Vacation!

Chrissy and I are off on weeks vacation. Any requests for pictures of Barcelona?

It was a dark and stormy night...

Chrissy I drove over to the restaurant during a lull in last nights storm to see if there were any leaks in the ceiling. We were concerned because it was the first real storm since we took possession and Tempe was getting hammered with huge amounts of rain and high winds. We could see a half dozen trees ripped out of the ground in our shopping center alone. The electricity had gone out at the house for almost two hours.
As we unlocked the front door and shut off the alarm I realized immediately that I should have brought some buckets. There were three steady leaks in the dining room, one in the men's bathroom, and a couple outright waterfalls in the kitchen. The roof over the kitchen is flat and it serves as a platform for all of the mechanical equipment like air conditioners and exhausters. I had already inspected the roof and I knew that all of the equipment was ancient. The exhaust fans are rusted, the condensers for the walk-in coolers are filthy and useless looking and the AC units are huge 20 year old dinosaurs. The roof looked like a junkyard and the surface itself is cracked and blistered and needs to be completely redone, so its no surprise that streams of water are working their way down into the building with relative ease. As I wandered around in that dark steamy building, peering into shadowy corners with a flashlight I could hear dripping sounds all around, and I felt a gorge of panic welling up inside me. A little voice in my head called out "What have you gotten yourself into!"

"Hot" Prospect

I called a meeting on Friday morning 10-17 for the purpose of interviewing an architect that was recommended to me. We are seated here reviewing plans, outlining our scope of work and what role we need an architect to provide. From left to right there is a mechanical engineer (forgot his name!), Howard our contractor, our own JVG, and Joshua Oelher from Arcone Associates who is basically trying to impress us, and actually doing a pretty good job. Across from Joshua is my seat and if you look close you can see a clipboard with a gizmo watch on it (mine of course). It is a fancy altimeter watch and during the course of the three hour meeting I checked the thermometer function on the watch and it read 97 degrees. As you can tell we are definitely on the summer energy saver plan.

Reality Check

This story has a point if you hang in there.

Part of the culture of our company includes community involvement. We participate in fundraisers and charitable events throughout the year. I won't list what we do in detail but they range from our annual Thanksgiving Dinner for 500 people at the Boys and Girls Club, to fundraisers for the Maricopa County animal shelter, which bizarrely culminates with 100 people having lunch with their dog on Iguana Mack's patio. One of our Managers, Laura Arias volunteers for every event and brainstormed a new one that was unveiled Thursday night. It was a fundraiser for the Breast Cancer Foundation and in simplest terms it consisted of volunteers from our staff dressing up as "celebrities" and ultimately donating all of their tips to the charity. RigaTony's would kick in 10% of any sales we would do that night. To be honest I now admit that I had trouble wrapping my head around this one right up until the time the doors opened. It seemed a little half-baked, a little silly and I was doubtful that our guests would figure it out or have fun with it.

It can be disturbing when I realize how wrong I can be. My first realization was when I got there at about 6:oo pm, couldn't find a parking space and had to park on the street. The place was packed. We're talking about a mid-July, random Thursday night in the middle of a financial melt-down, and we're on a wait. My next clue was the TV crew that arrived from channel 10 to cover the "event". I picked up a tray and started busing tables and thus was able to overhear comments by the staff and customers. Sarah Palin (aka Stephanie - our GM) was explaining to a table that it took a while to get them their butter because she had to go to Russia to get it. Could they have another glass of wine? "You Betcha!" People were laughing, engaging, pointing and grossly over-tipping. The entire building was filled with a Mayberry vibe and suddenly I felt like Barny Fife.

As I walked around our cheesy little restaurant I questioned myself about what makes this restaurant feel like this. What are the elements that give this business this small town feel, this feeling of community, this ability to communicate so personally with our guests. Is it the vintage linoleum floor tile, the random table types, the hand made curtains with fabric from Wal-mart, the postage-stamp-sized lobby? Whatever it is, nights like this make me realize more than ever that I have to be able to identify it, pack it up carefully, and seamlessly reproduce it 5 miles down the road. I don't think I have felt any more pressure to be carefully creative than I did Thursday night.

At any rate Laura's event was a huge success. She (AKA Dora the Explorer) was grinning from ear to ear all night as she ripped around the restaurant. At the end of the night we inked a check to the Breast Cancer Foundation for $1,998.

Time Travel to Tempe

I got a call from Michael Williams at the City of Tempe who said they had reproduced some old construction plans and they were ready for me to pick up. I was surprised they still had copies of construction documents from the late 80's when our building was built. He told me they stored documents from the 60's! Think about that. That means they must be storing plans for 75% of every structure in Tempe - and some have been rebuilt 2 or 3 times over. Whats even more incredible is how they store them. Have you ever seen an old black and white movie where the detective researches newspaper articles with a back-lit micofilm viewer? The public library in my hometown of Syracuse used to have one of those gizmos that I fooled with with when I was a kid. They are collectors items now, in a day when we can access the Library of Congress on our laptops at any Starbucks. Except... that's what Tempe still uses! Its kind of charming in a way. The results aren't so good however. Lots of the documents are smudged and the resolution is poor, but hey! - they delivered, fast and with a smile to boot. Here is Suzanne Garrido who worked hard to produce my huge stack of documents sitting at their hack-proof microfilm reader (sorry Ryan!)

Independance Day Trek

This post has nothing to do with the process of building a restaurant, but hey - its a holiday. Chrissy and I hike at South Mountain park every day. Needless to say it is difficult during the summer, but the 4th of July presents a special challenge; The park closes its parking lot gate to all visitors. Unless you happen to drive a motorcycle which can squeeze around the parking grate. Its cool to have thousands of acres to yourself and overlook a city of millions at the same time. Sometimes we find a lookout and look down on a half dozen fireworks displays at once. This year we just did a sunset hike.

Video Tour - Part 3 - The Kitchen

Video Tour - Part 2 - Bar and east dining room

Video Tour part 1

John and Greg were busy getting the restaurant cleaned up from being hastily vacated months ago, and they had it pretty well underway so I took this opportunity to film a brief tour so we can rememmber what the starting point was. This is the first of two parts.

The Hutson and Alyssa Show

Not too much activity today except that Michael Williams called from the City and said that he had already discovered our plans in the City's archives and would work on reproducing them for us to pick up next week. Also I called the City Utilities department and asked about our water turn-on situation. They assured me that our water was turned on yesterday as arranged. I sent John Van Gundy (aka JVG) our company handyman over to check it out and with the simple twist of the wrist to an outside valve he got it flowing. I had walked around the building twice yesterday and I didn't see any $%&$ valve! He gave me one of his condescending smiles when he told me about it. The big news of the day however was that Alyssa, our company Marketing Guru was able to arrange for us to do a TV cooking demonstration on Good Day Arizona. We asked Chef Hutson to prepare the Pasta Trio entree that we are running as our summer dinner promotion. They both described the studio as a chaotic scene with a new producer, and they had just a few moments to get situated for the cooking segment before the cameras started rolling. Hutson said that Alyssa frantically had her dress hitched up to snap her wireless mic onto her underwear just moments before they went live. That would have eclipsed the Michael Jackson coverage if that had aired. Even with that, the spot went great! They both handled the pressure like real pros and moments after the show ended we got a call from a woman who booked a reservation for twelve for the Pasta Trio dinner tomorrow night.