After being closed since the 25th, I returned to the restaurant today to receive deliveries, do some organizing and paperwork, and just generally get set up for the month to come.

I'd actually managed to resist coming back here to check to make sure everything was okay during my days off, so of course I had visions of fires and floods running through my head as I opened the door.

No water on the floor, no sign of fire damage, so that was good. But as I entered I noticed a lot of stuff all over the floor, menus, pens, cups...that kind of stuff, and my first thought was that we'd been burglarized.

But the register and other obvious targets for thieves were untouched. There were these plastic shavings everywhere, and as I looked around I found a jar of Nutella in the floor drain that had it's lid gnawed clean through by something. And just as I started to say "what the..." out loud, something furry whizzed by my head.

Squirrel!

It was scampering around up in the vent hood above the hot line, so I went around and opened all the doors and grabbed a broomstick with which to politely suggest that Mr. Squirrel go find another place to squat.

It became evident how the squirrel had gotten in as I tried to move him out. The lip under the front edge of the hood funnels air from outside up into the canopy to prevent the powerful fan from sucking out all the air from the dining area, and the squirrel had somehow gotten into the air intake on the side of the building, crawled through the vent tunnel, and come out the other side with a fierce craving for Nutella.

After a few good swipes with the broom, he seemed agreeable to the idea of going back the way he came. I heard him running around up in the ceiling for a minute, and then appeared to head out, although I didn't actually see him on the outside.

All day, of course, I've been listening to see if he comes back or emerges from some hiding place, but he's either gone or is a really quiet hider. I stuck the broom handle all the way up into the vent and set the flashlight nearby at the ready, but never got the chance to use it.

(Sadly I didn't have the presence of mind to take some cell phone pictures while doing battle with the varmint, and I half hoped he'd return just so I could snap a couple shots for this post. But I'm glad he didn't return.)

...my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that's all she wrote. -- Carl Spackler

Off to Home Depot for some chickenwire or something to put over the air intake.

At least it wasn't a fire or flood! Thanks for reading. Happy New Year.

We are winding down here at the ol' Burger Shop. Today was a very busy one--felt like a Friday--but we are conscious of the fact that we're going to be closed from 12/25/09 thru 1/1/10, so are running things out, trying to not over-prep and have to throw stuff away, ordering very little, and all that jazz.

I'll have to come in at some point that week to do inventory, set up next month's stuff, and receive some deliveries to start gearing up for when we get back, but I'm really excited to not work for a week. First time I'll have had a real day off since July.

Happy holidays all, and thanks for reading!

Being a cook means having an enormous amount of dedication. The money and the hours suck. The work is physically demanding and never ends. You have to really be dedicated to the craft of cooking, the idea of doing it well, always improving, and have a silly amount of pride in what you do.

As I left work the other day, I encountered this guy, a sushi chef at the Japanese place around the corner from Edzo's, cleaning his sharpening stone on the concrete in 13° weather, scraping it against the pavement in order to get all the metal shavings out. Now *that's* dedication.

In my mind, I've written a sign and taped it to the front door dozens of times already.

"Sorry, Edzo's is closed today due to xxxxxx. We apologize for any inconvenience".

I've never had to actually write the sign, but it keeps popping into my head, just when I least expect it. I wrote two of them today, mentally.

The first one was when I started grinding the meat this morning. I usually get in early and cut up the large pieces of chuck that I get, then let them sit in the freezer for a half an hour or forty-five minutes before grinding them.

Today, due to the fact that I was having printer issues, the beef sat in the freezer longer than usual. And then, when I started grinding it, I nonchalantly tossed in a piece that was almost all solid fat. The grinder, which has never skipped a beat, didn't seem like it could handle the job. Of course, I forced the issue, jamming the pusher down hard on the stuck piece of fat.

The grinder made a god-awful noise and then just.....stopped.

Arrgh. Fear! Scary empty-stomach feeling. I realized that I had no backup plan for a busted grinder. No beef = no burgers = Edzo's closed. As I disassembled the grinder, my mind started wondering how much ground beef the nearest Dominick's would have in stock at 7am on Sunday morning, and then started writing a sign; "Edzo's is closed today due to mechanical problems".

Disaster averted. Took the grinder apart, removed the frozen chunk of fat, put it back together, and it started right up, good as ever. Lesson; have a backup grinder on hand just in case.

Later, as 9am rolled around and only Oscar had shown up and clocked in, I started to worry (as I always do when employees are late) that the rest of today's crew wouldn't show up. Luis and Norberto were both ten, then fifteen, then twenty minutes late.

