Work begins

I picked up my old knife and shaved a few hairs off my forearm. I knew Francois, our teacher, would politely discard it as a baker’s knife, a baker long out of circulation in the world of fine food. Salame for me stubbornly remained something you get in the supermarket in vacuum-sealed plastic and spelled with an “I”. I didn’t discriminate between varieties as long as there had been no recent news of Salmonella poisoning. My knowledge of salame could be summed up in three thoughts. It came in large or small circles, you ate it on sandwiches and once you opened the package and peeled off a few slices you put it back in the fridge where it may never be heard from again.

Our first demo began. Francois spoke quietly, “Shall we start then?”  He lifted the back leg of the pig and began cutting. His movements were confident and measured. He described every cut, every bone and muscle. I was watching someone so comfortable in their work it could be done blind folded. The blade moved as if it was part of his hand. He used muscle memory and experience to find his way and the pieces deftly separated into ham, loin, city butt and ribs. This was knife handling by a master.

Francois is a handsome Swiss gentleman who began his career long ago a as teenage apprentice in a Paris butcher shop. He has spent decades perfecting his art and working into the upper echelon of the industry. His career spans a major transformation of how our population feeds itself. Where we now derive most of our sustenance from a huge automated food industry he remembers when people grew and prepared foods more regionally, closer to home.

We are gathered here in the Matanuska Valley of Alaska to see and learn from a master Salumiere, a sausage maker of the highest regard. Little did we know we would also be infused with Francois’ passion for the more logical process of a small village economy and his disdain for the monstrous industry he had witnessed his art mutate to.

As the pig was transformed into clean cuts of meat and neat piles of useful bone and skin Francois’ narration of his demo was peppered with warm and humorous stories from a past when a cured ham or stick of salame had a crop, a farm and a local sausage maker connected to it. Francois speaks a few Mediterranean languages, sometimes all in one sentence. Today I listened to him begin a story in English then casually slip between Swiss, French and Italian.  I felt poly-lingual there for a moment. He described how a butcher could actually feel the difference in quality between the flesh of a pig that was raised on a farm by a caring family and one that was treated as a commodity.

Salami, salame, salumi

After hours of detailed cutting and explanation Francois needed a break. His lovely wife Christine laid out a spread of fresh fruit and vegetables. We brought several recently crafted sticks of salame and cured meat to a cutting board. I was still trying to develop a fondness for salame. Of course I love Bratwurst sizzling on the grill. And who can pass up breakfast sausage or bacon on a Sunday morning, but eight kinds of dried salame? Francois and Stephan kept talking about something called Nostrano. To me it sounded like a Sicilian crime family.

But then Francois reached and sliced off a paper-thin piece. He lifted the slice to his nose and smiled. He said, “Look at it, look at the particles inside and the clear delineation between the lean meat and the fat, smell the pleasantly mild, acidic quality.” He put it down and picked up the whole sausage. He gave the cut end a squeeze and pointed out the firmness, the color and the way no moisture or melted fat appeared. Put that way I began to think I might learn to like it after all. I was definitely ready to try some now that it had been described in such a cultured way.

I gave in and tasted all eight along with three varieties of cured ham. By the end of lunch I was sure of two things; I had a new appreciation for artisanal salame and I would be requiring a renal regulator to balance the recent influx of salt into my system. A few pints of Alaskan IPA might do the trick.

April 17, 2012

I don’t often take aspirin but when I do I eat three. Is Alaskan beer stronger than those in the lower 48? It might be the altitude, or maybe the latitude. Regardless of the after effects from the Midnight Sun Brewery work in the shop began on time. After all we have plenty to do this week. The five of us are to transform four mature hogs into an exciting collection of Salumi. The list includes Atriaux, Boudin Noir, Rillettes, Pate de Campagne, Headcheese, Mousse de Foie, Frankfurter, Saucisson de Lyon, Cotechino, Saleme Nostrano, Sopressata, and Chorizo, Jambon Royal, Speck Tirolese, Lonzo Coppa and several whole loin Porketta Roasts.  Once we finish we will serve many of them at a grand banquet for fifty hosted by the proprietor of Palmer Alaska’s finest and most progressive restaurant, Turkey Red.

We began work today at 9am, a late start for a baker. There seems to be no rush to begin work up here because the days are so long. The sun comes up at a very casual pace, lighting up the sky long before it breaks over the mountain. It crosses overhead by the lengthiest possible route and then takes it’s gay ol’ time deciding to go back down. It’s almost indecisive. I watched it set yesterday and it seemed to hang just above the horizon for hours.

Success is not an option

Ninety percent of restaurant start-ups fail. We found the ten percent solution. Something in the following stories may reveal our secret.

His shiny head butted me in the hip as he lifted his load off the floor. Tyler thumped the big bag of flour onto the table next to me as we discussed what to do with our pathetic pastry cook. He’d shown up late for work and still felt we owed him something. I was trying to take a day off and appeared calm standing next to Tyler in the sweltering kitchen. He was more a part of the environment. Flour and dough bits stuck in the hair of his sweaty tattooed arms, tomato sauce spattered on his damp tank top.

Veins pulsed up the sides of his skull and the rings on his fingers glittered as he shook. “I’m going to be sick, you come tomorrow and work with him. I can’t do it anymore.” Regretfully I committed to a 3:00 am shift, again.

The bakery is compact yet it serves the small population of Kilauea and the visitors who drive passed it every day. A sign at the end of the road reads, “The Northern most inhabited point in the Hawaiian Islands.” Beyond it is a cliff that falls into the lonely expanse of the Pacific. It was beauty that put us here in the fix we were in. With its shoulders wrapped in a green shawl of rain forest and its toes dipped in the blue ocean Kilauea was irresistible.

It’s a rural community originally sprouted around a sugar plantation. Weathered little homes in front of dirt sidewalks lined narrow streets. The tin roofed elementary school is so old the doors still have skeleton keys. A quiet Post Office, a little Market, and a few shops for tourists make up the place. Move here and people will soon know you whether you intended it or not. After nine pm the dark silence in town can be stupefying.

One morning, years ago in Kilauea a man gave up his struggle with free enterprise leaving behind a floundering bakery. The Hawaiians sat in the shade and watched. Soon half a dozen would be captains of industry were vying for the space.  We out maneuvered them.

At 2:00 am July fifth 1991 I rolled over in bed to turn off the alarm the first day of business had began. Katie feigned sleep. I brewed coffee and grabbed my old bike for the short ride over to the soon to be prosperous Kilauea Bakery. Laying Trusty Rusty by the steps of the cottage that was to make our fortune I looked up at the night sky. A palm tree took a dark bite out of the star lit sky. Standing in the balmy air on top of the worn plank stairs I put the key into the lock and let myself in. The only sign of life was the chatter of refrigerators laboring to keep their new loads of food cold. We had spent a month transforming the place and I could still smell the fresh white paint that we brushed over the termite riddled walls.

To say our bakery was in a shopping center might conjure too common a picture. Kong Lung Center was a cluster of old buildings that had served as a commissary for the Kilauea Sugar Plantation. Our cottage was eighty years old. Built of first growth redwood plank, it had once held horse equipment; it was a Tack shed. New paint and a linoleum floor gave a clean, food-service look to the inside. The outside with its wide eves, wooden porch, and plantation paint was left untouched to reflect its fading past.

The interior was divided between the service counter and the kitchen yet a customer who climbed the stairs and opened the wooden screen door with a squeak could step to the counter and see the ovens roaring away against the kitchen’s back wall.

My first task was to scale out a bowl of ingredients and begin mixing the inaugural batch of bread. I’d been cleaning the big mixer the previous day and had absent-mindedly left the mixing speed up high. In my distracted state, being proud or anxious that morning, I hadn’t noticed. It was in the highest gear, reserved only for whipping cream. A speed so fast those seven hundred pound bread mixers will actually walk across the floor from the spinning vibration. Decades of struggle began the instant I pushed the button. The explosion of motion flung a forty-pound snotty mixture of flour and water over pristine tables, shelves and ceilings. It just took a couple of seconds before my startled mind reacted by slamming the “off” button but by then I was dripping with white runny globs and shaking flour dust from my hair.

Thinking back now I hadn’t realized the significance of the moment. It marked the beginning of days filled with endless explosions of food and broken down equipment and hours when customers and employees alike seemed a bit unusual and in constant need of attention or counseling. Like a Venus flytrap, the bakery had engulfed its next victim. A food service operation’s inherent movement toward chaos initiated a drawn out and brutal kind of therapy on me.

I swept frantically. Taking time to wipe up globs of spatter resembling paper mache’ paste wasn’t planned. Something made me pause alone in the florescent light. In what would become a repetitive phenomenon when things seemed to go inexplicably haywire I detected the ghostly fragrance of the previous bakers Swisher Sweet cigars. The odor would hang in the air most often in that last cold hour before dawn.

