The best part of the restaurant business is opening a new restaurant. End of story. Nothing is more addicting than the journey to opening night. There is a rush to the hole process that is hard to explain. The process is anything but sane. You spend countless hours dwelling on ridiculous minutia. You worry over flow patterns, wall colors, menu covers, grease traps and the like. You wake up at very early hours of the morning and your brain becomes a hyper blur of activity. You desperately try to go back to sleep but to no avail because after all 3 hours is just not enough sleep and if you wake up now you will pay for it later today. You know the dish pit isn’t designed right and it’s going to cost you an extra S18,000 a year in broken glassware but the fix is $54K and the budget is $12k and it’s 3 AM and I should be sleeping but my mind just won’t shut down. There is also the nervous adrenaline of potential failure that hovers over your every decision. I am convinced that fear of failure is my personal motivator. Fear of serving bad food, fear of bad service, fear of rejection by the customer all add up to a driving desire to make sure I make as few mistakes as possible. If I have to spend more time or more effort to make something right, so be it. I have proven twice that what I’m doing is right but it makes no difference because this is a new day and I’m opening a new restaurant.
So what’s got me nervous today? Right now it’s just getting everything in order, getting bids and not changing my mind too often. I change my mind a lot. Most of the time it’s because I know I have a limited amount of money and I’m trying to get the biggest bang for my buck. Some examples… I know that it is very important in the desert to have a patio. To me this is irrational thinking on the behalf of the locals. Why, because during the summer it’s 98 degrees at night so this means you have to mist your patio and during the winter it’s 48 degrees at night and that means heating. You would think that people dining under these conditions would prefer to sit inside where the weather is perfect, but these are desert dwellers and you have to think like desert dwellers and they want to sit outside no matter what it is you need to do to make them comfortable. Hell at home if it’s one or two degrees too hot or too cold you can’t even suggest that people sit on a patio. Why do you think I’ve gotten so good at enclosing patios! My motto in San Diego is I’ve never met a patio I couldn’t enclose. But like I said, this is the desert and I have to be aware of the differences in the clientele. So I have a small patio that looks like junk and if I spend about 20K to 30K on this patio, I can enlarge, cover and climatize this area and it will be a primary focal point for the new 3rd Corner. Problem is I only have 10K for the patio in my budget. Hummmmmm…….Were do I cut???? It would be so easy to just spend the money and worry about it later but that is exactly how you begin the process of financial instability.
Well that’s enough ranting for one day. See you in a couple.
Good read. Thanks for the insight on what it takes to open a restaurant. I would like to read about your method of selecting staff for the third 3rd Corner.
It’s a bit of russian roulette, but I will get into it.
Love travelling through the thought process with you. The bistro is down the line for me somewhere, but I’ve had several businesses and I’m so empathetic. That shot of adrenaline that wakes you up in the middle of the night and suddenly your mind is busy trying to remember if you really forgot something. Permits— it’s always the permits that wake me up. Checking off the list again and again in the calendar in my head! Finally I just get up and go to the real schedule with the real checklist and recheck for the nth time. Why, why? always at 3 a.m.
Anyway- I’m glad you’ll be in Palm Desert. My grandbaby is there for the present time. So in the winter, I’m out there every chance I get. And the rest of the time I’ll keep bringing friends to OB. Lucky me!
Cheering you on…