"To the world you may just be somebody....but to somebody, you may just be the world."
I saw this posted on somebody's facebook status today.
It's supposed to be inspirational. Why am I not inspired?
Could it be because I'm pretty sure I am NO ONE's world...?
It's been a day of good and bad.
Had to work. Bad.
Got a lot accomplished. Good.
It's my birthday. Good.
I'm 55 years old. Aauugghh!
Got lost on the way to where I was supposed to buy my birthday present. Bad.
Went shopping somewhere else instead. Bought two shirts, a pair of pants and a jacket—all on sale. Good.
Argued with (at?) the husband. Sigh! Bad.
Found good pasta and Marie Callenders' pie for dessert. Good.
Drove directly beneath two eagles soaring and wheeling over the highway. My first unambiguous eagle sighting in many moons. Thinking this is an excellent omen for my fifty-sixth year on the planet.
The best.
Monday morning, and I feel like today is the first day of the rest of my life. That giant catering job has been strapped to my back since mid-May when my chef crapped out on me. Now, I wish I hadn't worried about it so much. The facility we worked in was huge and well-stocked, we got all our prep done handily a few days before, and things came together quickly and beautifully (thanks to Chef Hope) the day of the wedding. Not only did we NOT run out of food, we have tons of leftovers. Which, as a business owner, I should be unhappy about…but all I wanted to do was make sure everybody got some and that it was good. And it was!
But of course, the day could not have gone off without some kind of attack by the Bullshit Squad. It would have been too much to ask for my staffing woes—which have gone from annoying to scary to unbelievable to ridiculous—to abate for just this one day. The "experienced breakfast cook" I hired three weeks ago ( pretty much so that I would have someone to run Saturday breakfast while Chef and I concentrated on this catering job) got her nose out of joint when she received her first paycheck on Friday and decided to terminate her employment with us by no-show, no-calling on the day she knew I needed her most—the day of the catering job. Classy. Very classy.
I ended up having to stay at the restaurant through breakfast, and then going out to the catering site. Which, in the end, was just as well, because we were SO well prepped that there was a lot of "hurry up and wait" going on. I had sent Chef and her assistant over to the church kitchen at 8 am, service was at about 3:30, and there were really only a couple of hours of real work to be done. As it turned out, our very capable lady Chef had everything well in hand, and all I had to do was throw a couple of chicken breasts around at the very end, serve the guests at the buffet line, and clean up.
So now, on this gray, yucky, cloudy day that seems to be part and parcel of summer 2010 in northwest Oregon, I'm ready to start MY summer in earnest. I have no idea what that means, really. But I just want to suspend the work and worry and planning and scheming for a couple of weeks, and grab a little gusto out of whatever the rest of this summer has to offer.
How about it?
Tomorrow is going to be a big day for us. Another "first" for the café. We'll be catering entrees for a wedding reception. To the tune of 250 guests. Wow.
I made this commitment way back in late winter, when I was counting on the services of the lately departed California Chef. (Who, by the way, bounced back handily from his unfortunate experience with his succeeding position, and is now employed by the restaurant right across the street from his most recent ex-employer. Sigh!) Believe me; when California Chef flew the coop, I was more than a little cowed by the scope of the job. But since CC left us a mere six weeks before the wedding date, I didn't feel comfortable telling the customer (who is also my hairdresser and a friend) that she would have to make other arrangements. So I sucked it up and decided, come hell or high water, we were going to make this happen. And do a good job of it, too.
So, tomorrow is the big day. And, truthfully, I'm feeling (perhaps uncharacteristically) confident. The food is simple—things that I personally know how to make, rather than the slightly off-the-wall hairball haute cuisine that California Chef often came up with. I'll be assisted by the Dear Husband, Chef Hope and an intern from a Portland culinary school. Everything's good. Right now, I'm sitting on my deck enjoying a glass of wine and engaging in my alternate passion. Tomorrow morning, everything will fall into place. And by this time tomorrow evening, it will all be history.
