hawaiian King Prawns with Grilled Pineapple Salsa and Rum-Black Pepper Sauce.

I will post these recipes over the next few days. Stay tuned.

What a Send Off!

Last night, Saturday the 26th, was our final dinner service before we close for our annual spring holiday during the week of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival. Each year, the city shuts off car traffic on the streets surrounding the restaurant early Thursday evening and for the parades Friday and Saturday. Because we are a block west of the pedestrian mall, our traffic is nil for our three biggest nights of the week. So, we close, deep clean and repair the restaurant, play a little golf, eat out at other restaurants, and join in the bacchanalia that is Apple Blossom.

And Apple Blossom generally cannot arrive soon enough, given that our last day off would have been for our annual summer vacation in August. In short, we're exhausted and happy to get the final dinner service behind us and to kick off our week without customers. And what a send off we got last night!

Dinner service was truly nuts. The first ticket hit the kitchen at 5:00PM sharp, the first table having arrived 10 minutes early.* And for the next four and a half hours, the tickets were relentless.

*It's not good form to show up at a restaurant before opening hours. We generally keep the front door locked so that we can finish our server briefing before customers come in, but we left the door unlocked last night so as not to strand early arrivers outside in the pouring rain.

To put things in perspective, we only have 18 tables inside and at most times, we were cooking for no fewer than seven or eight of them, all night long. Fortunately and because of the incredible August-like thundershowers and downpours, we were only seating inside, so the twelve outside tables were missing from the mix. That would have been sheer chaos on top of chaos.

To compound matters, 90 percent of the entrée mix was on my station, the sauté station. When we plan a menu, we try to balance the dishes so that if they are ordered randomly, the dishes will divide equally among all the stations in the kitchen, balancing the work load among all the chefs. Not so last night. I got hammered all night long. Truth be told, I live for that, but at the end of a long, long week, I was exhausted. I kid you not that I was beat by the time the last entrée left the kitchen at 10:15.

But, it was a hell of a send off into our week of vacation!

The Myth of Sysiphus

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."—Albert Camus, from the final essay in Le Mythe de Sysiphe

It's been more than 25 years since I read Le Mythe de Sysiphe, but it seems most apropos to pull it off the bookshelf and have another go. Come with me as we accompany Sysiphus for a time.

Five years ago I embarked on a mission, a seemingly simple mission at the time, a seemingly trivial mission to be precise. And what was this mission? Merely to start serving tapas at my restaurant. Well, perhaps there was a more subtle mission behind the obvious one: to bring a tapas culture to our small town. It was simple conditional logic, really. If I bring tapas to my restaurant, over time, tapas culture will come to Winchester.

Tapas are ingrained in Spanish culture and you won't find a big city in the US or even some smaller ones such as Frederick, MD, without at least one tapas bar. So why not here? Why not here?

I'm sure many of you are wondering, what are these so-called tapas?

This seemingly simple question is remarkably difficult to answer. On the surface, tapas are tiny dishes that are served as bar food, primarily as after work/before dinner snacks. But below the surface lies a great deal more to do with culture and life style, which Penelope Casas has captured more eloquently than I could hope to:

"The tapas way of life is completely in tune with the Spanish character. To eat tapas-style is to eat by whim, free from rules and schedules. It is meant for those who wish to enjoy life to the fullest and who love to while away the time with friends."—Penelope Casas, from Tapas: the Little Dishes of Spain

This way of life seems to suit most chefs to a T. Many of us in the hospitality business are gregarious by nature and so it makes sense that we love to go out with groups of our friends. If we're a little boisterous, so much the better! And by occupational circumstances, most chefs are grazers for the simple reason that we rarely ever have time to sit down to a full meal. So tapas is a natural way of eating for us and one that appeals to our desire to taste a wide variety of foods and to celebrate what little free time we have with our friends. And a crawl from tapas bar to tapas bar is a great way to celebrate!

Back to my local tapas mission. It surely wasn't hard to start serving tapas at the restaurant, not much more difficult than serving any other kind of food, except that tapas are perhaps a bit more labor intensive. Still, within a week of taking the decision to serve tapas, we were up and running, serving an array of tapas every week night from 5pm until 7pm when we started to get busy for dinner. Running a full dinner menu and a tapas menu out of the same tiny kitchen is difficult at best, so we cut tapas off at 7pm to concentrate on normal dinner service.

We quickly discovered that there is no culture of going out after work in Winchester. As amazing as it might seem to some readers, if people work here in town, they leave just as soon as work is over. By 5:15, all the business parking lots around us are deserted. If people commute to work, they're still on the road between 5 and 7 and are not going out anywhere after their long drives.

Did you hear that rock rolling back to the bottom of the mountain? Poor Sysiphus.

After listening to complaints that we ended our tapas hours too early, we picked a few nights and extended them. The result? Customers wanted to eat a full dinner after 7pm and would not order tapas, even when presented the opportunity.

Two years ago, we decided to serve only tapas on Wednesday nights, to try to create an event night in town and we put a lot of marketing money behind it. Every now and again, we would draw a good crowd, but just as frequently, we'd be empty. For a time, we were seemingly grossly under- or over-prepared. In the end, we developed only a small following of customers who would come somewhat regularly, meaning about once a month.

Ultimately, we found that most customers will not sit for two or three hours and order small bites every now and again, as whim strikes. Our customers wanted to order at most three items and wanted them at once, all to themselves. It was incredibly rare to find a table that would order food to share or that would order a few tapas every 15 or 20 minutes.

And this caused us no end of difficulties. We would serve all the tapas ordered at one time family style, with as many tapas on a single plate as would fit comfortably, simply because our tables are not big enough for bunches of small plates. Family style service went over like a lead balloon, for the simple reason that people are very territorial about their food.

