Open a BBQ restaurant, they said. It will be fun, they said

A remote temp alarm or something is on my list. Certainly don't want anything like that to happen again. It sucked.

And one of my cooks is a big Ducks fan. Hate the ducks! It's on this fall!

One thing I was not prepared for in all of this was the pace. What I mean by that is BBQ by its very nature is pretty slow and relaxed. It's a casual pace of cooking. And early in the morning and winding down at night, that holds true. But come lunch and dinner service, holy crap. It's unreal.

This Saturday it felt especially brutal, so I sat down and ran some reports to see just how many people we fed. We always can track tickets throughout the day, but that doesn't say much for actual meals served since there can be anywhere from one to sometimes ten orders per ticket.

So by 7pm on Saturday, we had hit the 500 person mark. That still blows my mind, but physically, it felt like every bit of it. Five people manning the line and orders being plated or boxed up in sometimes 30 seconds or less. Even then, it didn't feel fast enough.

When I'm not working the meat station I usually sort of expedite from the middle. My left ear is trying to listen to what the customer is ordering long before the ticket even prints so I can get a jump on throwing buns down on the grill, putting together to-go boxes and sauces, etc. Then when tickets do come up I'm making sure the two people on the cold station got the right sides, tell the meat station what goes where, and then do final plating/boxing before putting it in the window for service. All the while, my right ear is in-tune with the dining room through the pick-up window listening for things like "coke is out" or "trash is full" or noticing when a table leaves so I can get someone out there to clean it immediately.

Never in a million years did I expect it to be so fast paced. Two hours of that go by in the blink of an eye and you don't even realize that you are soaked with sweat while doing those million things at once in a 100 degree kitchen.

Not going to lie, it's a bit of a rush as long as things go fairly well. But when the adrenaline wears off, the pain sets in. 10 hours on your feet start to feel real. Those 50 pound trays of pork butt and brisket you were tossing around like toys become apparent in your back. The burns you got on your hands and arms in the middle of it all seem to appear out of nowhere. And then you realize it feels like the Amazon rainforest in the kitchen and all you want to do is go sit in the walk-in cooler.

So there you have it, just another little insight into the little known aspects of the business. I didn't expect it, but you don't have much of a choice other than to roll your sleeves up and learn by doing. Granted, there are a lot of times when the restaurant isn't that busy and it does roll at the casual BBQ pace. But on those busy times, it's a totally different animal.

I know people love their burnt ends, but last weekend it got serious. Had a customer come in just absolutely irate that he couldn't reserve them over the phone when we've been doing burnt ends as a first come first served basis for nearly a year now. So when he came in (after calling my cashiers on the phone inappropriate things) he made a huge scene, was calling my staff every name in the book, etc. Got so bad some of the customers who saw it all were going to call the cops.

It's just farking food, people! Damn.

Father's day was insane. I knew it would be busy, but I didn't know everybody was going to come in at exactly the same time. We literally sold our entire day's worth of food in about 90 minutes. At noon there were instantly about 40 cars outside, most having to park down the street because we only have 20 parking spaces. And for that hour and a half we were just slinging BBQ as fast as humanly possible.

In other news, just putting the finishing touches on getting set up for two big fairs to sell at later this summer, and I'm trying to put together an event for early August when the massive US 12 garage sale hits. Thinking about putting up a big tent outside, get a live blues band, and working with a radio station about having them come do a live remote broadcast.

So much to do and so little time.

And here's a little sales info for the month. Still blows my mind that brisket makes up two of the top three items. Who would have thought that would be the case up here closer to Canada than Texas. :shocked:

CakeM1x said:

Running out early of the more expensive cuts I'd raise the prices if you can't expand. If its as good as it sounds they'll still come. I'm pretty frugile and a favorite restaurant of mine has raised their prices 2 times in the past 2 years and I still go. And it's the only place I go to pay for food.

But I know nothing about running a business just know what I've seen with others.

Click to expand...

That's actually coming in a few weeks. I've got a full staff meeting scheduled for the 7th and a big part of that will be going over the menu overhaul. Prices will be going up across the board, but especially everything brisket. I could only eat the cost increase of beef for so long.

I've also introduced a few new sides that were initially ran as specials, but have taken off so well that they are now regular items. Smoked chicken and sausage gumbo, red beans and rice, green beans, side salads, etc. The great thing about those sides is they take away from some of our more costly sides like mac and cheese, which helps profit margins without even needing to raise those prices much.