Left Behind

Back in June, I made some moves that I believed were risky, brave, and eminently forward-looking. I hired myself a chef/kitchen manager, and a pastry chef. With the idea of taking the café to the “next level.” Knowing full well that some of the precious long-term employees I had clung to would not be going to that next level with us. You stop, you think, you swallow your trepidation and you take that big forward step. You know there will be consequences.

Now that I think about it, the fallout was already falling when I made those momentous hiring decisions. It was, in fact, one of the things that pushed me to make the moves I did. One by one, the backbones of my crew were themselves making decisions. To move on. To kiss us goodbye and leave us behind. In truth, I decided to take us to the next level because it was that or…I don’t know what. Run the restaurant by myself, I guess.

In May, the Good and Faithful “D” informed me that she would be going back to school in the fall. And of course, it couldn’t be a normal school, where you could take classes AND work, and get your degree or certificate in, maybe two or three years. No…it had to be one of those “career” schools with the intensive programs that eat up the students’ every waking hour, transforms them and releases them fully accredited and thoroughly exhausted into their chosen field of endeavor after a mere 6 to 8 months.

Time and time again, my “girls” remind me that I am their boss. I am not their friend, or their mentor, or even someone whose feelings matter, or whose opinion they value. I have so utterly failed to make that connection with the girls who work for me. And it feels like shit. What do you say to someone upon whom you have depended heavily—probably much more heavily than was wise—when they up and decide to move on? “Bye, see ya…have a nice life?”

And, yet, I could do that, if it looked like the parting was going to be a smooth and amicable one. But that would not be “D.” Her personality is such that, when she decides to move on, she completely emotionally disassociates from whatever she is moving on from. She's no Audrey Hepburn, but her personality is every bit "Holly Go-lightly." She wants to project the impression that there are no bonds, no chains, no attachments…everyone (meaning SHE) is free to walk away from any relationship at any time, no hard feelings, no regrets. The more serious the entanglement, the more aloof she becomes at the dissolution of it. Untouchable. Unreachable. Gone.

The end result of this is…though she will not actually start school for another two weeks, and she plans to continue to work part-time during the first ten-week term, “D” is already gone. The amazing young woman whose trust I thought I had won, and whose loyalty I believed I had inspired, at least in some small way, has disappeared. In her place is a disrespectful petulant malcontent with a serious case of “short-timer’s disease.” And it just…hurts. Deep in my heart, it hurts.

It will be a sad chapter in the history of the Old Town Café, and in my personal history, if the time comes—as it appears that it will—when I am relieved that “D” has finally walked out the door, never to return. She has been my right hand, my go-to…the Good and Faithful “D.” It will be hard…SO hard…to watch that relationship end in such a sad and ignominious way. But it honestly looks as if I have no choice. I have been pitched out of a taxi into an alley, in the rain.

Unfortunately, I don't anticipate "D" suffering a change of heart and coming back for me...

Full Moon...

Counter girl calls me to the phone. Customer complaint.

"We ate at your restaurant last night, and my receipt shows two charges of $1.00 each on 'Dept. 1…' What is that for?"

"Yes…you ordered two bacon cheeseburgers. We ring those up as the burger plus $1 for the rest of the stuff on it…"

"But you can't do that… That's terrible…!"

"No, you don't understand. The burgers you ordered were the special. They were $7.95—stated clearly on the special board. The way we ring those up is to ring up the plain burger at $6.95 and then ring up the dollar for the bacon and the cheese. You weren't overcharged. It comes out to $7.95.That's just the way we ring it up."

"Well, that's just a TERRIBLE way to do business. We WON'T be back! GOOD BYE!" *Click.*

Whatever….

An Open Letter...

I WAS going to post the whole letter...but there was too much of a personal nature in it to post it in a public space. But these last two paragraphs sum up how I feel about my ladies, whom, I suspect, will all soon follow the recipient of this letter off the edge of the Hot Flash Cafe plane...

Things will definitely be changing around here. It’s exciting and frightening at the same time; and we appreciate every step that every one of you ladies is willing to take to help us get to…wherever we’re going. Please know that I’m grateful to you and the rest of our long-time crew for helping us get this far. You all have seen me at my dead worst, and yet continued to choose to come back to work the next day. For that, I am eternally grateful.

