Tonight was one of the slowest nights I’ve ever experienced in the restaurant.  Sunday nights, generally speaking, are slow.  Superbowl Sunday is historically the slowest night of the year.  I worked that night this year and we had a total of 16 guests (compared to last nights 200+).

This Sunday…tonight…19 guests.

That struck me as very odd.  Sure it was Oscar Night but I didn’t think (originally at least) that it would have such a huge effect on our business.  This whole week has been slow in fact (with a couple exceptions).

And…of course…there was the usual strange happenings in the restaurant.  The one that stood out in my mind the most was table 62.  They had a reservation for 7 people (grandma and grandpa, mom and dad, 3 kids).  It was someones birthday (not sure who) so the whole family went out for dinner.  This table stood out initially because the kids had such unhappy and bored expressions on their faces.  Maybe they wanted to watch the Oscars too…

Eventually their server came up to me with a print out from our POS (Point Of Sale) machine.  He told me that the guests (mom and dad) wanted the bill split between two credit cards.  Both credit cards were declined.  This is extremely rare in the restaurant so we were both a bit surprised.  We had been processing cards all day so I doubted it was a problem with our system.  I told him to try the cards again then talk to the guests.  He did and still no go.

The dad was pretty pissed…blaming us for this, yada yada.  He stormed off to the Bank of America ATM just outside the plaza to get cash while mom called the bank.  Turns out the bank’s computer network/system was down…so the card wasn’t out of funds nor was it our computers issue.

It’s funny how people react so strongly to things like that.  I’m a bit torn myself.  Part of me thinks it is miraculous how technology allows us to be able to pay for everything with a simple swipe of plastic.  It makes life so convenient, so simple, so painfully easy to blow all your money.  I’ve grown to expect this simplicity at all times…so when it breaks down it can be frustrating.  But hey…it’s a complex miracle!  Deal with it!

So I might be getting some comments along the lines of “oh my god he wrote something!”.  Yeah…again…it’s a complex miracle.

Deal with it.

In case anyone who reads this has forgotten (or just didn’t know), I am a Restaurant Manager (Yes, caps…thank you, I’m proud). It’s not an easy job but it isn’t tremendously dificult either.

One requirement is dressing nicely. This means a dress shirt, slacks, tie, shiny shoes, belt, etc. Clean shaven too…and a “oh I’m happy to take care of you” smile.

This means doing lots of ironing. And I’ve become fairly good at it. I’m quick, efficient, and although I don’t love doing it…I don’t hate doing it either. It’s pretty mindless and I like the end product.

So yeah…ironing. Oh.

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!

When I was an accountant you pretty much knew what the day was going to be like before it even started. Hell, you knew what the week…the month…perhaps even the year was. It was extremely static…do this on this day, that on that day…boring.

I am a fan of consitency (at times) and knowing what will happen at a given time (at times). But working in a restaurant…hell, you honestly have NO clue what my happen at any given day. Sure you’ve got a semblance of concept of a theory…sunny day = more business, banquet for 30 at noon, etc etc. But there will almost always be some little thing that pops up that is…unknowable until it happens.

Tuesday March 14, 2006—

BL is coming in. BL is the President and owner of the corporate entity that owns this…and all the restaurants in the “chain”. He is Mr Big Guy (literally and figuratively). The note I have is… “BL will be here in the AM, alert the staff!”. No explanation why, no specific time…great. Not a BIG deal…but still…annoying.

The plaza calls…the group that runs the “mall” where the restaurant is located. They are telling me that some inspection people are coming by this week to, well, inspect. And she is FREAKING OUT about our chairs and storage outside. Yes there are a couple little areas that need attention…but she is seriously freaking about one area in particular…where we are following the fire code…and have a mountain of chairs. We have no place to put these chairs. This could be interesting.
The funny thing is that nothing bad has happened. Nothing has gone wrong. But the potential…yow.

Ya know, I think that is the deal with restaurants…the REAL deal. Every day is a potential for extreme and radical disaster.

But I think it’ll go smooth.

Well…then again…smooth is boring, isn’t it.