In my mind, when this happens, I always fear the worst. No call, no show, they're quitting. And then I start to figure out what I'm going to do once they don't show up and don't work for me any more. And sometimes, I compose signs in my mind, since if two of the three scheduled employees fail to show, we're going to have a heck of a time operating that day.

Handling late employees is a weak spot for me. Managers of small operations like Edzo's live in fear of employees (especially good ones) not showing up for work, because with so few employees, one no-show can really make the day (and subsequent days, weeks, whatever) difficult.

So when someone oversleeps, or just fails to leave enough time to account for late busses or trains, and shows up forty-five minutes or an hour late, I'm generally just so relieved that they eventually did come through the door, and that I don't have to go through the hiring/new hire/training process again, that I tend to be too laid back about the lateness.

It's a hard thing. I have to force myself to ignore my relief and gratitude that they didn't just outright blow me off, and act more stern and put out about the lateness than I'm actually feeling.

I did it today with Luis, who has come in more than a half an hour late two consecutive Sundays. Even though I wanted to hug him for eventually walking through the door, I angrily told him that he needs to leave more time on Sunday, since the trains don't run as often, and that if it happens again, he's going to be out of a job.

And I did it again today with Norberto, who picked up his phone when I called him a half hour after his scheduled start time and sleepily asked me what time it was.

So....no signs got posted today. The beef got ground and the employees who portion and cook it showed up. But I did double duty composing the signs in my head.

Just in time for all your holiday shopping needs. Come and get'em! Hard to tell from the crappy cell phone photo, but the one on the left is either dark brown or blue/gray (depending on the light) and the one on the right is kind of a mustard yellow. They're nice organic cotton pre-washed shirts.

Now available for the low, low price of just fifteen American dollars. Tell all your friends.

And...for a limited time only.....anyone who purchases an Edzo's T-shirt will also get a FREE piece of hot dog gum!

Luis is one of my employees. He's one of those guys who's just always in motion...talking, joking, doing twelve things at once, innovating.

I came to employ Luis because he works next door in the evening as a busboy, and he came by about three times a week while I was working on the space, asking for a job. I asked Rodolfo about him--Rodolfo is proving to be an apt HR person as far as vetting potential new employees--and was given a good report, so I signed him up.

He's quite the little hustler, Luis. But in a good way. Almost every day, it seems, Luis is working on brokering a deal to swap food with one of the other nearby restaurants. He works next door, of course, so getting pizzas and pastas from them is easy pickin's. He also knows his way around over there, so if we're temporarily out of garbage bags, eggs, or whatever, he just goes over and gets whatever it is we need (we pay them back).

The other day, he set the record for back-door-restaurant hustling. He traded four burgers for a large pizza with mushrooms, pepperoni, sausage, and onion in the morning, which we all feasted on. Then, when we had a backed-up drain under our dish sink, Luis suddenly just disappeared for a few minutes, only to return with some Asian guy and a power rodder. I guess the guy works at the Japanese place around the corner and somehow Luis knew the guy had the right tool for the job.

The worked on the drain for a while, and then Luis pulled me aside and quietly told me that the guy would probably want something in exchange for his time and the use of his tool. I was prepared to pay him (you know, with actual money), but after fighting the drain for a while with his handheld rodder and having no luck, then wheeling in the big one and finishing the job, the guy just wanted a few burgers.

He left with his rodders and a few minutes later, I sent Luis over there with a sack of burgers for him. Of course, when Luis comes back, he's got a bunch of fried rice and some pepper steak or somesuch. Hustler.

He's also one of those guys who never stops eating but weighs like 130. This might be explained by the fact that he never stops jabbering, joking, or just generally moving around. He's a hard worker and a pretty bright guy, but his energy level and his ability to figure out ways to get stuff done (and just get stuff) makes him a really valuable guy to have around.

More examples of Luis' powers; he's managed to get me to make a custom internet radio station for him featuring the music of Los Tigres Del Norte. Only because I could not bear to listen to another morning of radio 105.1 Que Bueno, the worst morning show in the history of broadcast media. He got sick of buying coffee on his way in to work, and trying to mooch it from the Trattoria was proving difficult, so he showed up one day with a used Braun machine from Village Thrift and a can of Folgers.

The amazing thing about this guy is that he's so charming and nice about everything, that he manages to hustle up all this stuff for himself without ruffling any feathers or stepping on any toes. In fact, everyone seems to love it. He's one of those guys that people like setting up with stuff.