I know you’ve given a great deal of thought to your decision to leave. I respect that and can only offer you my gratitude and best wishes to take on to your next job. Of course, I’m confident we can work through the rest of your time here without tension between us. And of course I will provide a good reference for you.

Whether you are with us here at the cafe or not, I will always want you to succeed.

Baggage

Seventeen years ago, I was in the heyday of my management stint with “Little Bakery on the Mall”—the position I’ve historically referred to as “My Dream Job.” I had a top notch crew of ladies working for me, whom I thought I appropriately appreciated. Knowing what I know now, I realize I took them way too much for granted.

As a manager working for someone else, back in the olden days, I had two guiding philosophies. First off, I had once been told that MY job was to “train myself out of a job,” and I took that advice and ran with it. Secondly—and this is really a corollary of the first—I was determined that the bakery could and would run exactly the same whether I was physically present or not. I had zero tolerance for the theory that playtime began as soon as the boss left the building.

I was never afraid to pile as much responsibility on any employee as she was willing to take on. And training was a priority—every one of those ladies knew exactly what to do and how I wanted it done…and they did it. Whether I was there or not. Our cash control was the stuff of legend (other managers in the company joked that I had a “slush fund” from which I drew money to make up for cash shortages.) The bakery was immaculate. Our business grew. We won prizes. I made good money. It was my first taste of real success in any job (I was 37 years old and had been working since I was 18…) And I thought I had it all figured out. Foolishly, I thought that somehow I was at least marginally responsible for the triumphs of our little store.

Nearly twenty years later, I own my own restaurant…and I find that the zen I had achieved with my past crew looks more like the impossible dream than a bullet point in my resume. Cash control sucks, the place is only adequately clean, business is static, and we aren’t winning any prizes. And I don’t take home a dime. It’s become painfully obvious that the success of “Little Bakery on the Mall” was more about the unique attributes of the ladies I had working for me, than anything I knew or did.

I continue to be vexed with staffing problems. Certainly, it was a challenge to keep the restaurant functioning while I learned the ropes, weeded out the awful staff I’d bought with the place, and attempted to train new people to do what I was still learning. THAT was a nightmare that took fully two years to abate. One would think that, by now, we would have turned some kind of corner, put past nightmares behind us, and started moving forward with a vengeance. Ummm…not so much.

Instead, I’ve acquired a core of four or five ladies who emerged as the cream of the crop. I don’t mean to disrespect them and their contribution to my survival and the continuing operation of the café (on a higher level than it had enjoyed previously.) But I knew early on that I’d had to drastically change my standards in order to have any staff. I hired (and re-hired) people I would never have given a second look in the past. I’ve steadfastly focused on the positive points of all of these ladies, while down-playing or even blatantly ignoring their negatives. I have had to choose my battles, and very probably chose not to do battle on several fields upon which I should have drawn a line. There was no other way to keep the doors open, never mind making appreciable forward progress.

Once upon a time, I was able to fine tune an employee’s performance to a “t,” without micro-managing and without making that person feel like I wanted her to be a clone of myself. Through a series of gentle nudges, kind of like a sheepdog, I could get the result I wanted without taking away a person’s feeling of autonomy. But no more. Things are different now. I’ve come to resist the urge to tell people what to do. New employees want to be hired on, get a general idea of the position, and then build their duties around their (sometimes erroneous) perception of what the job entails. Any kind of fine tuning or urging to a higher level of performance is met with a level of negativity with which I have chosen not to do battle. If my choice was between a peaceful workplace staffed with mediocre employees, and a cesspool of resentment, pouting, tattle-taling and finger-pointing, I selected the former, strictly for my own sanity.

As a result, I’m saddled with a group of employees who are steadfast and even smug in their bad habits. I have closing staff who truly believe that Job One is to lock the doors and race out of there as if the place were on fire…to that end, they begin “pre-close” in the middle of dinner service, sometimes even earlier. I have cooks who prep enough to cover their own butts, but don’t invest much energy into considering what the next shift will be walking into. A restaurant full of customers, rather than presenting an opportunity for the staff to give it all they’ve got and really shine, is more an excuse to take short-cuts and walk out the door leaving work undone “because it was busy.” Worst of all, I have a stable of workers who loathe being told what to do, but will not step up and take any kind of initiative to improve or advance their job performance. They achieve a comfort level and they stay there. Period.