For example, when a table of four would order four orders of scallops, we would put all four scallops on a single plate. I cannot count the number of times that someone at the table would pull the entire plate of scallops to himself and eat all of them. Then the table would be screaming at the server that she only brought one order of scallops rather than the four that they ordered. Once the server explained the situation, the table would grouse about our tiny portion sizes. You can surely imagine the impact this had on our servers' tips.

Sysiphus trudges back to the bottom to start pushing again.

The poor servers were constantly dealing with irate customers because "my food is on *his* plate," when in fact, there were several communal plates on the table. It always amazes me to watch people at a communal table who grab a plate from the center and pull it up close to them and shield it with both elbows down on either side of it, like a hawk shielding her fresh kill with her wings. Sadly, territoriality and tapas do not mix.

Besides this awkwardness for the service staff, we were damned by portion size. For better or worse, Winchester, Virginia, lies smack in the heart of the Land of the Golden Trough, where all you can eat is a way of life, a sport almost.

Over the years, we found that customers were predisposed to order only three tapas from the menu regardless of the size of the tapas, probably out of reflex from years of ordering an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert. When we started tapas, we were doing traditional one- or two-bite tapas.

Customers, after ordering the requisite three tapas, would still be pretty hungry as you can well imagine. Rather than order more food, they would grumpily ask for the bill, pay it huffily, and depart quickly to go tell the world what tiny portions we served. It mattered not that their bills were minuscule in comparison to a standard dinner bill.

Inexorably Sysiphus trudges on, knowing the darkness to more fully appreciate the light when he sees it.

After a few weeks of being bad-mouthed around town, we started gradually increasing the portion size (and the price) until at the end of 2007 we were no longer doing tapas at all, but rather half-sized entrées with full garnishes. As a result, in the kitchen we were doing all the work of a full entrée, but for only one third the money. And the planning for the garnishes and plating took all the joy and spontaneity from tapas service.

Even more disheartening was that each Wednesday night, an average of two tables would get up and walk out without ordering, after looking at the menu. On more than one occasion I heard "I don't want this tapas shit," as disgruntled would-be patrons exited stage left.

We continued to suffer these walk-outs even after we included traditional entrées on our tapas night menus, a lesson that we learned early on was necessary to appease a large segment of our clientele. Moreover, the actual walk-outs were on top of the customers who refused to book a table on the phone once they discovered that we were offering tapas.

Now Sysiphus takes a hard look at the rock, laying in a gully at his feet.

To cap off our tapas experience, we looked at our books, which were very clear. We were still drawing the same number of customers as before we started tapas, but our ticket averages were off by 30% on tapas nights. The expected extra customers never showed up to compensate for the lower checks.

Clearly a marketing person would look at the equation of more labor, more disgruntled customers, fewer reservations, more walk-outs, and less money and arrive at the conclusion that the product offered was not demanded by the market. But Sysiphus is not a marketing person, is he?

And here we, like Camus, leave Sysiphus at the bottom of the mountain, where finds himself weary and his back sore. Will he summon the strength to start pushing the rock towards the summit once again?

Thursdays

Thursday is a strange day in our business, one of contrasts. It's our hump day, the third day of our five-day work week, and in terms of customer volume, our slowest. Today, with it raining, we largely expect to be empty.

The slow customer volume lulls me into thinking that I can relax a bit on Thursday mornings, because all the major paperwork for the week (closing the prior week, payroll, bill and check runs, and inventories) has been completed on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

In contrast to the lack of customer volume, however, the delivery volume is at its highest point of the week. It makes sense, too. We take the vast majority of our deliveries on Thursday to get ready for the mayhem that are Fridays and Saturdays, our money days.

This morning already we have taken deliveries from one wine vendor, a local beer distributor, our specialty grocer (bearing goodies such as dried cherries, maple syrup, chocolate, tea, sun-dried tomatoes, and porcini mushrooms, among a lot of others), our baker, and our micro-green grower.

It takes a lot of effort for us to check in all these goods, write checks for those that are COD (wine and beer in Virginia are COD by law), and put everything away. This morning, it's been a steady process for us, unlike some days when we have vendors lined up four deep wanting to make deliveries.

It's days like those that make me want to schedule delivery windows for my vendors. But unlike Costco, I need my vendors more than they need me: I can't afford any ill will, especially with the drivers who can make or break my day. Anyway, today hasn't been one of those days, thank goodness.

Wine deliveries are always a pain for us, because we really have to scrutinize the merchandise, the invoice, and our order sheets. We have to really look carefully at the merchandise because so many wineries pack different wines in the same box and those boxes are inevitably warehoused next to each other at the distributor. Mispicks are all too common.

The invoice and order sheets have to match, not only for what was ordered, but for vintage and price. Distributors have totally different price structures depending on geographical territory and quantity ordered. I'm surprised that we don't see more pricing anomalies than we do. Any change in vintage or price has big ramifications for our wine lists, but that's a whole other topic of discussion.

This afternoon we expect deliveries from two more wine vendors, our weekly pickup at the ABC store, and FedEx will be here at least twice, once with our weekly shipment of wild mushrooms from Oregon and once with our game and meat deliveries from New York and Philadelphia. I'm expecting foie gras, veal, bison, and whatever else it is that I have ordered that I don't remember right now.

On top of this, our restaurant goods supplier will be here with chemicals for the dish machine, disposables such as paper towels, hopefully some new coffee cups, and some miscellaneous goods (such as tongs and storage containers) for the kitchen.

So, while Thursdays are deceptively slow from a customer perspective, they are pretty busy days for us here at the restaurant.