Our first paying customer was a jovial soul named Thea Carlyle. She banged on the door in the dark. On her way to open the mini-mart close by she had promised to check in. I hoped that maybe she was an angel of mercy coming to stand by and help with the mess. What she had in mind was hot coffee and the privilege of handing over the first dollar bill. We wrote something about luck and prosperity in the greenback’s margins and tacked it to the wall. She left with fresh pastry and coffee and I dashed back to my mess.

By 6:30, with a pastry case full of Danish and crispy breads, there were at once two jobs to do. Sell everything before it became stale and then wash the pots. Standing at the low sink faced me away from people entering through the front door. While bent at the sink I listened for the squeak of the screen door. I scrubbed and rinsed and wondered about things.

The morning rolled into afternoon with a scattering of visits by curious friends and neighbors. They politely complemented the efforts and leaned on the display case to offer advice. I succeeded in not offending or poisoning anyone. In between chats I finished the pots.

By adding up expenses and figuring the mean size of each sale I deduced the daily volume of sales we needed to avoid failure. The more I scrubbed and thought the more that squeak of the screen door gained a significance beyond it’s quaint noise. It had to squeak ten times an hour, less than that I began to worry and feel lonely. I scoured blackened sheet pans and promised myself I would worry about failure for only three years. With each squeak I’d happily dry my hands, straighten my apron and greet my customer cheerfully. I told myself, do this right and they may come back. Don’t appear too, they’ll sense desperation.

On slow days I found myself turning around or drying my hands thinking I’d heard or imagined the sound of the door hinge. This wouldn’t do over the noise of the refrigerators, fans, pots banging in the sink and the old stereo cassette player. I added a small bell.

The tink of the thin brass clapper soon blended in with the rest of the audio scramble. We had plenty of returning customers from the first week. Having one of the only two eateries in town may have helped. The pots often had to sit until closing time. I became a fixture behind the counter serving coffee, pastry and the topic du jour.  To be continued…

So you want to open a restaurant?

Accelerated aging; Prepare for days on end of missing your club or your work out if you had one. If you didn’t previously work out then just prepare to age. For the first few years you will not feel comfortable leaving your establishment for even a short period of time. The first few times you try to leave for an hour or two the energy it takes to put out the fires that start while you’re gone will convince you that it is more efficient to just keep working for the first three years. If you survive those first three years you may go to the doctor afterwards with a complaint such as anxiety and your doctor will look at you and with a straight face she will look into your blood shot thirty year old eyes and tell you your blood sugar is way up as well as your cholesterol and blood pressure. That’s when you let loose and explain to her that you couldn’t leave your restaurant for three years in a row. She will sympathize and as you tell her about your sore back, your constipation, your aching teeth, the pressure behind your eyeballs, the fungus rotting in all your finger nails from squeezing lemons, your carpal tunnel syndrome, your cut and swollen fingers, the tension in your neck and shoulders that’s causing numbness in your hands, your premature graying and thinning hair, your sore liver from drinking after work and your tight stomach from running on too much coffee all day she starts writing you prescriptions and three months later you can add battling an addiction to prescription drugs to your list of problems because the restaurant didn’t go away!

Hint; Get a good medical plan. Get life insurance to cover your family in case you have a heart attack. As owner you probably won’t be covered by Workers Compensation or temporary disability insurance so stay healthy and don’t disable yourself by catching your arm in a mixer or cutting off any fingers on the meat slicer.

Hint #2; Be anti-nike as my friend Big Tim says. He and his wife started the Hanalei Gourmet Pub the same time we started The Kilauea Bakery. Anti-nike? “Just don’t do it!”.

So you want to open a restaurant?

Power supply; You will over tax the wiring in your building. You will plug too many appliances into one circuit and the breaker will disconnect when the amperage demand exceeds its tolerance levels. This usually coincides with peak business periods.  Let’s say you’re serving coffee, toasting bagels and heating soup for lunch all at the same time, there is a line out the door and your four service people are moving as fast as they can. That’s when the lights go out, the coffee is suddenly cold, the toasters stop toasting and the stereo goes dead. To make it more realistic throw in the probability that you’re on the beach taking your first morning off in weeks and no one at the restaurant knows where the breaker box is or what to do if they could find it.

Hint; Take your pick; you could balance the amperage of all your appliances to fit all your plugs and breakers or you could just respond to this eventuality one black out at a time like we do.

Back pain; One poorly designed part of homo sapiens is the lower back. If you become a restaurateur yours will probably fall apart once or twice a year. If you are like me you will spend a week or two each year lying on your back in the living room of your house, an ice pack on your just above your tailbone, a bottle of aspirin to one side and a tumbler of the beverage of your choice to the other. You will learn that you can actually get a lot of management done with a telephone.

Hint; After that first little warning “PING” you feel just above your butt and behind the back of your belt stop, stand up carefully, go home and lay down. Better just to give up sooner rather than later.

To be continued…

So you want to open a restaurant?

Electrical; You will get a phone call one day while you are hours away trying to buy a food product like a locally produced goat cheese from a farm out in the hills miles from your shop. You need it because you’ve run out, it’s Friday night and it’s on the new menu and it has become a very popular ingredient. Unfortunately you hadn’t considered how sensitive goats are to weather and the farmer has a little supply problem in his hands. The phone call is from the person whom you left in charge of the restaurant. Hopefully by now you have a trained and qualified manager or chef but maybe it’s just the most resourceful person available. Let’s say it’s Sammy the dishwasher, he’s there because he’s worked all the other stations in the past and understands that as a dishwasher everyone needs and appreciates you and you can work at your own pace.  So Sammy calls you on you cell, “Boss, the oven is broken and the fan won’t work.” In this particular case the oven is the engine of your entire ship, the whole menu relies on the hot oven. You trust Sammy because although he drinks a lot he only starts when he’s finished working, he has years of experience in the kitchen and reasonable mechanical abilities.

He says he checked everything, he looked for obstructions in the back of the ovens, he tested the door switches, he checked the breakers in the breaker panel, he even took apart the fan switch and didn’t seem too shook up from the shock he received after touching the wrong wires with his wet hands. In the back of your head you are freaking because it is Friday and it’s a long weekend and it’s going to be extra busy because this is a three day weekend. By now, say one year into your restaurant career, you’re battle weary and your blood pressure barely raises a notch. You reflect on the loyalty of Sammy who didn’t have hold a live 110 volt wire for you and you just ask the obvious. “Sammy, did you check the plug? Is it plugged in?” Sammy says, “Lemme’ check” a moment passes and you listen to the background noise over the pbone of service personnel gossiping about a particularly fat customer. You make a mental note to remind your help that the customers they gossip about are the reason we all have jobs. Sammy gets back on the phone, “That was it boss! It was unplugged! You’re a genius! Thanks!” and he hangs up.

You try not to startle the farmer or the goat in front of you as they are intimately trying to produce some goats milk together.

When something breaks down a service man is going to cost you more than one or two hundred dollars even if it is a minor problem. You most likely will consider doing it yourself. If you haven’t dug into electrical problems yet let me tell you from experience that touching live 110 volt wires with wet hands or a metal tool is a wake up call. Putting you finger into a live 220 volt socket is truly shocking but once you pick yourself up from the floor where you landed you’ll most likely return to normal. It’s the Start Capacitors you want to avoid. If after several forays into repair work you think you are practically a mechanic you may try taking the cover off the back of a machine, you know the type of cover, they usually have a little warning on them that says “Warning; Shock hazard”. If you get one of those open and you see two little black turd shaped things attached to the motor be careful. Don’t take one off and touch the two little aluminum points on the end of it. They store 10,000 volts for a one-time jolt that will leave permanent scaring.

Note; In situations of electrical malfunction start at the power source and work your way upstream.

To be continued…

So you want to open a restaurant?

Plumbing. A broken pipe is an emergency that can be mopped up but a slow leak can be catastrophic. It’s the drain lines that cause heartbreak and despair. They clog most often during a rush, or they slowly drip. Seemingly too small to fix but over time they cause unimaginable damage.  Sink drains, refrigerator drains, toilets, grease traps, cesspools, septic tanks, one of these will get you eventually. One barely visible dripping pipe can cause the deconstruction of an entire business.

One day I walked past the ovens in my kitchen and did a double take. Something was wrong. I stood back and sure enough the ovens looked rather lopsided against the back wall. They are kind of heavy, about 800 pounds or so. I dragged in a floor jack, lifted them on the low side and put in some steel shim plates to make them appear more level. A year later they had sunk again. They were sinking through the floor toward the earth as gravity would have it.  Dripping water did this. Five years of a little over spray from a dishwasher. Drips saturating their way through the layer of recent 1990′s flooring to the layer from the 60′s, then through the original floor planks from the early 1900′s and down the original posts to finally soak into the soil the building stood on. I knew for some time something would have to be done but as the business runs seven days a week the first thing I did was ignore it until it got really bad. We finally had to close and dis-assemble the entire kitchen, demolish the floor, replace it with a new floor, re-assemble the entire business and re-open… in seven days. It was like butchering a living, breathing animal, taking apart the bones, muscles and major organs and then reassembling them and hoping the animal performs as well or better than it ever did before.

