“If life were predictable it would cease to be life and be without flavor.” Eleanor Roosevelt
Perhaps all first-time restauranteurs experienced a similar rush of giddy anxiety. The crazy rush to buy all the necessary equipment, line up suppliers, interview potential employees, hire, train, and schedule staff. Determine menu items and pricing strategies. Design and print menus, design restaurant signage and contract with a company who could construct and install signage in two weeks. Set up inventory records and accounting/payroll systems. Plan a marketing and advertising strategy. Design and create special events to complement the marketing strategy. Sheesh. Meanwhile all of the money is going out and none is coming in. Panic. Rush, rush, rush. We need to get the restaurant open. We need cash flow. Damn, I should have listened to my old boss, who cautioned me about adequate capital. We need to get this place open and ready to operate.
But the rut of 9 to 5 was over. No more answering to the man. My own boss. Damn, life was good. We rushed to get signs made, menus printed, and staff hired. We purchased uniforms, contacted the local papers and tourist agencies, lined up suppliers, placed our first orders, and voila, we were in business. Six a.m. to three p.m. were our hours. Prepare and serve breakfast and lunch and then go home. What an awesome plan!
Six a.m. Monday morning I flipped on the OPEN sign of Shamrock, Shilleleh, and Shenanigan’s Irish Cafe, posted the day’s breakfast special on the chalk-board, went over last minute details with the waitstaff, and headed into the kitchen to begin preparation for the day’s menu.
Seven a.m. our first guest arrived and ordered a cup of coffee and burnt toast.
Eight a.m. our second customer arrived. He ordered a Spanish omelet, juice and coffee. I thanked him for coming in and introduced myself. He was the owner of the barbershop next door and said he was glad that the restaurant had reopened. Slowly but surely customers began to trickle in. I was ecstatic. We were in business! By the end of the week we had served 350 guests, banked $2450, spent $1176 in wages and $980 in food for a gross profit of $294. After factoring in the cost of the lease and the bank loan we were headed toward losing $270 for our first month of operation. No worries, I thought. This is our first week and business will continue to grow. And it did. But after three months, it was clear that just serving breakfast and lunch was not going to create a successful business. So, I created a dinner menu and recruited for a dinner cook.
“Hello, Bob. It’s nice to meet you. Tell me about your previous cooking jobs.”
“My most recent job was at Barnaby’s Fish and Steakhouse in Bothell.”
“Why did you leave that position?”
“Well, you see, I had an auto accident and missed a few days of work and they let me go.”
“I will need to do a reference check with them, Bob. Are you ok with that?”
“Sure. They will just confirm what I told you. The manager’s name is Jim.”
“Hello, I’d like to speak to Jim, please. Hi Jim, this is Rich Turnbull at Shamrock, Shillelleh, and Shenanigans, I’d like to get a reference on a past employee named Bob.”
“Bob was a very talented cook; especially when he was sober. He had perfect attendance up until his auto accident. His clam chowder is to die for. My customers are sad that he had to leave.”
“So, Bob, Jim tells me that you are a very good cook, but I’m concerned about your drinking and if that will interfere with your job.”
“Nah. It’s not that big of a problem. I screwed up and that’s all behind me now.”
Okay, that may have been a sketchy interview, but I needed a cook as soon as possible and so I hired Bob and he was grateful for the opportunity. He had some good menu ideas and pretty soon we were in business from 6 am to 10 pm six days a week and 8am to 3pm on Sundays.
Bob could handle busy dinner rushes and never complained. The food he prepared was consistently good and in keeping with our casual family dining venue.
The business was exciting. I’d get up at 5am, shower, dress, drive to work, and open the restaurant for business by 6am. I would prep everything for breakfast and begin preparation for the soup of the day, beef stew, and chili which were on the lunch menu. The chili was served in a pie crust, topped with grated cheddar and garnished with sour cream, a green pepper ring, and a sprig of cilantro. It was a popular item on the menu and required that I prepare the pate brisee dough and pre-bake it. All of this prep work for lunch and dinner happened between breakfast orders. The pace was busy.
Linda would get the kids off to school and then come in to prepare desserts for the day.
Bob would arrive at 2pm and work until 10:30pm prepping and cooking dinner. He worked Wednesday through Sunday. Monday and Tuesday were my hardest days because I was cooking from 6am until 10pm. By the time we got the restaurant cleaned up, did the book keeping, prepared the bank deposit, dropped the deposit off in the bank’s night deposit drop, it would be well after 11pm. Then I’d drive home, sleep for a few hours and pop back up at 5am to do it again. The first few months I was fueled by adrenaline. While Bob was cooking, I had time to meet our customers and our customer base continued to grow. Many of our menu additions came from suggestions and recipes from our customers.
“Rich, here is a recipe from my great grandma Bertha Mae. It’s been in our family for years. It’s a family favorite. You should give it a try.” And so we would, and if Bertha Mae’s recipe sold, it became a feature on the menu.
