Lately…I’ve been feeling crappy. Physically crappy that is. I’m not sure if it has been some increased stress from work (things are a bit complex there…but not really bad per say), this annoying Spring (I do love warm weather…but the heavy rains before created nasty allergies), some personal stuff (stupid women…75% over that crap) or whatever…or a combo…etc.

And I’ve been reading this book (I mentioned that before). And today I watched “Super Size Me”. Considering my career choice it’s probably something I should have watched/read a long time ago.

So this is my 30 day experiment.

-No food of questionable origins. This is rather tough to nail down specifically…what is “questionable origins” anyway? With my food educational background I am defining it as “any food that I am completely clueless about what the ingredients are”. For 30 days I want to know exactly what it is I am putting into my body. This means absolutely nothing that I cannot (and have not) see the ingredients list for. This will make eating out a bit dificult. Going to a burrito place and asking (what, exactly, are all the ingredients in your quacamole? your sauce? where does your cheese come from and may I see the food label?). This is going to force me to A) cook at home much more and B) eat at places where the ingredients are easy to figure out. Thank god I work at a restaurant! But this means goodby McDonalds…that’s for sure…and Rockstar…sigh!
-No ingredients that I cannot define myself. Sure…I can pick up a can of Sierra Mist and read the label…but hell if I know what calcium disodium EDTA is. Of course I could look it up fairly easily but I want this experiment to be based soley off current knowledge. Again this will cause some dificulty I’m sure as there are lots of things which I don’t know…but I think I can handle it. This INCLUDES high fructose corn syrup…which will be EXTREMELY dificult to avoid. Trust me on this…I’ve been looking at labels.
-No smoking. Ah…now this is the kicker. Smoking is something I am definitively addicted to. With this current awful allergy season it is absolutely killing me…congested + smoke = hard time breathing, very stuffed up, feeling very crappy. I “feel” I am “ready” to quit smoking but I don’t know if I can do it right now. So I am going to give it 30 days…test out the waters so to speak. I’m not promising to “quit”…I’m just promising to “take a break”. Ow…

-Have at least 30 minutes of exercise daily. Again…a bit more dificult to define. But since this is my experiment I can make all the rules. So I am defining 30 minutes of exercise as “30 consecutive minutes of elevated heart rate due to physical activity”. This could mean taking a walk for half an hour, 30 minutes of yard work (not watering the lawn mind you…but seriously moving about getting that heart rate up), or (of course) 30 minutes of “working out” (traditional stuff…sit-ups, push-ups, weights, yada).

I could be all ultra scientific about this…take pictures, measure and quantitate, use scales and graphs and all that jazz…but I’m going to keep it very simple. I’m going to go use the old scale sitting in the garage and…well…look at myself in the mirror. Gimmie a minute…

I weigh in at 176 lbs on our (probably innacurate) scale. Physically I look skinny up top, hairy as fuck, and my stomach is getting fat. Physically I feel mildly tired, my mouth and noes are itchy (stupid allergies).

When I wake up tomorrow I’ll start this new plan. I’m rather curious how it’ll turn out. Wish me luck!

I’ll try to update my observations daily…but I make no promises.

Here are some searches that have found my site recently….

-women fucking donkeys

-donkeys fucking women

-sexy donkeys

-stories of women and donkeys

-normal sized donkeys eat

-when tractor racing began

-creepy phrases

And then there has been a whole bunch about the Dakota stereo install and the ss8c automatic timer.

Funky!

I’m not sure if this is the case for all restaurants…but for us, Mother’s Day is the MOST busy day of the year. Easter is a somewhat close second…but still is not quite as busy.

How busy is the “busiest”? As we all know Mother’s Day is on a Sunday. On Sunday we normally serve brunch from 11 am to 3 pm. On average we’ll do somewhere between 90-170 for brunch.

On Mother’s Day we served 500 people. Oh yeah…for dinner we served another 250.

That is a HELL of a lot of people.

Brunch was $35 per person for a 3 course meal (maybe I’ll post the menu). So with 500 people that’s 1,500 plates coming out of our kitchen…all in a span of 5 hours (we serve from 10 am to 3 pm on Mother’s Day). That works out to 5 dishes every minute. Insanity huh?

Our kitchen is open to the restaurant (with a smaller area behind). It’s a long counter with the “cold side” (desserts, salads, etc) on one end and the “hot side” (self explanatory) on the other. With (again, on average) a plate coming out every 12 seconds there is an extreme need for someone to organize all this stuff coming out and make sure that each tables orders are complete and correct. It gets a bit…confusing.

And that was my job on Sunday. I was the Expo. My entire job was to A) organize the dishes as they come out of the line and B) make sure they got to the proper tables in a timely manner. I had 4 “food runners” assigned to me…their job was simply to bring the dishes from the line to the tables.

It went pretty well. It didn’t go perfectly though (hell, what does?). We had some issues with certain dishes coming out way before others, large amounts of dishes hitting the counter at once, and some communication problems between what the guest wanted-what the server thought that meant-what the kitchen prepared. This is common. In fact, nothing really out of the ordinary happened. It all flowed pretty well and there were no real big guest complaints.

I worked through the brunch bit…but foolishly we had guests coming in past 3. That was very dificult because we needed to re-set the restaurant (tables and kitchen) for dinner service that night…and that too was going to be busy. Towards the end of Brunch there was definite hostility and frustration in the air. We powered through it, did an insanely fast re-set of the whole place, and leaped straight into dinner.

Thankfully I didn’t have to stay too long into dinner. We had used our larger banquet room for general seating and it was a complete mess. Since we weren’t going to use it for dinner service that night we decided to ignore it as we re-set…focus on where guests will be and leave that for now.

Once dinner started everyone had re-adjusted to their new roles and responsibilities…and since I am the Lunch Guy I was bit out of the water for dinner. I didn’t know the menu well enough to Expo again…and the food runners didn’t really need it. So I jumped into that banquet room and got it all set up again. I was, in essence, a busser.

And that is the real role of a manager in a restaurant like this. Well…I’d say we serve 3 primary roles. One is to do the “behind the scene” organization. Things like ordering supplies, dealing with cash, payroll, accounting, working with the corporate body, etc…administrative type work. The second role is “decision maker/guest liason”…this comes into play when a server is unsure about something or has an unhappy guest. A manager is there to have the final word on something and to talk to a guest to smooth something out. The final role is “everyone’s job”. If there is a guest at the door that needs to be seated, and a host is not available…we seat them. If someone needs a cocktail and the bartender isn’t available…we make the drink. If a table needs to be cleaned and a busser isn’t around…we bus it.

It’s a crazy complicated job…peaks and valleys of things going on…and I’m happy to have the day off!