Hint; Keep elbow length gloves handy and fix every leak.

To be continued…

Do you want to open a restaurant?

Food is messy. A few lines down on the job description of any food service professional (Chef, cook, grillardin, patissier, baker, etc,) is an item that is often overlooked; Create mountains of dirty pots and spills the size of the Deep Water Horizon oil disaster. Let’s use a story about eggs as an example. Why? Because most of us have probably fumbled one and seen it drop in agonizingly slow motion knowing that it was going to hit with a splat on the kitchen floor.

There once was a young man much like this writer only about 30 years younger. At the time the only thing he was sure of was that surfing was extremely important and if you worked in restaurants you could eat for free. He was employed in an Omelette house. coincidentally the same Omelette house his future wife worked in. But let’s stick to the egg story. With a tranquil and blissful demeanor caused by being submerged in seawater for hours along the California coast our cook would show up for work in the afternoon and put on an apron. Part of his job was to pre-crack the eggs for the next days business. Let’s get past the fact that someone is cracking raw eggs 18 hours before they will be cooked. This was 1975 and the institution in mind is long since bankrupt. Our food service professional obediently set up five cases of eggs on the floor next to him, each case containing 30 dozen of the little cackle-berries. He began cracking them and lining them up on trays in plastic cups. Each time a tray was full he would carefully pick it up and set it in a stack of egg-cup-trays on the floor of the walk-in refrigerator.  He enjoyed the challenge of balancing the thin plastic tray on one hand while opening the heavy walk-in door with the other. Of course he fumbled a few eggs as he worked. Who wouldn’t while handling 1800 individual smooth, delicate objects. He kept a rag or two at his feet and nudged it with his dirty shoe over the broken shells and slime to try and contain spreading goo. Inevitably the floor became slippery. He found crossing the slick floor with a egg laden tray in one hand even more challenging. By and by he managed to get the entire five cases of pre-cracked eggs safely stacked on the floor of the walk-in. The stack was about waist high, a little taller than normal because the following morning was the busiest day of the year, mothers day. As he exited the cooler and let the door close he was proud of his job and considering his next task. Unfortunately as he lifted his leg out of the way of the spring loaded cooler door the toe of his left foot clipped one cup at the bottom of the stack of egg-cup-trays. Like a slow motion movie in which a parking garage is leveled by dynamite the tower of eggs began to fall. Quickly calculating that the liquid volume of eggs exceeded the capacity of the refrigerator floor he slammed the door shut. There was a brief moment where he felt obligated to begin a large scale clean-up operation, but it passed. He looked around the kitchen wondering if there was a witness then casually moved on to the next order of business, pre-cooking fifty pounds of slimy bacon.

So you want to open a restaurant?

Spoilage. In most public arenas an independent restaurateur is considered a creative purveyor of artistic food presentations and service. In a more pragmatic perspective, say that of a banker, a restaurateur participates in the business of manufacturing. As a food manufacturer one starts with raw materials, literally, combines them and manipulates until the become a new product. The product is then sold for a value added price. One unique thing about the restaurant business as a part of the manufacturing industry is the instability of the raw material. A manufacturer of furniture has few problems keeping his wood stock stable, a tool factory watches it’s steel resource decay in terms of centuries.

The inventory in your restaurant, quite often hundreds of different items, begin to deteriorate the minute they are received at the back door. Dairy products or produce last only a few days. A restaurant has storage issues like no other. Fresh food has to be stored between zero and 39 degrees. Packaged food needs a dry, dark and cool environment. Even then it is in a constant state of degradation. Refrigerator compressors seem to die when you need them most, like on the hottest summer days. If you’re lucky enough not to have to sweat out the loss of a walk-in full of lobster and shellfish you will still have to pare down and throw away significant portions of your inventory before your final product can be served. For example most of your fresh vegetables will have to be peeled and trimmed and that lobster will have to have half it’s weight, the body and shell, taken off before you can sell the tail. Your inventory, instead of just being put on a shelf will be subject to refrigeration, rotation, over supply, under supply, spoilage and preparation waste problems. Let’s say you bought a case of zucchini or spinach because it’s half price if bought in bulk. You buy it and as you use some up in your quiches and souffle’s you watch the remainder get slimy or wilt. You’re commitment to quality is tested daily. At which point is the inventory item not fresh? At which point is it too slimy or wilted? Will customers know why you are suddenly selling lots of zucchini bread? How long can a finished product, for instance a nice trimmed New York Steak or a delicate Berry tart, stay at it’s point of optimum attractiveness, flavor and temperature? From the moment it is finished and ready to serve it begins to degrade. If you can’t get it served just after it is finished your customer will be experiencing your product in a diminished state. Business is fickle. Customers arrive late, they tell long stories that can’t be interrupted, they go to the bathroom just at the wrong time. Let’s face it, one way or another most of the products you “manufacture” will be past their optimum state once finally consumed. Heck if you’re honest you should just open a factory seconds outlet or a second hand store! Instead of being served or picked up on time the food you serve will most likely be cooling down or warming up. It will be wilting or losing color or aging.  Prepare for this, no other manufacturing or retail business has that kind of temporary product.

 

 

So you want to open a restaurant?

The customer that can’t be satisfied. You will be able to satisfy some of the customers some of the time. It is as certain that a few of your customers will be left unsatisfied. You will work to get your employees to work on time, you will polish the glass, arrange your products and test the temperature of your soup. You will make sure your floor is spotless and the tables are squarely set with chairs lined up in front of them yet on some mornings the first customer through the door will be someone who’s self identity is wrapped around the sentiment that nothing they could buy or experience in you establishment is good enough for them.

It may be a genetic thing, like red hair or left handedness, a set of people who are determined to always want what they can’t get.  “Do any of these pastries come without sugar? Which of these don’t have eggs, butter or wheat flour? There will be people who walk into a bakery, a business founded on dairy products and variations of the wheat grain and ask for dairy free, lactose free, gluten free pastry. When you cheerfully point out the platter of selections without any of those offensive ingredients one day there will be that customer that says, “Don’t you have any of those gluten free muffins with…. anchovies?

Hint; Just say ” No problem, we can have that for you tomorrow if you pre-pay today.”

So you want to open a restaurant?

Early pattern baldness, even if you’re a woman.

Prepare for days on end of missing your club or your work-out if you had one. If you didn’t previously exercise then just prepare to age fast. For the first few years you will not feel comfortable leaving your establishment for even a short period of time. The first few times you try to leave for an hour or two the energy it takes to put out the fires that start while you’re gone will convince you that it is more prudent to just stay at work for the first three years. If you survive those first three years you may go to the doctor at some point afterward for a complaint such as general overall pain. Your doctor will look at you and with a straight face she will look into your blood shot thirty year old eyes and tell you your blood sugar is way up as well as your cholesterol and blood pressure. That’s when you let loose and explain to her that you couldn’t leave your restaurant for three years straight. She will sympathize and as you let it all out and tell her about your sore back, your constipation, your aching teeth, the pressure behind your eyeballs, the fungus rotting in all your finger nails from squeezing lemons, your carpal tunnel syndrome, your cut and swollen fingers, the tension in your neck and shoulders that’s causing numbness in your hands, your premature graying and thinning hair, your sore liver from drinking after work and your tight stomach from running on too much coffee all day she starts writing you prescriptions and three months later you can add battling an addiction to prescription drugs to your list of problems. Because the restaurant won’t go away!

Hint; Get a good medical plan. Get life insurance to cover your family in case you have a heart attack. As owner you probably won’t be covered by Workers Compensation or temporary disability insurance so stay healthy and don’t disable yourself by catching your arm in a mixer or cutting off any fingers on the meat slicer.

So you want to open a restaurant?

She’ll probably leave you.

How fathomless is your love? You say wood chairs she says plastic. You say the menu needs Green Goddess dressing she says vinaigrette. You say it needs more salt she says it needs less. Simple disagreements that all pile up to “Honey I wish you would to come to bed.” and she says “Honey, not tonight “.

Does your wife or husband like your idea? Have they promised to stand behind you every step of the way? Are they encouraging you to do this? Make sure they are with you, committed to the point that they will quit their real job, ignore the children and mortgage the house. Other wise when things get bad and they will, your spouse will certainly choose to make you sleep on the couch.

But on the bright side when you are both too tired for the bedroom you can at least eat out at your own place for free, if you can agree on which table to sit at.

So you want to open a Restaurant?

Sleeplessness. Just because you close the restaurant late at night doesn’t mean your day is over. Employees will call you in the middle of the night and tell you crazy lies like “I can’t make it to work tomorrow. I was at a bus stop in Honolulu on my way to see my mother who is in the hospital. Suddenly a truck careened into the bus stop, I lunged to push an old woman out of the way of the truck. I saved her but was hit myself and now I’m in the hospital too. It was terrible.” (true story) Customers will call you at all hours to tell you what you should do. Just as you are drifting off to sleep the phone will ring. You don’t want to miss the call because is could be someone calling in sick. Or not. It just might be a customer suggesting you make that kind of crust that has cheese inside it just like Pizza Hut’s. Try to respond politely before hanging up.