For my part, I know I have not exactly been a paragon of hospitality management. I’ve been frustrated, overwhelmed, exhausted and menopausal—not a good cocktail for bringing out the nobler aspects of any woman’s personality. Leading by example has always been my strategy…but if this staff had always followed my lead, we all would have gone straight to hell. So I can hardly blame them for choosing their own paths to what they’ve considered success in the job.

But now, we truly ARE at a crossroads. I’ve taken steps (that I didn’t realize I was taking at the time) to transform our little café from “okay” to “special.” I realize my staff—the girls upon whom I have depended heavily for many months—lean way more toward “okay” than “special.” There is not one of the old employees who has not made it clear to me that her priorities lie elsewhere. Their attitudes and level of commitment have been and would continue to be adequate to keeping the restaurant going along okay. But they will not make it “special.” And on some level, I believe they understand that.

Which is not to say that the transition is going to be painless.

There is more to say about this…I’ll post again later.

Score One For The Old Ladies

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced at my restaurant has been staffing. It has taken three years, but we seem to have cobbled together a crew that mostly does the job and works well together. There are unique challenges associated with working at the Old Town Café—not the least of which is that any member of my crew has to be able to work elbow to elbow with me. Even after my most recent acquisitions of a chef/kitchen manager and a baker, I invest more hours than anyone else associated with the café into just…filling positions. Any and all positions. I am the ultimate cross-trained employee, and I find that I have to make use of my own services—STILL—more than I like.

Conversely, it has been more of a challenge than I have wanted to acknowledge for me to work so closely with…children. I can’t decide whether being childless myself has made it easier or harder for me to work with these young people less than half my age. On the one hand, I don’t have as much problem seeing them as adults as I might have if I’d raised a brood of my own—that were now approximately the same age as the people I depend upon to keep my restaurant functioning. It might be a little tougher for me to heap adult responsibilities upon these young shoulders if I was seeing them through a mother’s eyes…

On the other hand, I wonder if I don’t expect too much from them. They are, after all, still kids…I was one, once, too…back when dinosaurs walked the earth. I dimly remember having friends, going to parties, having a social life…and all the angst that went with it. I showed up to work drunk—ONCE. (I was nineteen…in fact, it was my nineteenth birthday.) I might have called in sick one or two times when I wasn’t really sick. I goofed off just often enough to prove I was a bona-fide, card-carrying KID. So I try to give my staff some leeway in that regard…

Still, it was more my habit to drag myself to work no matter how sick I was, even at the tender age of nineteen or twenty. The job needed ME, I needed the money, and work was a priority. That was handed down to me by my parents. These children who work for me now…they are a completely different breed of animal, and I have a really hard time identifying and accepting their priorities. Social life IS their number one—they engage in it and tend to it 24-7-365. Technology gives them the capacity to be in uninterrupted communication with their friends. Work, school, adult responsibilities—seem to be mostly unpleasant interruptions of their social connections.

I find it impossible to relate to that…and so, I feel uncomfortably distant from these children who work for me. And it’s hard, really. Damned hard to work so closely every day with a group of people with whom you share…nothing.

All this became a lot clearer to me this past Saturday. We were BUSY at the café, and understaffed, because half the socially-hyperactive twenty-somethings who make up my crew had requested the weekend off. My kitchen staff consisted of myself and “C.” C is the one employee I have that is of my generation—she is a couple of years younger than me. She had been the cook at the Senior Center until their budget was cut and they had to let her go…she came to me looking for part-time work to hold her over until she could retire in a few more years. So I was a little anxious about how we two “old ladies” in the kitchen might handle things if it got busy. But I had no choice, we WERE what was available.

Of course, we got slammed. We did 30% more business than the previous Saturday, with 25% less staff. Surprise. Never let it be said that customers can’t smell blood in the water…

Our twenty-something counter girls ran their butts off all day, started whining about getting their breaks around noon… One of them even wanted to go home sick, but there was no one else to call to work for her, so she stayed. The front-of-the-house staff was looking pretty ragged by the end of the day.

In the kitchen, the “old ladies”…ROCKED. Neither of us left that kitchen to do more than pee in seven hours. We kept up with the orders. We prepped as we went. We attacked the mess about an hour before close and were able to clean up and get out of there on time.