If you come into the restaurant, look for him. He's the guy in the paper Vienna Beef hat. He prefers to wear these cheesy paper hats that I have instead of the standard issue baseball cap, for some odd reason.

(Oh, the hustled-up rodding job didn't take, of course, so I've now got a guy coming out tomorrow. A real guy. Who I'll have to pay. With money.)

I've felt like I've had a slight fever most of the day today and have occasionally been a bit dizzy, so I'm heading home early tonight and going straight to bed, swaddled in sweats and a big comforter, to try and sleep/sweat out whatever might be going on.

I live in fear of getting sick or injured. If I do, I'm not sure how the restaurant would continue to run, and if we had to close due to me not being able to work for any extended period, that would be the end of Edzo's, I think.

Not a pleasant note to end on, but I'm not in the mood to write more now. Back tomorrow.

So, I'm a big believer in the whole "customer is always right" mantra. Except for those times when the customer is wrong.

Seriously, I take customer complaints VERY seriously and I'm very quick to offer comps, refunds, empathy, apologies, whatever it takes to rectify a situation in which a customer is less than fully satisfied. I've become very good at handling these kind of situations and turning an unsatisfied customer into someone who feels that, although they weren't given what they should've been, the situation was handled by someone who genuinely cared about making it right.

So today, when a guy called me and told me that the burgers he got on Wednesday contained "foreign matter", I got my initial horrified reaction under control and started asking some questions to get to the bottom of the situation, and, more importantly, what did he want me to do to fix it.

Turns out, this person, who identified himself as "David" was claiming that the burgers had "gristle and bone" in them. He claimed that once he or one of his friends (for whom he bought lunch) got a bite with whatever it was in it, they just threw away the rest of the food and ordered a pizza.

He also claimed that he called back that day and was told that the manager "wasn't available."

So now I start to wonder what's up. First off, I grind the beef myself every single day. No one else does it. Ever. The large pieces of chuck that I get in are boneless and they're trimmed well before being ground. I eat the burgers every day and have never had anything even vaguely resembling a hard gristly piece, and have never received this complaint before.

Second, I'm the only one that answers the phone here. If the phone rings and I'm not able to answer for some reason, my employees don't pick it up.

So as soon as David told me that these two occurrences that never occur both happened to him on the same day, some red flags went up. That said, I wanted the opportunity to talk to him in person, so I told him to come in when it was convenient for him and we'd talk about it.

Of course, he showed up today, towards the end of the day, and was basically demanding his money back. He claimed he was owed forty bucks, but when I asked him how many burgers he had, he said "four", which doesn't compute.

It's always a delicate situation, this kind of thing. You don't want to just come out and call the person who's standing in front of you a liar, you want to somehow reach an amicable solution, but, also, no one wants to be taken advantage of by some scammer making up a story to try and extort money.

So I basically tried to just keep him talking. I asked him if he had a receipt and he said that he had "just thrown it away this morning" after talking to me on the phone, since I didn't tell him to bring it, he said he figured he wouldn't need it.

Ding, ding, ding! My scam artist alarm bells just went off again there. If you managed to actually save the receipt for two days, why wouldn't you then bring it with you? And, even more damning--I generally don't give the customers receipts. We use them in the kitchen and, while I can print a copy of the receipt if the customer requests one, almost no one ever does.

I didn't tell David that, though. I just acted incredulous about the fact that he expected me to hand him a cash refund without a receipt, and asked him if any other store/restaurant would ever do that.

That's when he started getting confrontational and loud. He made some thinly-veiled threat about how he didn't want to have to talk loudly about this and have my customers hear, since I might be embarrassed and I told him that I wasn't worried about that, and to go ahead and talk as loudly as he wanted. Then he asked me flat-out if I was "calling him a liar" and even though I thought he was lying, I didn't want to escalate the whole thing, so I just said something about how his story contained way too many unlikely coincidences for me to believe it to the point that I'd hand him forty bucks out of my register.

Then, he started going off about how we're doing well, have lots of customers in here, and could afford it, to which my response was "what the fuck does THAT have to do with anything?", and then I started getting nervous, wondering how long he's been watching me and/or this place.

Finally, I just came out and told him that there was no way that I was going to give him any cash, but if he wanted me to give him a re-make of his lunch, I'd do that. With that, he stormed out, but he went out the back door, rather than the front. I followed him to make sure he wasn't going to trash my bathroom or something, and after I listened to make sure he was just washing his hands, he returned into the restaurant and said that, yes, he would just take the free food.