Cole Sullivan, one of our regular’s, came in one Friday evening and ordered a beef pastie. “Cole, I don’t have pasties on the menu.” “Why not? How can you call this an Irish Café if you don’t serve beef pasties?” “Forgive me, but I have no idea what a pastie is. This isn’t a strip club.” And for the next half hour Cole told me how he left home at age 14 and got a job in the mines in Butte, Montana, and how he would get a pastie from the Boarding House he lived in to take with him to the mines that would sustain him all day. And that any self-respecting Irishman would have pasties on the menu of an Irish restaurant. And so, for the next several Friday’s, Cole would come in and try my take on pasties and then critique them and tell me what was wrong and then I’d go back in the kitchen to make adjustments and present him with another pastie the next Friday until, finally he gave up and said, “I guess that will have to do. It’s pretty damn close to the real thing.” And so from then on we had beef pasties every Friday as a dinner special.
Each month we would print new menus, adjust prices, cull slow moving items from the menu and add new things to keep the menu fresh. Despite a steadily growing customer base, our monthly profit margin remained slim and pulling money out of the business for our owner’s salary was challenging. George’s advice on holding a cash reserve of one year’s expenses was beginning to sound like very sage advice. Just as soon as we would build up a little bit of a cash cushion, the ice machine would break down, or the sandwich cooler’s compressor would fail, or the freezer would stop freezing. I hadn’t budgeted enough for equipment failure and replacement. Employees wanted raises and insurance, Linda wanted more take home pay for ourselves, I just wanted a good night’s sleep. I got sick but still had to work. I got pneumonia and still had to work, hoping I wasn’t making others sick in the process. The luster and promise of entrepreneurship were beginning to fade.
And then along came Kelly. Kelly worked with me at WSU as a dietetic intern. She had put herself through college by catering. She was smart and energetic and I called her out of the blue and asked her if she would be interested in working for me as an assistant manager and catering manager and surprisingly she said yes. I offered her a base salary and 25% of all catering revenue. I knew that the additional salary would be a bit of a challenge, but if the catering business took off, it would help offset the additional labor expense and contribute to the restaurant’s bottom-line.
We began advertising our catering business, Klassic Katering by Kelly and business began to come in. One morning we received a call from a company called Fliteline Services that serviced private jets coming into nearby Paine Field by the Boeing 747 plant. They asked if we could do an upscale Northwest Style Fare lunch for the President of GTE and a staff of 25 and have it delivered to the airplane by 12:30 pm. That gave us 2 hours to prepare and deliver lunch. I checked with Kelly. She said, “Yes, let’s do it.” We had just gotten in some fresh coho salmon, we had some Dungeness crabs, so we poached the salmon in champagne, quickly chilled it, stuffed mushroom caps with bacon, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, and crab and baked them in the oven. We placed the fish, the crab stuffed mushrooms, slices of fresh fruit, and a raspberry cream cheese tart on a silvered plastic tray and garnished the tray with lemon rosettes, and fresh pansies from our patio garden. After we loaded the trays into our van, we rushed them to the airfield and personally placed them in each of the luxury seats on this Dornier Jet.
Our quick response received rave reviews and just like that, we were in the private jet catering business. We served meals to politicians, executives, musicians, movie stars, and others with the wealth to own and travel by private jet. This led to catering contracts with local motel groups specializing in corporate meetings, and corporate catering for companies like Viacom and Honeywell. One of our restaurant customers, Mike, was the Commodore of the local yacht club and one evening while he and his family were dining, Mike asked if I would be interested in catering their next banquet at the yacht club and soon we were the yacht club’s regular caterer, not that I honestly appreciated their business that much. For a bunch of millionaires they were the cheapest, most miserly group of people I have ever met. They would think nothing of drinking scotch at $100 a bottle but would cringe at the thought of spending $20 for a full-service meal. Cheap bastards! But other business morphed from the yacht club connection and soon we were catering meetings at Scott Paper Company, weddings for the children of Boeing Company execs, and others.
And Bob was a real trooper. He picked up the lion’s share of cooking responsibilities as Kelly and I devoted more time to the catering business. After one very busy Friday night, one of my waitresses asked me if I wanted to join them for a refreshing, adult beverage at a nearby bar. I was exhausted but having a drink sounded good. By the time I finished the books and joined the crew at the Seahorse lounge, they were well into their second or third round of drinks. Bob seemed to be having an especially good time and I began being concerned about his ability to drive home. I needed to get home and I asked Bob if he wanted a ride. He declined. I didn’t insist. Bad judgment for both of us. Rinnnng! Rinnnng! Jesus! What time is it? 2:30am? What the hell? Hello? Who is this? Bob’s girlfriend? Huh? Why are you calling? You kicked him out and he’s headed to my house? Huh? Oh, gawd. Ok.
Knock, knock. “Dude, you’re a mess. Come in. Here’s a blanket and a pillow. You can sleep on the sofa downstairs. Try not to puke on the carpet.” “Oh man, you’re the best, boss. Thank you. I love you, man.” “Shut up and go to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I went back to bed and thought, shit, we’re going to have to burn that sofa. I’ve been drunk; but I’ve never been that drunk. Just when business was beginning to boom I was now terribly afraid I was going to need to hire a new cook and I doubted I could find one who would work as hard as Bob.
Husbandry 