Dear husband, on the other hand, is completely unglued by the enormity of the commitment, and is fussing in every direction possible. He feels like a helium balloon with a defective gyroscope, and I'm trying to keep him from flying off in weird directions, or flying away altogether. Tonight, sitting in the car returning from a short buying trip, he confessed he was really freaking out about this whole thing. (No, duh?) And I said, "What's the big deal? It's easy stuff, we have most of it prepared already, it's not something we can't do. Do you see ME freaking out?" "No," he said. "And that's what freaking me out."
"That's silly," I scoffed. "Sometimes, you just have to trust yourself."
A couple of years ago, I could no more have said that than I could have quoted the Koran in Arabic.
Maybe I have learned something.
Sleep deprivation and stress seem to be turning me into a person I really don't like very much.
Time was, when I hired a new employee, I could observe how that person learned, analyze his/her talents and strengths, ferret out the weaknesses, and—taking all those things into account—almost immediately turn that newbie into a functional member of the team. Not so much anymore. I just do not have the patience.
Three weeks ago, I hired two young men—one twenty-two-years old, and one twenty. Each of these kids possessed a resume that included some months served in some kind of commercial cooking environment; and each had some degree of formal culinary schooling. On paper, they appeared to have what it took to make them successful candidates for a cook's job at the café. Yet it took less than three weeks for both of them to go down in flames.
I'll just say here and now that, after all the staffing hassles I've encountered since buying the restaurant four years ago, I take nothing, and I mean NOTHING, for granted. I no longer bring people on staff with an expectation of success. I find it hard to even stand back and wait to see what happens. My attitude is more like, "I know the highest probability is that you are going to suck, or if you don't suck NOW, you'll suck shortly down the road. Prove me wrong…!"
I hate having that attitude. I hate expecting the worst from people. Negative thinker that I have always been, I have up til now had a way of expecting good from people. Expecting honesty, respect, empathy and a knowledge of some kind of decent work ethic. But somewhere along the line, the things I just took for granted from people have become almost extinct. These qualities are not only not part of prospective employees personalities; the words are hardly in their vocabularies (and they would not be able to spell them if they were…but that's a rant for a different day.)
Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about my work. I realize that I have been working myself to death just keeping the doors of the café open. I'm wearing every hat, doing every job, nose to the grindstone, hardly looking up to even see or recognize the faces of the people who inhabit my world. The customers. The staff. I don't know their stories, and I can't care about them. I have too much on my plate to care about the people. And there is something drastically, tragically wrong with that picture.
I feel like, within the next, say, six months to a year, I'm going to have to make a choice. Because just opening the doors and serving food is not what I want my business to be about. I have to be able to disentangle myself from the eternal knot of bullshit that has ensnared me since I took over the café. It seems like it's been drawing me in deeper and deeper, binding me tighter and tighter, until I can't pull far enough away from it to see the Big Picture. To BE the moral business owner I want to be. To care about my staff, the customers, ALL the people I come in contact with every day. And act accordingly.
What I have to figure out is, the way people are these days, CAN I care about them? Because part of the problem is that I have a really hard time caring about people who can't or won't reciprocate in any way. Have people become so self-centered, greedy and rude that I just can't find a way to care? It's not that I expect kudos or gratitude or…really, anything positive when I go out of my way to be kind or fair or respectful of people. I just don't expect to be treated like crap…which, unfortunately, is what happens most of the time these days. It's my misfortune that I tend to treat people as they treat me. Altruistic I am not, apparently.
So what I know is that I don't like this person I have turned into since I bought the restaurant. What I have to figure out is if I can change that, or if I just have to…bail.
I did something mean today.
I got home from work about 2:30 this afternoon. And, it being the first nice day we've had in, well, forever (the local news says we've suffered through 21 straight days of rain, including rainfall amounts in the last two days equal to the normal rainfall for the entire month of June…), all I wanted to do was flip a couple of cups of sunflower seed into the feeder, sit on my back deck, soak up the sun and watch birdie TV. Quietly. No noise. No music. Just the soft chatter of the avian diners and the buzz of the occasional fly or wasp drifting by. A glass of pinot gris at my elbow and a mindless game of spider solitaire on my lap. Was that too much to ask?