Sleep will be something you get when you can. You will find yourself napping in places you never used to consider relaxing. Falling asleep in the dentist’s chair for example, while the dentist is drilling your teeth. You will fall asleep in places where no one can bother you. You may learn to love sitting on Airplanes. They make you turn off your phone, offer you drinks and give you a big chair to sleep in for hours and hours…

Query; If the phone rings and you don’t answer it did anyone call?

So you want to open a restaurant?

Anxiety. If you open a restaurant expect at some point a good dose of anxiety, that feeling of dread and impending doom. It could be a sign that you are doing something unusual and new or it could be a sign that you are doing something very wrong and fiscally dangerous. It is a warning from the brain to proceed slowly and thoughtfully. In regard to stepping into the unknown of owning a business anxiety attacks only happen during that intense phase just before opening. Once you are open and there is no hope of turning back, trust me, you will be too busy to have an anxiety attack. Compared to skydiving or tow-in surfing the duration of your anxiety can be rather long. Once you start withdrawing money and preparing to open a wide range of variables will cause delays.

You may find yourself doing strange things like sleeping in the bathtub or drinking tequila for breakfast. But let’s save that for the paragraph on the high probability of self medication among restaurateurs.

Our Menu

A well laid out menu makes a list of items pleasing to read. Unfortunately this blogger hasn’t figured out how to craft a proper menu in this forum. Therefore, behold a rather dry accounting of our offerings. In the pastry/bakery area keep in mind there are forty or so delicious varieties and personal creations under headings such as Tropical Danish, Specialty cakes or Chilled pasties that for proper justice need to be seen first hand.

Espresso Bar
cappuccino
Latte’
Mocha
Big Train Chai

Coffee options
Organic Steamed Milk or Organic Soy Milk.
Syrups; Vanilla, Caramel, Hazelnut, Macadamia nut,
Amoretto, Sugar free Vanilla, Coconut and Irish Cream

Pastries and Desserts
Danish pastry
Cinnamon Rolls
Sticky Buns
Muffins & Cookies
Scones
Croissant
Coconut Creme filled Eclairs
Specialty & Birthday Cakes
Bread Pudding
Fruit Pies & Nut Pies
and more…

Pau Hana Lunch
Grilled Panini Sandwich of the day
Calzone- choice of three items
Slice & Salad
Cheese Slice
Three meat combo Slice
Chef’s Veggie Slice

Soups; Four fresh, hot & hearty soups a day from over 100 of our recipes.
Bowl of Soup
Cup of Soup
Full Salad
Quart Soup To go

Bagel Menu
Onion, All Seed, Poppy,
Sesame, Seaweed, Garlic Parmesan,
Cinnamon raisin, Fresh Herb and more.

Bialys
Artichoke Gorgonzola,
Black Olive, Sun Dried Tomato Pesto, or Basil Pesto

Spreads
Salmon Cream Cheese
Hummus
Olive Tapenade
sun-dried Tomato Pesto

Smoothies and Icy Coffee Drinks
1.Green Jade; Mango, banana, apple juice,
fresh ginger and Spirulina.
2. Banana Nut; Banana, coconut, mango and soy milk
3. Berrylicious Blend; Blueberry, strawberry, banana,
lilikoi, guava and mango
4. Strawberry Guava; Strawberry, pineapple, papaya
and guava
5. Lilikoi-lemonade

Vanilla Latte’
Caramel Latte’
Coconut Mocha
Macnut Mocha
Spicy & Vanilla Chai
Chocolate Chai
Chai Buzz

Traditional Pizza

Includes garlic infused olive oil, Mozzarella cheese, homemade sauce, and our own semolina crust. Feel free to specify how you like your pizza.

Ingredients;

Fresh Vegetables; Green Pepper • Mushroom, Pineapple • Sliced Tomato, Zucchini • Garlic • Spinach

Seafood; Anchovy • Shrimp, Pau Hana Smoked Ono

Assorted Cheeses; Kilauea Goat • Gorgonzola, Feta • Grated Parmesan, Asiago • Tofurella

Meats; Pepperoni • Home cured & smoked Ham, Homemade Italian Sausage, Organic marinated Chicken

Specially Prepared Veg­e­ta­bles; Roasted Onion • Roasted Red Pepper, Sun-dried Tomato • House Marinated Artichokes • Chipotle Pepper, Kalamata Olive • Black Olive • Capers, Basil Pesto • Sun-dried Tomato Pesto

House Specialty Pizzas;

Billie Holliday; Smoked Ono, spinach, roasted onions, Gorgonzola rosemary sauce and Mozzarella cheese.

Island Stylin’; Smoked ham, fresh pineapple, chipotle peppers, garlic, and Moz­za­rel­la cheese.

Provencal; Sun-dried tomato, garlic, basil pesto, roasted onion, Moz­za­rel­la and Asiago cheeses.

Pomodoro; Fresh tomatoes with Kilauea goat cheese, house marinated artichokes, black olives and Mozzarella cheese.

Pesto Mystic; Basil pesto, sun-dried tomato pesto, fresh mushroom, roasted onion and Mozzarella cheese.

Veggie Deluxe; Mushroom, green pepper, garlic, onion, olive, tomato and Moz­za­rel­la cheese, or soy cheese.

Classic Scampi; Shrimp, tomato, roasted garlic, capers, squeeze of lemon, Asiago and Mozzarella cheeses.

Big Meat Com­bo; Smoked ham, Pepperoni, Italian sausage, roasted onion, pizza sauce and Moz­za­rel­la cheese.

Big Blue; Our Smoked Ono, tomatoes, capers, garlic, parsley and Moz­za­rel­la cheese.

Barbecued Chicken; barbecued chicken thighs, roasted onions, roasted red peppers, mushrooms and Mozzarella cheese.

In witch we hire our first helper

“Hello, anybody here?” The gory jam container slipped from my hands back to a warm sea of soapy water. It would have to wait patiently for Search and Rescue to return from this new priority. The bell had let me down. Strangely a lady had gotten a sound. Leaning over the counter was a woman of middle age with shoulder length black hair and a smile forced through wrinkles. Patting my hands dry I stepped up front. She wanted to order a cake. I asked if she wished for a salutation to be included? She said, well it’s for me so I guess you can write “Happy Birthday Vanessa”. I thought, how poignant, a lonely woman in her fifty’s ordering her own cake.

Something about her reminded me of my recently departed mother. I hadn’t let on but at that time of my life I felt like the little lost chick in the children’s story who wattles up to cows and trucks and asked “Are you my mother?” We talked a little. She mentioned she was looking for a job. I paused for a second to appear as if I was deeply considering many factors and then hired her. I thought, a woman who smiles would be just right for working on the counter. Then I could get back to the adventure in the pot sink.

Here’s a helpful hint for you future employers. Use more criteria for hiring than the fact that your applicant reminds you of your dearly departed mother. Upon closer inspection Vanessa’s hair was black as a raven’s. Her laugh was more a cackle. Around her neck hung a little leather pouch full of mysterious sticks and seeds. She claimed to be part of a family but it looked like she’d abandoned it and fled here. Her lineage was a stew of German, Spanish, Gypsy and Cherokee Indian. Her bumper sticker philosophy, “Fighter pilots don’t have rear view mirrors.” seemed to apply to every situation including customer service situations.

Within days I watched Vanessa turn from an eager employee to The Boss of the Counter. She assumed command. She took control of the customers and the telephone. She took control of the indoor plants. The atmosphere was permeated with her presence. I thought my concerns might just be a micro-management issue and nervously let her go with it. After all she was working hard and taking a lot off my hands.  A few friends suggested tactfully that something was very wrong. She’s surly they said, her smile was strange even spiteful.

I dealt with it by focusing on my pastries and sweeping the floor a lot. As luck would have it July was a perfect time for starting a business in Hawaii. In case you ever have the whim to do this yourself, pay attention. Be ready to open a few weeks before the busiest month of the year. The act of creating your establishment; getting the lease, buying the ovens, selecting the silverware, the chairs and those cute little baskets to hold the paper plates will leave you financially, emotionally and physically depleted. Emotional and physical exhaustion will become a new way of life for you. However if you open just before the busiest month of the year and if you don’t do something stupid like poison your first customers with Salmonella or scare them off with alcoholic rants you may be able to get your cash flow going. I said “cash flow” not “income”.

On July 3^rd we were seven hundred dollars over drawn in our new checking account. We funded our opening inventory using a credit card. With nothing left we were a little nervous about operating capital. We went to our friendly bank to ask for a loan. Bank managers here resemble most bankers back in “America”. Serious looking trimmed men or women with calculated smiles. I had this feeling of certainty though that our bank manager had a sense of humor and that he would have a good laugh after we left. I could just see his lips moving through the window as we walked away. “Cut a loan to a new restaurant? Haaaa!” We had no choice but to establish and prove cash flow the first month.