And we laughed. We enjoyed ourselves. We joked and commiserated; the two ancient, creaky, half-blind, hot-flashing cooks…got it done.

At one point, I leaned over and said, “You know, C, I think I know why I enjoy working with you so much. You’re MY AGE…! I SO enjoy being back here with somebody who GETS ME…”

She looked at me, almost with tears in her eyes, and said, “Well, thank you…!”

At the end of the day, I kicked her butt out of there because she’d worked seven hours without a break (and without even mentioning a break.) I could finish up the last of the cleaning by myself. C took off her apron, signed out and disappeared through the kitchen door.

A second later, she poked her head back into the kitchen, looked at me and said, “Thank you for letting me help you today. It was fun.”

And then it was my turn to blink back the tears…

The Next Level

A little over a week ago, I wrote, almost as an aside, that I had gone and hired me a real live dyed-in-the-wool chef. A foodie. Someone who knows how to cook and loves doing it.

And then, yesterday, I realized quite out of the blue that we had reached the third anniversary of our purchase of the restaurant.

So, there it is. Three years into the thing, and I’m finally going to make this restaurant MINE. By getting out of the kitchen, handing the sauté pan to someone who really KNOWS how to operate it, and using his skills to advance my vision.

No more pushing someone else’s dream up the mountain. I’ve proven I can do that. That in itself is a tremendous accomplishment…there have been oh-so-many times in the past thirty-six months when I’ve nearly conceded that, indeed, I could not. Do. It.

The time has come to bleed and sweat and ache, and laugh and celebrate and high-five, not just for something I “can do,” but for something I can love and be proud of. This young man, this twenty-five-year-old in the early years of what I’m sure will be a fine career, is going to help me get there. If we’re lucky, we can have a long, mutually beneficial association. If we’re lucky.

Tonight, sitting in the restaurant, on a beastly hot evening when I was pretty convinced that people would rather walk over burning coals than sit in our poorly air-conditioned dining room and consume pasta, I watched group after group come in, sit down, enjoy a meal. I lent a hand here and there, answered the phone, opened a bottle of wine, seated some folks, schmoozed a little…

And then I went home and left the clean up to the people I pay to do that.

For the first time in three years…

the FIRST TIME

in three years

I felt like I OWNED a restaurant.


And it felt

FU**ING AMAZING.

Another of Life's Little Metaphors

I was standing at my anti-cross-contamination work station—the top of the chest freezer in the corner of the kitchen—far away from any clean dishes or other food. Up to my elbows in chicken, egg, flour and bread crumbs. Suddenly, every light, fan and motor surrounding me went off, on, off, on again…and then a final plunge into silence and darkness. Except for the hiss of the burger sizzling on the grill. And an ominous sound like a Flash Gordon ray gun coming through the wall to my left.

Shocked exclamations from the dining room hovered at the edge of my consciousness while I held my salmonella laden hands in the air, waiting for the lights to quit their foolishness and go back on so I could finish up and get the dinner special in the oven. Then the louder sound of Dee's voice from the hall near the back door cut through my expectant confusion.

"Oooooohhhh my God! Lisa, I think we're done for today…."

"What?"

"I think we're done. Come here and look…"

"Why? What's that noise?"

With my germy, eggy, crumby hands held up in surrender, I navigated, squinting, out into the brightness of the dining room with its walls of full-height windows. Dee stood at the back door with a look of fascinated horror on her face. A few hundred yards down the block, at the neighborhood high-voltage transfer station, a giant ball of pink-yellow power-flash danced and pulsated and threw sparks ten feet in the air, emitting that loud ray-gun sound I'd heard coming through the wall.

"Whoa!"

Well. Yes, indeed…it did look like we were done for the day.

Tuesday. Senior Night. Ten percent of our week's business expected to begin toddling through the doors in less than two hours. Negated by the ill-timed flash-bang of some terrorist squirrel.

It's amazing how slowly one's mind seems to grasp such emergent situations. Those protracted moments of fumbling at the controls… The panic button starts to flash and glow fluorescent orange. You struggle to ignore it and sort out the saner possibilities. What eventually triumphed were the orders in the kitchen which had been paid for, and needed to be completed and sent out. And I had to wash the salmonella off my hands, move my chicken out of the way and go do that. All in the half light of the bright dining room filtering into my windowless kitchen.