But now I was so certain that he was a shake down artist, that I didn't want to give him the free food, at least not without making him work some more for it, so I kept at him, telling him that his story seemed really fishy, and first he didn't want the food, but now he was going to take it, and what's up with that? Finally, I just said to him, "look, if I give you a bunch of free burgers, are you just going to go away and not come back again with this kind of crap?" He said yes, so I wrote a ticket and had the burgers made, but while he was waiting, he must've gotten cold feet or something, so he said he needed to go do something and he'd come back in a few minutes, but he never returned.

The whole thing was just so upsetting. The guy looked like a fairly nice, normal person, and it goes against my nature to be suspicious of people anyway, but especially in a customer-service type of situation. After he showed his hand, I felt like such a moron for even giving him the time of day in the first place, and then I started getting paranoid, thinking he was going to try and come back and beat me up, or jump me when I went to the bank or something. I even took a different route when I walked to the bank to make the deposit.

It's been a couple hours, but I'm still shaken up. I hate the nervous, freaky feeling that this encounter has left me with, and I hate even more the prospect of dealing with any future unsatisfied customer with this looming in the back of my head, coloring my perception of the next person, whose complaint might be perfectly legitimate.

Fuck you, asshole scammer shakedown artist. Stay the fuck away from my store!

I know that the lines out the door are a good thing. And almost everyone is super-understanding and patient about waiting. Which is also a good thing, and thanks, folks, for that.

But I can't help but feel bad when people have to wait too long to get up to the counter and order and then wait too long for their food, or have us screw up their order in one way or another.

I try and say 'sorry' a lot, I'm loose with the freebies when this happens, and I'm usually good about thanking people for their patience, but this post is geared towards people I missed, or didn't know about, or who I just wasn't able to personally talk to. Sorry. Thanks for your understanding.

Today I misjudged how busy we would be and we got caught. I thought it would be slow, that people would be heading out of town, but it was crazy busy. We should've had at least one more employee working than we did, I should've ground at least 30 pounds more beef than I ground this morning, and we should've been more ready.

That said, it wasn't a disaster. I managed to run around and get Rodolfo, my dishwasher, set up with some meat and the grinder so he could start grinding more beef, the cooks held their own, and even though I had to run downstairs to the basement to change the CO2 tank for the soda machine right in the middle of it all, everything worked out in the end. I did notice quite a few people at the end of the line peeling off though, and for that I feel bad.

But.....we didn't run out of beef, fries, or burger buns, and those are my three basic cardinal rules of what to never do in this restaurant. So not the end of the world, I guess, although all the delays and scrambling certainly caused some people some time, annoyance, and perhaps negatively impacted their experience. Especially if they were the ones in line when I came back from running downstairs and promptly spilled the dirty milkshake-machine-cleaning-water cup all over the shake station.

Sorry! Thanks for your patience! Next year, I'll know to plan for a busy day, the day before Thanksgiving.

I've been reading a lot of stuff lately about me and my restaurant. Which is great--I'm super thankful for all the media attention we've gotten.

One thing, though, that I've noticed is that a lot of writers like to emphasize the point that I "used to be a chef". The implication being, I guess, that since we're a quick-serve burger place with low prices, that my designation has somehow changed.

Even though I'm still running a kitchen, wrote the menu, plan to write specials, manage the cooks, and do all the stuff that makes up the typical chef's job description. I find it a bit strange.

Don't get me wrong--it's not a big deal. Media folks can hang any title they want on me as long as they get the restaurant's name and address correct. But I think it's indicative of how society thinks about restaurants and chefs. In my experience, there's a bit of a disconnect between how people think of chefs and how chefs think of themselves.

People have always been a bit confused about who gets called a "chef". When I graduated from culinary school, my parents were quick to introduce me as "my son, the chef" and their friends acted suitably impressed. But I was quick to point out that I wasn't a chef. I was working at the time as a cook, and so that's how I identified myself. I worked with too many puffed-up line cooks who thought they were chefs but couldn't properly truss a chicken or butcher fish, and I tended to err on the side of modesty, for fear of lumping myself in with them.

Graduating from culinary school isn't the same as graduating from medical school. You're not "a chef" the day you graduate. You're a culinary school graduate. In my book, you're not "a chef" unless someone is paying you to run a kitchen, write menus, order food, etc, etc.

There are notable exceptions, of course. Some chefs reach a status that entitles them to be called chefs regardless of what they're doing at the present moment. But these are few and far between and I'm not in that realm.