Curse Katie. If she hadn’t done such a good job with all the receipts, forms, statements and money I stuffed in a bag at the end of everyday we may have failed and I would have reached my Gestalt moment with ten or twenty fewer years of suffering. I may have cracked in the first few months. My resolve to force life and make things happen might have fallen apart and I could have optimized the progress of my psychological evolution. I could have crossed the street and sat with the boys of the “Kilauea Social Club”. Sat in the shade and let life just happen instead of trying to push it around with the futile arrogance of the Army corps of engineers on a flood control project.

I dutifully rolled Danish, mixed bread and served coffee with Vanessa through July and August. While we slowly lured in our shy and cautious local neighbors the tourists herded in from the first day. “Good morning what can I do for you?” “Better get a box for this, I’ll have six of those rolls there, and six of those donuts there, (Those are buttery Danish pastries sir), and gimme’ six cups of regular coffee. That’s not that exx-presso is it?”  “No sir it’s organically grown, freshly ground, Guatemalan, whole bean, regular coffee. It’s drip brewed by the cup through an unbleached paper filter with purified water.”

“Whatever, six larges”  “Thank you sir, good job.”  By the end of the summer Katie was happily depositing receipts from sales and writing checks for our expenses at an exactly even rate. If nothing major broke down and we could avoid unexpected expenses we might be able meet our obligations.

If nothing major broke down? What about me? I lay in bed one night and counted the possible hours left before the muffins had to be scooped and the French bread mixed. 2:00 am comes quickly when a little sleep is all that bridges the gap between exhaustion and the forced march awaiting the next work day.

I crawled into a comfortable position, a pillow under the knees to take the tension off taught lumbar muscles, one under the neck to relieve shoulder tension. I lay a t-shirt over my eyes, put earplugs in to muffle the barking dogs next door and threw Katie’s pillow over my chest just to top off the feeling that I’m buried and will never have to rise again.

The body was ready but the mind wouldn’t bed down. What if I can’t relax? Valuable minutes of possible sleep slip off the clock. If I don’t fall asleep it’ll be worse tomorrow. I could try napping but our two girls in diapers need attention, Katie needs a break, the house is a mess and the dishes are piling up! I’ve never had a problem sleeping. If I can’t drift off I’ll become so tired I won’t be able to work. I won’t be able to open and I will fail. I’ll have let Katie down. We’ll go bankrupt. We’ll lose it all if I can’t get to sleep in the next hour!

Just a little sleep is all I needed. Breaking into a sweat my eyes clack open and peek from under the t-shirt. 9:45 pm. This isn’t working. Making a hunched and untidy shuffle into the kitchen I pour a glass of wine. After that a cookie and some hot tea. Shaking with fatigue I sit down on the couch in front of the TV with Katie. Over come with anxiety I look at her, hopefully. Maybe sex? “Not tonight honey, I just got the kids down”. She pats me on the knee, “It’s ok, everything will be all right”. Something in the glow and movement of the TV screen seems to slowly unlock my caring. I begin to unwind. Finally around 11:00 my eyes start to droop. Considering there are only two and a half more hours until the alarm rings I call it a nap. I promise myself I’ll pay the sleep debt later and drift off to bed.

The next night is worse. After dinner I shower and slip into bed making the same valiant attempt at falling asleep. I sense immediately I’m setting myself up for hours of staring at the ceiling. A depleted body has to recover a little before it can rest. I throw the covers off and march to the TV couch. Upon the first signs of heavy eyelids I head for bed but once there all I can think about is the hour hand’s relentless march around the dial and worst-case scenarios. I try a hot bath. This relaxes me and I eventually fall asleep there, waking in tepid water. I drag myself up, towel off and glance at the time. It’s so close to work I dress and start some coffee.

I thought I was falling apart. I’d never felt this kind of doubt and anxiety before. I called the local hospital. I got a Psychiatrist, “I can call in a prescription for a few nights of sleeping pills or you can come in and we’ll talk.” I opted for the visit.

Passing through the first of two locked steel doors I wondered if I should have just accepted the prescription. A genial older woman in a nurse’s uniform coaxed me inside and sat me down in a chair to wait. Little puzzles on the table kept my hands busy. The doctor had to finish with a patient down the hall. The green linoleum tile floor was aged but highly polished and lined with doorways to small, spare rooms. Rusted metal screens covered windows looking out over an empty yard and obsolete cameras were mounted in the upper corners. A large male nurse escorted an angry looking adolescent boy into the common room; they stopped next to a couple that appeared uncomfortable with each other and their surroundings. I assumed a troubled son and messed up parents, or a messed up son meeting troubled parents.

The good doctor approached as I was giving up on the simplest of math puzzles. We made introductions. In a shaky voice I unloaded the visions of failure and self doubt that had infected me for the first time in my life. My doing strange things like curling up in a warm bath to go to sleep. He politely let me finish, wrote a prescription for a week’s worth of sleep medication and told me with that confidence only a Doctor can convey that it was probably all I needed. Before I could leave two matronly Hawaiian women in nurse’s uniforms offered me some of their boxed lunches. They were caring people warming cold facilities. Part of me wanted to stay. That evening after dinner and a sleeping pill for dessert I suddenly loved everything and everybody. I hugged my wife and children, I hugged the refrigerator and drifted down the hallway to curl up in bed and fall into a warm sleep.

One good Egg

Profit is not a four-letter word, Loss is. Percentage of sales that is profit increases when percentage of sales that is expenses decreases and percentage of expenses decrease proportionately to the increase in sales volume. In other words it became evident that if we wanted more money left over at the end of every month we would have to stay open for dinner in order to increase sales volume. The conundrum was we would have to struggle more to struggle less. We now needed a full time manager because I sure as heck wasn’t going to give up any more sleep.

“This is great! You should open a restaurant…. Ha!”. Dave stood above me eating my lunch as I lay on the soggy floor groping for tools to fix a leak. I was fighting to get all three sink basins of our  three basin pot sink to stop pissing water all over the floor. The problem was as soon as I could fasten two drains the third would leak. I was rushing because our new Dishwasher was on the clock doing nothing as the dishes piled up and I needed to get back to my bread dough that was rising on the table. In the tropic heat of the kitchen it was growing rapidly and beginning to resemble the huge stomach of the executive Chef/Instructor who taught me how to make bechamel sauce back at the Institute.

I lifted my head off the floor to respond to the joke but could only see Dave’s slippers and dropped back again with a splash. As I lay there I relaxed a moment and envied plumbers the hefty wage they received while laying in such a comfortable supine position. In the end I jury rigged the drains with gray Duct tape and pulled myself up to finish explaining my management problem to Dave.

“Dave, you taught us, Profit is not a four letter word, loss is.” I wiped a fresh expression to my face with cold water, washed my hands and moved to the table to punch down the dough.  “I can’t do it alone, Katie quit her real job for this but she can’t help in the kitchen. She’s in the office all day keeping us out of debt, dealing with the house and two baby’s in diapers. We need help. I know it can work but we’ve got to open nights and double our sales to cover the rent and the electric bill. You’re the man Dave. We’ve talked about doing it on our own for years and here’s our chance.”

Dave was at the top of the list in the head-hunt for a co-conspirator. He was a friend in the business who retained a sense of humor in the most horrid situations. He kept a dry wit and simmering libido under a cloak of low self-esteem. Something like Woody Allen on Viagra.

I met Dave in 1974. After I convinced my parents that I needed freedom (not) to excel scholastically I left the Bay area and drove down the coast to Santa Cruz California. Working nights in restaurants there provided endless food and a little spending money to support long days of surfing. Dave managed a house of omelets called “The Broken Egg.”

Santa Cruz was an easy town to be eighteen in. The first rent I paid was forty-nine dollars a month. But still the money had to be made. One day with hair still wet from the freezing, green ocean by that town I tucked a T-shirt into Levi’s and walked into “The Egg”. In the dimly lit dining room I could see a figure wiping black lacquered tables. He had a lanky, slightly bent posture. I asked the young man if the manager was in, “Yes that’s me, can I help you?” His smile had a frantic look about him and his hair was crazy like Einstein’s.

I applied and Dave hired me to wash dishes. Through attrition I became his assistant manager in a matter of weeks. It was a salaried position that in the restaurant business translates to sanctioned slavery at the cost of printing a business card. A title and a salary that actually meant unlimited hours of work without hourly compensation. We became friends there preparing, serving and cleaning up what sometimes resembled a perpetually recurring mob scene at a UNESCO food drop in Somalia.