As I returned to stumble around in the gloom, bits of conversation filtered back to me from the gathering crowd at the back door. Gasps and oohs and aahhs and "Did anyone call 9-1-1?" Speculation about how long it would take to fix. After five minutes that seemed like an hour, the fries came up and the orders went out. Dee and I looked around at the dark kitchen, then went outside one more time to check out the continuing fireworks display down the road.

I started sifting through a mental check list. Without power, we had no soda and no espresso machine. We had some drip coffee left, but no ability to make more once that ran out. We could make food…the grill, fryer and ovens were still functioning and cold sandwiches wouldn't be a problem. But one had to assume the fire extinguishing system would be out, along with the ventilation. How dangerous would it be to continue to cook with gas under those conditions? Plus, not knowing how long the power would be out, we could not afford to keep opening and closing cooler doors. Once the contents rose to a certain temperature, the health department would require that we throw everything out, and I couldn't chance that just to try and save one night's sales. And dishes would be a nightmare…in the dark, with no dishwasher.

Dee and I looked at each other. "Well, we have to close, I guess."

That decision made, you would think that I could have just rolled up my sleeves, dug in and made it happen. But the stack of corollary decisions that now confronted me in my poweless kitchen just seemed overwhelming. What should I do with this chicken if I'm not going to cook it? How am I going to cool down this soup and this marinara so I don't destroy what cold air remains in the fridge? Should I change out all the pans in the sandwich table, or just take the utensils out, slam the lid and lock the cold air in? We have to call the night crew and tell them not to come in. Should I let the husband do the provision shopping he normally does on Tuesday, or tell him to bag it because we don't need more stuff we might not be able to keep cold? And what about this mountain of dirty dishes…and no dishwasher?

And behind all those issues that needed immediate attention, the dread of worse possibilities that would require more drastic planning ballooned like an aneurism. I so wanted to panic, but I knew there were too many tasks before me right now to waste energy on dire predictions. So I rolled up my sleeves, cleaned away my chicken mess, puzzled out where to put everything, had Dee call the rest of the night crew, and addressed myself to the heap of dishes that would now have to be washed by hand. In the dark.

Piece by piece, from the largest prep kettles to the stacks of silverware, every item went meticulously through the cycle. Scrub in hot soapy water, going over each piece like a blind person, feeling every surface. Rinse under hot water in the center sink. Load it into the sanitize water, soak, then pull it out and set in the drainboard. Start a new sink full while that batch air dries. A boring and tedious task under normal circumstances, raised to a new level of excruciating by the adverse conditions. Wash, rinse, sanitize, dry. Wash, rinse, sanitize, dry.

The dish tank became my center. My homepage. Some new problem would enter my mind, I'd wander away, bark some orders at Dee or at my husband over the phone, look around helplessly, almost allowing the panic to overwhelm me…and turn back to the dishes. Wash. Rinse. Sanitize. Dry.

At one point, Dee came back into the kitchen with the newsflash that the first responders over at the power station had moaned that this would take days to fix. Days. My soapy hands stopped scrubbing, I rocked back on my heels. "Oh my god, Dee… Do you know what a disaster that would be?" Tonelessly, without feeling. I couldn't let myself feel it. I would have started screaming and never stopped. I paused for a long minute. Wrestled that panic, threw it to the mat. Then I bent over the sink once again. Wash. Rinse. Sanitize. Dry.

For two hours, I soldiered on. Washed dishes. Scrubbed counters. Washed dishes. Scrubbed the grill. Washed dishes. Thought ahead, but not too far: We have power at home. Plug in the freezers in the garage. Get ready to load out the food. Wash dishes. Now they say they'll have the power back on some time tonight, but they don't know when. Wash dishes. The mountain became a hill. Then a pile. Then a few scattered pieces. And then, just the silverware.

As I set the last basket of silverware into the sanitize water, in a perfect anti-climactic fillip…

The lights came back on.

Too late to save my dinner service.

But my inventory and my sanity and the night's sleep I would have lost fretting about it, all out of danger now. Relief far outweighed anger or disappointment at the afternoon's turn of events. We locked up and headed home to enjoy the unexpected treat of a night off.

There's a moral here, I realized. A bit of wisdom for all of us facing the panic and looming darkeness of our faltering American economy:

Just…carry on.

Keep on doing dishes in the dark. The lights will come back on sooner than you think.