It's strange, though, because when I've been unemployed, I haven't followed this rule. If I met someone at a party or something and they asked me what I do for a living, I'd say "I'm a chef". It's just easier than getting into the whole thing.

Anyway, the important thing is that I know I can cook. I've always thought of my vocation--the one that's not tied to any individual position--as cook. I was a cook when I was cleaning out the deep fryers at Spruce in the mid-90's, when I was cleaning cuttlefish in Barcelona in '98, and I was a cook when was expediting at Carlucci and writing menus at Solara in the mid '00's. It's just easier to think of it in those terms, and also, when things blow up and I'm unemployed cooking dinner at home for my family, I'm still just a cook.

I suppose now that I'm running my own place, I'm wearing multiple hats. Bookkeeper, accounts payable/receivable, HR, interior decorator, cashier, kitchen manager....call me whatever, I guess.

At root, though, Edzo's is what it is because I'm a cook at heart, and I kind of like the fact that the restaurant that I chose to open is so low-brow and accessible that people are reluctant to bestow the title of "chef" on the guy running the show.

Joints don't have chefs, I guess. That's probably a good thing.

Word gets around.

Yesterday a guy came in and grabbed a burger and fries to go, and while he was waiting for his order, he told me that he works at Blackbird and someone he worked with told him to come up to Evanston and check out Edzo's.

Then today, around the same time...maybe 3, 3:30 in the afternoon, another guy comes in, asks me what I recommend (double cheeseburger, fries), and gives me his name--Brian.

Turns out it's Brian Huston, of The Publican.

He grew up in Evanston and still lives here, I think. We talked for a while, he told me where he gets the espelette pepper he uses on their famous pork rinds, and I was so absorbed in the conversation that I forgot to pass his ticket into the kitchen.

Nice to meet you, Brian. Hope you liked the (somewhat delayed) burger.

New exhaust fan = clean air inside the restaurant.

It works. Pretty damn well, actually. As I recently blogged, there were so many things wrong with the exhaust fan that was here when I bought the previous restaurant that I just went ahead and got a whole new unit. Upgraded it a bit, even.

The difference is huge. Whereas before, the smoke from the char burgers would curl up and under the hood, billowing out into the dining room, the new unit pulls so hard that the smoke literally streams up off the grill and flies right up into the filters and out. It's like night and day. The place already smells less like burgers and fries and I expect that, with time, it will go back to having a fairly neutral smell.

(Not that the smell of burgers is such a bad thing...I just don't want people's clothes to smell like burger grease after eating here.)

I'll resist the urge to share the final cost of the whole operation, but let's just say it was significant and dashed any hopes I might've had about turning a profit this month. The fan I ended up getting was huge--600 lbs--and had to be lifted up onto the roof with a crane. The install was supposed to happen yesterday around 4pm (closing time) but the company doing it called me around noon to ask if they could move it up to 2pm, since the crane would be more expensive at four.

So it all happened while we were open. I was out back, checking out the crane (my cell phone was out of batteries, so I couldn't snap any pictures), running around trying to get people to move their cars out of the parking lot so the crane could maneuver around some electric lines, all while still taking orders, ringing up customers, and making sure that things in the restaurant were happening like they're supposed to.

Except, of course, for the smoke. And the heat. Before the new fan could be installed, the old one had to come out, so we had basically two hours with no exhaust whatsoever, but we were still cooking burgers and fries. So it quickly got pretty hot and smokey. I propped open the front and back doors and warned everyone when they first walked in that it might be somewhat uncomfortable, and everyone was really quite nice and understanding about it.

There were, of course, some issues with the install and so I had to stick around until late into the evening before eventually signing the guy out and writing him a big check. Once it was hooked up and running, I cooked a burger on the char grill just to make sure it was working well, but it was pretty obvious. The draw yanked a piece of wax paper quickly up toward the filter, and it's strong enough to cause the filters to kind of rock back and forth as they get sucked up.

So it's good.

But let's hope not too good. Problems can arise from having too powerful of an exhaust as well. It can create a vacuum by sucking out all the oxygen from a space and cause other gas appliances to get choked off or backdraft, it can pull all the heated air out of the space and require the furnace to run far more than it needs to, and it can sometimes create weird pressure and drafts to move through the space, causing strange problems. This is the kind of stuff that you don't always find out about right away--sometimes these things won't be evident until the weather gets cold, or hot, or humid, or not, or I start running the furnace...or who knows.