Dave became a favorite role model. That thousand square foot patch of downtown Santa Cruz was always a spark away from exploding into disorder and somehow he managed holding together a pre-ignition sort of atmosphere. The crew of bossy waitresses he’d inherited from the previous manager who’d deserted needed to feel that they had control of their lives. Dave finessed them daily so that they would continue to strut miles back and forth from the pick-up counter to the black lacquered tables carrying white bake-lite plates heaped with snotty omelet’s and tan plastic mugs full of generic diner coffee.

We served breakfast in a seedy neighborhood. Next door to the Egg was a Greyhound bus depot and a dingy card room. Directly upstairs was a place called Staircase Massage. During the night shift a lady from Staircase would call every so often and order a side of Mayonnaise. The first time she came down to get her order I held out a level two-ounce portion cup. She said, “Honey are you new here? I need a bowl.” I pleased her with what she wanted naively thinking at the time that they must eat a lot of sandwiches.

I managed to remain fairly naïve in spite of Dave’s management examples.  At the end of a horrendous rush of customers and omelets he could deftly adjust his interpretation of company rules regarding interpersonal relationships with employees. While he might be locking himself and a waitress into the tiny Managers office I would diligently plod onward with the never-ending tasks at hand. Like cleaning the overflowing and reeking grease trap by hand after one too many omelet chunks had slithered down the drain of the pot sink.

It’s all up (chuck) from here.

A grease trap is probably the best place to start in the restaurant business if you plan on moving from the bottom up. I was first introduced to a grease trap by the owner of the mighty three-unit Broken Egg chain. Mr. Hutchinson, with an artificial enthusiasm in his body language rolled up his sleeves to demonstrate for me the exciting and important job of grease trap maintenance. I was honored. The grease trap is a heavy steel container that intercepts kitchen drainage before it exits the building for the municipal sewer. Municipalities will not accept grease in their sewer systems and they require restaurants to separate it from wastewater and dispose of it themselves. There are no high-tech signals to tell you when a fifty-gallon grease trap is full. Perhaps a description of a typical cleaning is in order.

One likely sign that it’s time to clean the Grease Trap is the smell of rotten eggs that will suddenly fill the restaurant. Another no less certain but more tangible sign is a slick of viscous amber ooze welling up from the floor under the dish sink and spreading slowly outward into the main kitchen traffic aisles. As a rule the probability of an overflow is higher on busy weekend mornings.

Picture a full dining room about ten am on a Sunday morning. Families of five or six are dressed up for church and small groups of friends in cycling apparel or pre-beach ware wait for a table. The customer can barely hear “I can seat you now” from the hostess over the din of chatter, utensils clanging, waitresses and cooks calling out to each other and the usual audio abuse of painful music coming from the kitchen’s sticky ghetto blaster. The pimply dishwasher is washing off half full plates of omelet remnants, cheese goo and fruit garnish’s and stuffing them into the dish machine as fast as he can. A cook might be standing at the other end of the machine waiting for the clean dishes to come out the other end because he’s got omelets finished and no plates to put them on. The cook and the dishwasher notice a new foul smell and look down at their feet to find themselves standing in a spreading puddle of grease that only a solvent as powerful as jet fuel can cut. In unison they yell, “Tom please!” over the cacophony of the rush. “Please” being the required tail to any sentence spoken within the confines of the Hutchinson workplace. I calmly finish explaining to the needy customer in front of me why their omelet will be just another minute or so and walk to the next crisis. Ah yes, it’s The Grease Trap Overflowing During the Breakfast Rush Crisis. Everyone on shift knows two things at this point. Keep working and let that sucker for a job title, the assistant manager handle it.

That reluctant but driven restaurant man first grabs a warm stinking pile of wet napkins, table cloths and kitchen towels in the dirty linen bag, a few four gallon plastic mayonnaise buckets, a screw driver, a pair of gloves and a small sauce pot. He snaps on the latex gloves and sops up all the grease and slime on the outside of the trap with the pile of dirty linen. This usually results in a damaged linen fee from the linen company but it’s a small price to pay for a quick fix on a kitchen oil slick. Next he removes the screws holding down the steel lid and lifts it up off the vat. Breathing through his mouth he avoids vomiting at the odors rushing off the bubbling raft of coagulated effluent. It’s a mix of egg and cheese protein, frill picks, peas and a wide range of green and black textured molds. Inserting a gloved hand and the sauce pot he pushes into the raft and gently lifts warm soft globs of it into the waiting bucket.

Try as he might to keep from getting splashed a piece of one of the blobs will invariably calve off and fall back into the evil stew. As if in slow motion a drop of slime will lift off and sail up toward him to land on the shirt or worse yet onto the cheek. No time to dwell on the possibility of contracting some rare wasting disease from the spatter. He carefully scoops out all the grease and gray water and last but not least the sludge at the bottom consisting of coffee grounds, nuts and seeds all encased in slime the texture of loose fecal matter.

With any luck he can get all this into the buckets and seal them in under thirty minutes. He’ll give everything a final wipe, spray the area liberally with Lysol, scatter salt all over the floor to prevent slipping and go wash up in order to get back on the floor and help bus tables.

That’s it. That’s as bad as it can get. From the perspective of being hunched under a sink digging with your hands into a reeking grease trap the rest of the job seems sweet. Dave and I learned this together and these many years later he was the person we wanted with us in the trenches of our expanding culinary conflict.

An innocent impressed into service.

Offering someone a job in a risky business far from home with no guaranty of success can be tricky. Location was our strong point. Hawaii calls for most people living above the twenty-fifth parallel. Never mind that rent and food alone eat up most of every paycheck. Getting Dave to visit, getting his feet onto the beach of this fair shore gave us our best chance of hooking him and yanking him into our little boat. One impassioned and overly enthusiastic call and he agreed to a visit.

His plane set down on the runway in February, 92’. He’d left Santa Cruz in dismal winter weather. Taking off from SFO the ocean below him slowly shifted from muddy shades of green to deeper blue as he rocketed closer to the islands. He landed in warm weather under sunny skies. In those days, before Jet-way tunnels were installed on Kauai the effect of arriving in paradise was romantic. The graceful young flight attendant in her floral uniform opened the hatch and you walked down a metal staircase directly into a blast of bright tropical sunlight and the moisturizing humidity of paradise. Dave emerged at the top of the stairs with a smile; he may have already had a Mai Tai. He crossed the tarmac to the breezy open air terminal of Kauai’s inter-island airport. We draped him with orchid leis and hugs then directed him to our version of limousine service.

We proudly drove a dull blue 67’ Plymouth Valiant. The best car 150 bucks could buy. It was decorated specifically for arriving visitors. We had glued a sandy beach to the dash including a few shells and a rubber shark and spray painted Aloha Limo across the doors. A cup and a pair of rubber slippers were permanently forgotten on the roof just over the driver’s door, held there by glue. Concerned citizens gestured wildly as we drove off into our two-week recruiting effort.

The quality of the sand at Pilaa is like flax seed. It is shiny, smooth and sensually soothing to the touch after the mid-morning sunshine warms it. Dave was laminated there. He lifted his head to slide a sandy forearm under his chin, coral grains stuck to his cheek. Behind him the infinite mass of the Pacific gently surged under early beams of light. He had dozed off and it wasn’t even noon. “I could get used to this” he said. My spot had lost its optimum temperature. I rolled across the soft incline. After the waves break on the outer reef they ripple in over shallow coral beds and sluice onto shore. The sluicing affect leaves thin patches of sand with the perfect aggregate. The highest grade flax. I rolled to a nice spot to warm my skin after our dive. The swim fins and masks lay half buried next to my spear and a shimmering blue-green fish that would soon be lunch.

The Latitude was having the desired effect on Dave and the three of us were having fun being together. After I finished baking and Dave woke up we would go find a new beach to play at each day. We cooked brightly colored dinners and filled the kitchen with conversation. We plotted dream restaurants or the next morning’s location for our ocean entry. Finally with the warmth of the sun baking him to a light brown Dave began to ask questions relevant to someone planning a move. He committed to a year’s sabbatical from Santa Cruz in order to help us open the evening half of our operation, Pau Hana Pizza. By April he was back to the island with several boxes of Bachelor packing. Important tools of the trade like a Tennis racket, Surfboard, dive gear, swim suits etc. He set up camp in the living room and began looking for a decent rental.

You are one of us now.

So you want the recipe for those Cookies? How do we make that Organic Turkey soup with wild rice and mushrooms so rich? We’ll get to those secrets soon enough but first we’ve got to interview you and get you trained.

You’re one of us now.

The interview

Aloha, how nice to meet you! We’re happy you want to enter into a relationship with us at the Kilauea Bakery. In your case we will be filling the kitchen slave position. Sorry, you’ve got to start at the bottom like everyone else. Let’s begin; Do you have a pulse? Do you have a phone number? A car? Do you live in your car? No? Excellent. Any experience in the kitchen? Yes? How much? We’re hoping for a little but not too much. That’s the kind of experience we need. If it’s actual professional commercial kitchen experience and you actually know something then we may have a problem. We can’t use you. Demographically that puts you into the slot of someone who will only put up with us for as long as it takes you to get a better paying and more prestigious job at a nearby resort hotel. You people don’t take us seriously. It’s as if we’re a small no account Pizza joint. Why is a Bakery or Pizza shop any less respectable than a “fine” dinner restaurant? Maybe it’s the white chef coat or the air conditioning. Air conditioning…  wouldn’t that be refreshing.

