[phaedrus]

I'm actually pretty excited. No matter how many times you do it you still gotta see if you still have it./img/vbsmilies/smilies/biggrin.gif I've set a limited menu this year so I expect smooth sailing in the kitchen. FOH will be a shit show for sure but my boys & girl have it on lockdown BOH./img/vbsmilies/smilies/smoking.gif Should be fun. I am doing fondant potatoes as a choice this time which will be kind of cool; it's sort of old fashioned and not something you see much anymore nowadays so I think it'll go over pretty well. Doing a selection of regular menu items plus a couple of features just for the occasion. We're a hundred-seater in a small town that's not too far from a bunch of villages but also a couple "major" cities. On the kind-of-bummer side people kind of expect prime rib so I'm offering it even though it bores me to tears and I dislike serving it (eg messy, time consuming, servers have a hard time getting it out without getting jus all over hell, etc). But the customers pay the piper so they call the tunes!

It's been a challenging year in lots of ways. Not a lot of good, experienced staff available here. I really have had to start at the very beginning with my staff. This is how you hold a knife. This a julienne, this is what mounting butter means. It has been a lot more exhausting than I expected but it's cool that a couple of the younger kids are really starting to pick it up. If we succeed at all it's because of them and that makes me proud.

Are any of you folks still cooking?/img/vbsmilies/smilies/lol.gif If so what do you have lined up for NYE this time?/img/vbsmilies/smilies/chef.gif

 

[phaedrus]

It went pretty well.  It was weird to walk out at 10:30!  Kept it to just 12 hours today, not bad.  It died off by nine but up til then we did terrific sales.  We'll get a solid bar crush mostly likely around 11 or so but we only do a very limited bar menu late night.  Things ran like a Swiss watch, the limited menu worked really well and the customers were really happy. That's the whole point of it so I'm happy, too.

 

[phaedrus]

Since we were closed on the 1st it was a lot easier than usual to do inventory. I went in around nine in the evening and finished around midnight (what can I say? I'm a nite owl). Of all the parts of my job the office parts are my least favorite, and inventory is my least favorite office job. It always makes me feel like the survivor of a disaster movie or the only human alive on an alien planet. Still I try to embrace it each time. An accurate count is necessary of course, but beyond that I always feel more in touch with the place. There's a story to every box, bottle, can and hunk of meat. I see features yet to come and brainstorm how to use up those odds and ends.

Still it's especially poignant when it's the end of year count. How did the year go? Where will the next one lead me? Did we achieve what we tried to do in 2016? What can we do better? There's also, for me, this odd sense of anti-climax. The holiday season is always balls-to-the-wall with little time for reflection. Just a mad dash through the holidays into the new year. Then it sort of stops! The Xmas songs (which I hate) still leave pangs with their absence. After a month or two of every night being special it's now the 'morning after'. Sure, there are weekends, sporting events, etc but not a lot of restaurant events til V-Day.

Does the final count of the year make anyone else melancholy or is it just me?/img/vbsmilies/smilies/redface.gif

 

[phaedrus]

We had a good night but not insane.  I checked the ring on the POS when I was counting and it was great but not quite what I expected.  Must not have had as much late bar and I thought.  Weird, too- we had everything in our favor on paper.  Saturday night, decent weather, everything closed the next day, etc.  Ressies do hurt us a little bit sometimes; we're small enough that we can get rezzie-locked, with no room for walk ins.  Again, it was one of the best nights we've had the whole year, but for me it could always be better.

 

[phaedrus]

NYE is going to live in infamy as the night the servers were screwing up so bad, they rang in the wrong food for their employee meals.

I don't care you who are, that's funny! /img/vbsmilies/smilies/lol.gif I feel for you. For the most part mine went smooth but the FOH basically burned the restaurant down last Saturday. Pretty much the closest I've come to walking out in at least 15 years. When things get that stupid I try to remind myself that sometimes you're the windshield and other times the bug, but I actually walked out back and smashed milk crates for a few minutes./img/vbsmilies/smilies/redface.gif It just builds and builds, I bottle it up but the stupid, it burns! /img/vbsmilies/smilies/mad.gif

 

[phaedrus]

Normally I'd pretty chill with people, not your cliched enfant terrible chef of the horror stories. I want the BOH and FOH to be able to come to me with stuff without being worried that I'll blow up on them. And I rarely do, but man they really pushed my buttons.