Darkest before the dawn

Chrissy and I couldn't get to our daily south mountain hike until evening yesterday so we strapped on our headlamps and started up the slopes in chilly darkness. While we climbed I summed up the current status of our project. We are in the middle of the plumbing project from hell, illustrated with a 30 foot trench in our kitchen, the air conditioners we contracted for are out of stock, we are furiously juggling the demands of the fire department, health department, liquor board, environmental services, and the City of Tempe, I keep changing my mind and tweaking our kitchen layout and therefore delaying our equipment orders almost to the point of impossibility, and every project - our design team and contractor are well behind schedule and frustrated. We are supposed to open in 11 weeks. We plodded silently for a few moments in our tunnels of light when Chrissy asked me "How does anyone open a restaurant anymore?" I knew what she meant. I have been associated with about 20 openings in my career, four of them my own. With my experience this should be smooth sailing but it was anything but. The good news is that we FINALLY got a permit today. The interior permit at least, so we can proceed to actually build something. Hopefully we'll get the exterior permit next week so we can start work on the new look of the building and the patio. Today we also had a marketing meeting with our management staff, Ruthan our graphic artist and Chris Stage. We are still making the assumption that we are still opening in mid-late March and our big challenge is to communicate our move to thousands of customers before we leave. We put together a great campaign which kicks off this Friday. In the meantime back to the trenches.