Oh, you like the concept of cooking? You don’t have any commercial kitchen experience but you bake a lot at home? You’ve been a customer for years and it always looked like it’d be fun to work here? Did you just say you’ve just left a well paying professional career and now you need to stay active and would love to work with people? We’re sorry for taking up your time. Thanks for coming in but this just won’t work out between us.

Wait, I see from your application that you’re young and new to the island and have some work experience at Starbucks. Hmmm, you’re not too big to squeeze around in this pathetically crowded kitchen. Not too short to reach heavy things on the high shelves. You appear strong and energetic, good teeth and healthy… enough. No scabs, good color, hair needs to be tied back. We can’t do much about the tattoos and tongue stud but that’s what they’re wearing these days. You live in a house and not on the beach? Good, because we only hire the homeless after hurricanes. You seem able to put words and thoughts together quickly and have a generally sunny disposition. Maybe we can use you.

How long do you plan to live here on Kauai? You just moved here with your best friend and you’re going to stay forever? They all say that. Well, we’ll try you out. By my estimate you’re good for the average six months to a year if you can keep it together. If you can pay the rent, if you can keep your car running and get here on time, if you don’t hike into the Kalalau valley never to return. Camping there with the other neo-natives and naked survivalists can be habit forming.

Can you start today?

To be continued…

But first the training.

But you have no experience in the kitchen? Oh my god, are we starting from scratch? Can you hold a knife in one hand without cutting the other? Do you smoke? Are your hands clean? If you smoke add up the accumulated time you spend leaving the kitchen, smoking in the designated smoking area, coming back inside, washing your hands and eventually getting back to work. Deduct that time from your regular thirty-minute break. Do you have any music? Bring it with you because if we have to spend another day with our old tunes we’re going to have a mutiny.

You’re hot? There are no more electrical outlets left to plug fans in.  We’ve cut holes and added windows to as many walls as possible. So you’re just going to have to deal with the heat. Wear thinner clothing. Now sit down and read this, come back in half an hour and we’ll get to work.

To be continued…

First the training

Kilauea Bakery Policies

1. Be aware of where your hands are at all times. Few people do this. Everything we prepare is put into someone’s mouth. Wash your hands often during your shift, especially between transitions. For instance between petting your dog and cooking one of our fine soups. Keep your nails clean, tie your hair back, keep from habitually touching your eyes, ears, nose, mouth and face. Keep your hands above your waist and below your neckline. Wipe and clean with sanitized towels often.

2. Arrive at work combed, shaven, neat, cleanly dressed, and deodorized. If you’re the type who needs a little deodorant please don’t make us remind you to use it. It’s not that we won’t, it’s just that the suggestion will create an awkward situation for the both of us.

3. Please dress appropriately.  No midriffs, arm-pit hair, or navels exposed. Skirts and shorts should be long enough to allow for bending over without exposing yourself. This is a family joint we nurture dietary appetites not sexual ones.

4. Cook while straight and awake. Not stoned, buzzed or drunk. In the readers case, you are of course in the privacy of your own home. Just don’t cut yourself.

5. Work safely; be sure your mind is on the task at hand when you are handling knives or any of the kitchen tools. Beware of distractions, concentrate. No cuts, no burns, no errors!

6. Manage yourself. Don’t be a safety lawnmower, you know the kind, every time the driver lets go of the handle the motor dies. Keep yourself busy. Feel free to talk and tell stories, if you can move your hands and your lips at the same time. If you have to stop working in order to tell a story you might make a good committee member, politician or construction worker but not a cook for the Kilauea Bakery.

Training; le Methode

Risky Cookery

Do you ever attempt to recreate complicated recipes with only a quick glance into the cookbook?

Do you ever think you can make something turn out even though you’ve made substitutions for most of the original ingredients. Do you think that your hands are accurate measuring devises?
Do you ever sometimes have to say you’re sorry as you serve your food?
Or do you ever fake it when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing in the kitchen?
If so, don’t let it bother you. Whether you know it or not, you are a practitioner of an exciting, zesty, adventurous style of cooking! Here in Kilauea, we call it “Risky Cookery”. If you answered yes to any of the questions above, even if you wish you had answered yes, come and join the team! Welcome aboard as a new member of Team Risky. Coupled with a grasp of basic cooking skills, you will be expected to cook and eat with the best of them on the gourmet circuit.
Now get risky! Bon Appetite!

We cook 34,000 bowls of soup a year. The pastries, breads, soups and pizza’s we serve are not just comforting to eat and enjoy. They are comforting to prepare, to cut and mix, cook and knead. Soup is good. It allows for creativity. It can be as challenging and enjoyable as the energy you put into it. I may never tire of starting a soup by grabbing a favorite knife, setting out vegetables on a wooden cutting board and cutting them up. (Beginners please keep band-aids available)

Gorgonzola Dressing, an actual recipe.

But first two things. They say I shouldn’t give my recipes away. Am I afraid someone will take them and go open their own place? Refer to the “Humor/Tragedy” thread. I figure if someone thinks it’s the recipes that make a restaurant they can take these, rent a building and get started. Hoarding them would also be a mistake karmically as well. Let he who has never hijacked a recipe withhold his own.

The real reason I’ve avoided the actual recipes is the work involved converting them faithfully to cups and teaspoons, or parts, or percentages. You’re going to have reduce our working formulas. I suggest converting by ratio. Look for that new book out called “Ratios; The simple codes behind the craft of everyday cooking”, it will help. For instance this dressing is 2 to 1 (mayo to milk). Want three cups of dressing? Start with 2 cups mayo and 1 cup milk.

Method; See the dashes between the numbers in the recipe? That’s how we illustrate pounds and ounces. If the dash is on the left of a number it refers to ounces. If the dash is on the right, pounds. 10-8? Ten pounds, eight ounces.

This recipe makes  about 28 pounds or 3 1/2 Gallons. Notice the instructions for putting lemon juice in the milk. Adding lemon juice to the milk sours it. It’s a quick substitute for buttermilk when baking. You’re thinking “Why don’t you just order buttermilk?” Sorry with 60 quarts 1/2 & 1/2, 100 pounds of butter, 45 gallons of milk and 120 dozen eggs on the shelf in the cooler each week there’s no room for buttermilk.

Measure out your ingredients. 2 cups mayo, 1 cup soured milk, a few good pinches of salt and herbs, slightly less pepper, a bit of garlic (minced and cooked slightly in oil or butter.) and a good chunk of Gorgonzola cheese. Blend it, chill it and serve. This dressing is my best effort at reconstructing our family’s favorite dressing from the pizza parlor in the town where I grew up, Biagio’s. Now it’s everyones favorite here in Kilauea.

This recipe is now yours to hijack. Feel like using buttermilk? Buy a quart, drink 2/3′s of it. Put a cup in your dressing instead of soured milk. It may turn out tasting better. It may also turn into something the consistency of  thick mud. If it does you’ve just joined our team. Team Risky Cookery. Try adding milk to thin it, then more seasoning to balance the flavor, etc. etc. Soon, I think technically it’s after the recipe has changed by 15%, you will be able to call it your own creation!

Gorgonzola Dressing
 Mayonnaise                        16-
Gorgonzola cheese            3-12
garlic                                       -8
Italian seasoning               4 Tbl
salt                                         4 Tbl
pepper                                    4 tsp
milk/lemon                           1 Gl      (with 3 Tbl lemon juice per quart)

Training; get your mess in place.

The Gear

Before you can cook something you must first prepare it by assembling, measuring and cutting the ingredients. In the case of soup begin with a cutting board, a knife, a heavy cast iron pot, a wooden spoon and an onion.

Guys if you’re new to cooking look at it this way. There’s a gear element to cooking that makes it very much a guy thing. I just said get a knife and cutting board. Here’s the opportunity to purchase and handle a lethally sharp instrument. Get a really good knife. Get the best possible knife for the job. If you really get involved with cooking soon you will need a whole kit of knives. It’s kind of like having a set of sockets or open-end wrenches, one for each job. You may be thrilled to find out that some Chefs keep their knives in real toolboxes.

For most kitchen work we prefer 10” inch utility chef knives with a stainless steel blade and a clean white polycarbonate handle. The brand is Dexter-Russell. Our choice of knife is not the common choice of most “gourmet” cooks. Most cooks with the money purchase fancy knives with triple riveted hardwood handles and hardened steel blades. The objection to this style is that they seem to get dull about as fast as any other knife yet they are annoyingly difficult to sharpen. In addition the steel is brittle, it chips and breaks easily and they often cost three times the price of a good utility grade Dexter-Russell knife.