Well, of course it was. Next thing I know, one neighbor's dog is barking, through the fence, at the other neighbors, who evidently have company and have chosen to give the "grand tour" of their back yard. From ten feet away on my left, I'm suddenly hearing:
"WOW! ARE THOSE STRAWBERRY PLANTS?"
"DO YOU USE THAT GREENHOUSE MUCH? HEH-HEH…NOW I'M GONNA HAVE TO BUILD ONE…"
"ARE THESE MORE STRAWBERRIES? OH, BLACKBERRIES, HUH?" (Like you could confuse the two….?!)
…and so on.
Now, these neighbors have vexed me much. They cut down the trees that screened my yard from theirs. They built Disneyland in their back yard. They send smoke of burning rubbish piles through my open windows. They till their garden at first light on Sunday morning. Most recently, they have acquired a chicken. A chicken, for gods' sake. Do you have any idea how LOUD one upset chicken can be? In a neighborhood where a dozen backyards snug up to one another in the space of about three acres? And this chicken is housed maybe fifty feet from my bedroom window?
So, this afternoon, their noisy stupid garden tour ten feet from my quiet sanctuary sent me over the edge. I stood up, retreated to my family room, opened all the windows and doors, and turned on the stereo. Loud. So that I could hear it clearly from my refuge on my back deck. Wanting only to drown out the unwelcome intrusion from the other side of the fence. Sort of.
The CD that happened to be in the queue was Kenny G. So it's not like I blasted them out with Led Zeppelin or anything.
I assume they were pissed. Almost immediately, they drifted away from the fence. Withdrew to their own deck, which is at least as far away as they can get from ME and still be in their own back yard. And within five minutes, they departed from there into their house.
"Hmmm…" I mused wickedly. "Well done!"
I half expected them to come knocking on my door to complain about how rude I was.
But I had my retort handily prepared:
"Tell that to your CHICKEN at 6:30 on Sunday morning…."
Last night, I chose to rub salt in a wound that had not healed over as much as I had thought.
I had heard on the grapevine (from my manicurist—the resource library for all of the county's juiciest gossip) that one of the major restaurant players in The Next Town Up The Road had recently lost its chef. Using what deductive powers haven't yet been compromised by my chronic state of overwork and undersleep, I put two and two together and guessed that this was where California Chef had landed. So, last night, husband and I made a little "market research" field trip up the road to see what was shaking.
And yes, there was my ex-chef, toiling away in the open kitchen of the pizza restaurant-cum brew pub-cum comedy club-cum whatever else will put butts in the seat, which has also been struggling to add "dinner house" to its list of various personae. And while I am the first to admit that, in our-pint-sized demographic, success is built upon how many market niches an eatery can successfully fill, Pizza Pub Up The Road has enjoyed about as much success in the dinner house category as has the Hot Flash Café.
There are reasons for this; reasons that became more abundantly clear to me during the ten months I personally struggled to morph the Hot Flash Café into something that would optimize California Chef's talents. The truth of the matter is, there is an extremely limited market, out here in the exurbs, for what California Chef does best. He can make beautiful, tasty, trendy food. And that, unfortunately, is not what our customers are looking for in a local restaurant. They want clean, friendly, edible homey stuff. If a restaurant can kind of nudge them toward the 21st century without their knowing it, they're good with that. But they are definitely not looking for nouvelle cuisine out here. If they want trendy, they make a day or night of it and go into "The City." Or they go west to one of the more upscale communities on the beach.
When California Chef took his leave of us, it didn't take me long to realize that he had to leave…that we were never going to be able to make proper use of what he had to offer. I thought, "Okay. Failed experiment. Chalk this one up to experience and move on." But as cantankerous and hard to get along with as the kid had proven to be, I had made a sizeable emotional investment in him. I really believed he had talent and a bright future, even if it wasn't with my restaurant. As much as, in the end, his leaving was obviously best for everyone, it was not painless for me to see him go.
