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!