Search for just the right cutting board. In a craft as simple as food preparation with only two or three key pieces of gear they should feel good to work with. We prefer a cutting board to be large in surface area but not in thickness, 24” square by ½’ thick and made of hardwood. Where is the satisfaction of paring a good chef knife through an onion and connecting with a rattling piece of plastic, nylon or Formica? Get a board with enough surface area on it so that you can cut and stack your food in little piles, like paint on a pallet. This way, when you’re ready to start cooking, you can hold the board over your pot and drop the ingredients into the hot pan in an orderly manner with the flick of that cool chef knife.

As for the soup pot I recommend finding a thick-bottomed six-quart, cast iron pot with a heavy lid. At home I use a cast iron “Dutch Oven” called the Drip Drop Baster. It comes down from my mother. If inanimate objects can have soul this is the soul of our kitchen. Cast iron cookware absorbs flavor, history and I feel it holds generations of love that have been cooked into it. For generations we have cooked food in it to heal the common cold and sooth stressed lives. It has frequently been carried, full of steaming soup, into homes as a source of comfort in tough times.

How we do soup.

Kilauea Bakery Soup Guidelines

1. All soups will be hearty, filling and substantial, even clear soups.

2. We don’t do delicate soups. Not that you shouldn’t and the following methods will apply if you want to try a Consommé’ or a Gazpacho. It’s just that we consider Consommé’ closer to a tea and Gazpacho to be incorrectly classified, it’s either a salsa or a smoothie depending on whether you prefer vegetables or fruits.

3.  Bakers use formulas and measure everything. Cooks us recipes and recipes are merely guidelines.

4. Most people decide to eat a menu item with their sense of sight, smell and taste, in that order. If it doesn’t look and smell good it won’t be acceptable even if it tastes great. We serve four soups a day, mixing texture, color, flavor, cultural orientation and dietary preference, (with or without dairy, vegetarian, vegan, etc.) in order to please as many people as possible.

5. Quality ingredients make quality meals. For example if you plan on eating a raw foods dinner and leave out any kind of smooth lip smacking fat you pretty much will get what you deserve.

6. Quality ingredients make quality meals, how much time and propane do you have? Homemade soup stock is far superior to using a quality soup stock base. Don’t waste any bones, peelings or roasting juices boil them with water and make chicken, beef, fish, seafood or vegetable soup stock. In the event you don’t have the time and energy for making your stock use a quality bullion concentrate, prepared stock or powdered soup base. The difference between using water and stock for the liquid ingredient in soup is… wateriness. A stock has an infusion of protein, sugars and seasoning ingredients that add depth to a soups. It adds a complex background to the individual ingredients. That background can be developed adequately with hydrolyzed vegetable proteins, sugars and seasonings. That’s why you see recipes with ingredients like; Soy sauce, Miso, Worcestershire sauce, A-1 steak sauce, caramelized onions and Chicken, beef or vegetable bullion. Find a good vegetable based soup stock powder in a health food store or use one of the above substitutions where appropriate. Avoid MSG and too much salt.

Denial is for wet Egyptians

If you’re going to cook a Vegetarian style soup make it vegan. Make it gluten free and dairy free but lets try to at least make it seem rich, thick and savory. Our experience tells us that vegan and Vegetarian eaters still crave the perception of rich, oily or sweet foods even if they don’t contain animal fats or sucrose. From the opposite tack, if you’re making a meaty soup don’t mess around, saute’ in butter, finish with cream, thicken with roux and put enough meat in it to leave no doubt as to it’s identity.

Crisp, fresh soup; An oxymoron
Soup is an infusion of various foods that produce a deep, warming and comforting flavor. It is often described as better the second day. Yet be careful not to cook it to death. Preserve ample amounts of color and texture. Colors of vegetables fade, pasta and potatoes get mushy and dissolve and dairy products like milk, cream or cheese can break and separate when cooked too long. We have a few tricks for keeping soup from getting over cooked.

A. Soup is done when it’s done and not a minute longer. When the beans or pasta are soft, when the rice or barley are tender the soup is done. This way it can be reheated and become richer instead of overcooked.

B. Pasta, rice and grains can be cooked separately and added to the soup after the soup is finished boiling. This prevents the vegetables from over cooking while you wait for the pasta, rice or grains to become tender. It makes it easier to estimate how much pasta, rice or grain to add so you may avoid turning your soup into a pot of cement. Finally this technique helps you avoid burned soup as grains and pasta tend to stick to the bottom of the pot and scorch.

C. Add ingredients to your soup pot in the order of which will take the longest to cook.

 

 

 

Do you use Veganaise, Fakin’bacon or Tofurella?

The Vegan Tyranny

We tolerate intolerance

As Bob Dylan says, “You always have to serve somebody.” We serve and obey four or five hundred of our closest friends everyday. Humans are Omnivores. It seems that as a succesful organism we can adapt to practically any food source. What does that mean? Some interpret it to mean they can eat everything. Yet in a world of choices some people interpret this result of evolution as an opportunity to evolve spiritually and meta-physically through a host of rigid dietary restrictions. With so many real or imagined dietary restrictions we try to help everyone, the gluten intolerant, the lactose intolerant, the pre-diabetic, the vegetarian and of course the vegan tyrant…

You will find that all of our soups are gluten free. It was easier than we thought to eliminate wheat from our soups and important for a segment of our customers with true Celiac disease or a bothersome intolerance to gluten. We suggest that taking these restrictive requests as a cooks challenge. Can you make a chowder without seafood, wheat, potatoes or dairy products? See below for our best efforts.

Among our other soups you will find whole classes that accommodate special diets. Take for instance the Cold creamed Mackerel soup for that rare person who believes they are descended from Atlantic mermen…

 

Not the Harvard Onion

The Onion.

We try to please our customers, god we try. If they want bread without wheat we’ll make it, Pizza without wheat or cheese? You want what? Ah, yes sir, no problem. We’ll even make you a “Why bother” Latte’. That would be a double decaf Latte’ with nonfat milk and sugar free vanilla syrup. Why bother?

We have one customer with a challenged appetite who has quized us quite often. One day he said, “I love your soups but onions make me gassy. Can’t you make some of your soups onion free?” In this rare case it was without hesitation that we replied decisively, No.

A fresh onion is hard and crispy like an apple. There is a satisfying resonance when pulling a knife blade through it. The onion has sustained civilizations. Ulysses S. Grant would not move his army without onions. Abe Lincoln had to send him three train cars full to get the civil war off to a good start. In Egypt the onion was a symbol of eternity because of its circular design. The bulb shaped dome and pointy top of the Russian Orthodox Church is designed after the onion. Captain Cook would not set sail from England until his sailors had each eaten twenty pounds of onions.

A few favorite quotes;

“Life is like an onion.
 You peel it off one layer at a time;
 And sometimes you weep.”
—Carl Sandburg, American poet

“For this is every cook’s opinion, No savory dish without an onion; But lest your kissing should be spoiled, Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.”
—Jonathon Swift, Irish satirist

“It’s probably illegal to make soups, stews, and casseroles without plenty of onions.”
— Maggie Waldron

“The onion and its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul.”
— My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner

 

How to dice an onion.

I once had a bout with the building trades. My thumb is permanently flattened from hitting it several times enthusiastically with a 24 ounce steel framing hammer. I soon realized I couldn’t endure the learning curve of another trade. It took me over ten years to stop cutting the tip of my index finger with my trusty chef knife. But I’m getting away from the point, there is a parable here. I learned from builders that what defines civilization is the straight line. This too is what defines civilized food preparation. You grasp vegetables or meats, pieces of uncivilized nature and with a blade of some sort convert it into organized pieces of material that cook uniformly and are appetizing to look at and consume.

The beautiful thing about cutting onions is that because of the concentric separations inside they are already cut in one direction. To finish the job nature started follow these instructions; Cut a small portion off the top and bottom of a fresh, crisp onion and score a thin line through the skin. Peel the skin off the onion. Holding the onion on the cutting board top-side up cut it in half down the middle. Lay the two pieces on the cutting board flat side down. Slice through the length of one of the halves several times. The trick here is to leave a little bit at the end uncut so that you can then rotate the sliced onion hemisphere 90 degrees on the cutting board without it falling apart. Proceed to turn it on the board 90 degrees and slice the onion half again several times perpendicular to your last cuts. The onion will fall away into little squares until you get to the stub at the end, whack this last bit a few times and instead of randomly chopping an onion into a rough pile you have used the original design of the onion and three or four simple maneuvers to make a neat pile of uniformly diced pieces.

Repeat the process to the other half and you’ve got a whole diced onion. If you need more than one onion like we often do, say you’ve got to prepare two hundred of them, proceed in Henry Ford style. Separate the job into stages. Cut the ends and score all your onions first, then peel them, then cut them all in half and finally dice all the halves. I like the “Henry Ford” style because I’m essentially lazy and find that the most efficient way of doing something suits me most of the time.