If only he HAD gone on to somewhere that his talents could be nurtured and properly utilized. But, no—he's at a stupid, small-town restaurant of ambiguous identity that is really just a bigger, more ambitious version of the Hot Flash Café. Churning out humdrum food that is NOT his, to keep the unimaginative patrons happy, while straining to attract a market that does not exist with specials like "Halibut Picatta."
My greatest regret with California Chef was that I worked elbow to elbow with him for ten months, and couldn't teach him a damned thing. I knew I had little to offer in the way of teaching him how to cook, but I had hoped I could impart some wisdom about how to run a kitchen, how to assemble and relate to a staff, even what kinds of food might appeal to our demographic. Seeing him last night, ramming his head against the same brick wall he'd encountered (erected?) at the Hot Flash Café, it really brought home to me how utterly deaf and blind he was to anything I had tried to impress upon him during our short and obviously fruitless association.
Within comfortable commuting distance to the city of Portland and its exciting up-and-coming culinary scene, California Chef chooses to go…sideways. Or even backwards.
It was a blow my bruised heart was less ready to absorb than I thought…
Just after we bought the café, I was so overwhelmed, yet still so attached to blogging, that I took to making little ten-minute posts just to let everyone know I was still alive.
Well, now there's not really an "everyone" to let know I'm still alive… And, theoretically, I have enough of a handle on this whole thing to be able to carve out some time to create real posts. And I really thought I was past those over-worked, walking around in a sleep-deprived haze days. Unfortunately, we seemed to have back-slid a bit in that…
So here I am with another ten-minute stream of consciousness post, because even though I have no brain left at the end of any given day, I am still attached to this blog.
With Mothers Day out of the way, it might actually be time to lean back and let the café go on auto-pilot for a month or two. NOT! Though I've managed to pull myself together enough to get a few things done in the long-term promotion category, I still have a list of things ten feet long that I want to/need to accomplish. Not the least of which is get the ball rolling on this air-conditioning thing before it gets really hot out. We've had a miserably cold spring (if we were at 3000 feet we would be buried in snow…) that has, up 'til now, saved our bacon air conditioning-wise. But we all know it's going to get warm sometime, and rather sooner than later, I would think. I cannot have my guests trying to choke down a meal with sweat running down into their pasta.
Speaking of Mothers Day, it went rather well. We didn't have any big disasters, reservations were taken and filled promptly, people complimented the hell out of the food, and we had a fairly good sales day. So I'm going to call it a success, though our food cost and labor costs for the week were unfortunately way out of line, so I'm thinking we didn't really make any money on the whole thing. We hope, however, that we did make some friends. And that is what keeps the doors open.
So, yes…Mothers Day went well. As well as can be hoped for a motherless, childless workaholic. These days, Mothers Day just means a day of extra stress and work work work for me. Which is, in the end, probably a good thing. Because May is just a…hard month, if I let myself think about it. Mothers Day and my parents' wedding anniversary were always within days of each other (my folks were married on May 12, 1945). With them both gone, mid-May would be a time of sighing and missing them, if I had ten minutes to rub together to dwell on it. Plus, my sister passed away five days after Mom & Dad's fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995, so that is not a good memory, either. So though spring—May in particular—is a beautiful time of bloom and renewal in the Pacific Northwest, it is not without its barbs, at least for me.
Ten minutes are up. Time to make the donuts…
Wow. I thought Word had freaked out and eaten this post. But I just found it in some obscure "Auto Recovered Files" panel. Wrote this early this morning, before the rest of the ultimately crappy day had unfolded.
My chef quit today. Just up and said he couldn't get along with any of the staff…hasn't tried, really, but that's a story for another day.
So I guess some re-evaluation, reorganization and re-everything else is in the works.
Yay.
