Here's a one week in update...
Holy ****. Talk about insane. This is by far the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It makes Prized Pig 1 seem easy. The things that have happened in the past week to get to this point are like a soap opera.
We opened on opening day without an even functional smoker. We had a team of people working on the smoker until 2pm, just in time to fire it up and have ribs and tips and chicken and stuff ready to go by doors open at 5. So much pressure. And on the same day we had kitchen floods, broken dishwasher, one of the coolers went down, you name it.
To top things off, at 4:55 with a line down the block waiting to come in, I'm gathering with my staff one last time to go over the POS and taking orders. Guess what? Our credit card processor goes down. Yep. Your worst nightmare. And when the clock struck 5:00, our plan to have a host seat tables one at a time and set the pace for the night, everybody stormed in and just sat down everywhere and a huge line formed throughout the dining room for carry out. We went from zero to about 85 people in the building instantly, all without a working point of sale system.
It was awful. I mean, to me it was awful. I'm sure most customers were excited and had a relatively good time, but from an operations standpoint it was pandemonium. Then tickets weren't printing to the kitchen. Suddenly we have 1-2 hour wait times for food that is essentially already cooked and just needs to be plated. I don't know how we survived.
We are a week in now and things have gotten much better, but it's still chaos. There's just so many customers and they don't stop coming. From 10:45 in the morning until about 5 or 6 when we sell out it's almost constantly packed and almost always a line.
The smoker is big enough but now it's a matter of not having enough space to store the food we cook. We need at least double the CVAP cabinets we have now if we want to stay open past 5 on a busy day. So we just ordered two more. We already have two kitchens and it doesn't seem big enough. I don't know what's going to happen.
It's so amazing to see this kind of reaction quite a few years later, but it's stressing me out that things aren't going so smoothly in the front of house and people aren't getting quite the service they need all the time. So we're working on it. Oh, did I mention staff is the hardest part of everything? Almost every day dishwashers just stop showing up to work. Servers don't show up. Cooks don't show up. I've already fired about 4 people and our staff now is up to almost 20.
It's just insane, that's all I can really say to describe it. Never in a million years would I have imagined that hundreds of people would line up every day to eat my BBQ. It's just wild.
But I'm exhausted. I've had a few 18 and even 20 hour days in the past few weeks. I've hardly slept. I haven't eaten. It's starting to get to me to be sure. Monday we're closed so I hope to recover and get ready to go at it again next week. Just have to survive this weekend first...