Yesterday was the busiest our restaurant has been since our first two weeks of being open. In fact, our late lunch rush brought me to tears.
It was about 2 o’clock, and 40 people walked in. This is not an exaggeration.
Typically, I’m by myself in the kitchen after 1:30, finishing the lunch crowd and doing prep for that night’s dinner. It’s calm; relaxing, almost.
So at 2 o’clock I’m still swamped with about 50% capacity in the dining room, and I’m already stressed about getting a late start on prep. Then the chime starts “FRONT DOOR. DING. FRONT DOOR. DING. FRONT DOOR.”
I looked out of our pop-out window and saw a huge caravan of cars parking, and groups of people lining up to walk inside. Front gal walked into the kitchen and said, “We’ve got a couple of softball teams coming in.”
I spun a pie in the oven while calling Whitey: HELP! He answered the phone in a whisper, as he was golfing and someone was up to putt. Please, I begged, please help me!
He called Chuck Norris (our other ovens guy) who happened to be two blocks away. Norris arrived moments later in swim shorts and flip-flops, apologizing about his appearance. Are you kidding me? I could care less if you were wearing a dress – just get to work!
There were so many tickets coming one after the other; we ran out of room on the make line to hang them and just left them spitting out on the printer.
In the end, in just one hour, we did twice as much business than we normally do all 5 hours of lunch. It was ridiculous.
When our 3pm crew showed up, they stood in shock at the nightmare that the tidal wave of customers had left behind. The kitchen was a disaster. The make line was empty of toppings, dough trays were scattered in the dish hole, aluminum foil pieces were everywhere.
The dining room stood empty; yet every table was covered in debris of empty trays, pitchers, glasses and plates. The PM crew looked at me with confusion as I hastily explained the insane lunch, and then announced that if we didn’t get to work fast on the clean-up, that we’d be playing catch-up for the rest of the night.
It took a half and hour to get the dining room back in order, another twenty minutes of washing dishes, and ten minutes of re-stocking the make line before 5 o’clock arrived.
And then?
This happened. Read the rest of this entry ?