We have a passive make-up air system that allows air to flow from outside into the front lip of the hood, which is supposed to prevent the exhaust fan from pulling out all the interior air, and it appeared to be functioning fine today, although there are definitely some new drafts and the door to the kitchen is very difficult to open when the fan is on, so there's certainly some change. Only time will tell if it will be problematic.

Sure hope not. One of the few things that is more costly than an exhaust system is a make-up air system.

Today was a crappy day. Probably the first one I've had since we've been open.

It had nothing to do with the food; everything ran fine and people were happy with their burgers. It mostly had to do with me finding out that I'm going to have to shell out nearly five grand for a new motor for my exhaust fan.

For those of you who've been following along, and remember when the fire department was here, that's probably not a big surprise. But I was holding out hope that someone would tell me that I just needed a new fan belt or something similar that would cost a hundred bucks or so. No such luck.

After having three or four HVAC guys out here, and getting wildly disparate opinions about what the underlying issue was, the last two have basically told me the same thing, which I am now resigned to believing. I need a new motor, a new drive shaft, and new bearings.

That's not the reason for my crappy day, though....It was more due to how I responded to the news. The quote was delivered to me right as we were about to get busy for lunch and I really let it affect me. The guy kept turning the fan on and off and we kept building up lots of smoke and heat and then it would slowly dissipate, and for a while I was worried that his monkeying around up there was going to cause the thing to fail entirely.

Instead, it kept chugging along, but they're coming out tomorrow to do the install. After I found out I'm going to have to put out all that cash, we had a fairly slow lunch (well, ok....not slow, per se, but slow compared to the crazy pace we've been going at) and I found myself sweating the stupid small stuff like people getting water instead of a soda and that kind of thing.

Normally, I hate the kind of nickel and diming that restaurants often engage in. My philosophy is that I'm happy to provide water cups for free (full size), happy to have people get in and out for $4.75, and happily give four quarters to non-customers because I believe in the concept of hospitality.

It's a lot harder to do, though, in the context of a $5,000 hood repair, and so I wasn't able to be as upbeat and positive today as I normally try to be.

Similarly, I try hard not to "cut" my employees when we're slow. Generally, I believe that hiring and scheduling well makes it possible to allow my employees to work their scheduled hours, and that giving them X number of hours per week consistently is the humane thing to do, since they have bills to pay and households to run and need to be able to count on getting a certain dollar amount every two weeks.

Today, though, after the lunch rush ended, I continued worrying about money, so did end up cutting two of my guys early, although I asked them if they would mind and was fully prepared to allow them to work their scheduled shift if they expressed reservations. Both were actually happy to get out, so that was no big deal.

Bottom line is that I allowed the news about the hood to affect my mood and demeanor with customers and my employees, which is not good.

I need to chalk the expenditure up to start up costs, which is really what it is--it was something that needed to be addressed all along, we just didn't find out about it until a month in--and get over it.

I'm having a hard time doing that, though. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be closer to a place where I can manage it. A really busy day will help. And so will seeing the burger smoke whip up into the canopy and out the way it's supposed to, rather than billowing around under it and curling out into the restaurant as it's been doing for the past month.

These have been coming out nice, as both a 4-oz. thin patty melt, and a half-pound melt where the customer can specify the degree of doneness. We do these with the standard american cheese and grilled onions on griddled marble rye. This is a pretty good looking medium rare;

I've been wanting to blog about the mural and have probably referenced it already in one place or another, but this is the official post about it and the process that went into having it done.

It's fabulous--I love it. The digital file looks great but on the wall, it's like 15 feet wide by 10 feet high, and it's just so in your face with it's utter funky burger-osity.

I wouldn't have even thought of having a mural done, but there was already a framed-out space that had some dark undersea motif going on, and that needed to be changed, so I figured I'd put an ad on Craigslist looking for a mural person and see what happened.

Well, there are a LOT of talented artists in this town who will respond to a Craigslist ad for a low-paying, long-hours job like drawing and then painting a big-ass mural. It was great, since I had so many awesome people to choose from, but it's kind of depressing too, that so many talented people are hard-up for work and cash. As a society, I think we don't value our artists enough.

Anyway, after looking at many portfolios and talking to lots of people, I hired Jason Castillo to do some sketches and then see where we could go from there. He documents the process on his blog, but, from my perspective, the whole thing was really fairly effortless. He emailed me scanned drawings that he did, I gave him feedback, he sent me more, and eventually we got it to a point where I was just literally thrilled with the result. It completely makes the space.

Sadly, Jason broke his elbow on the same day that we finished removing the old wallpaper and he was just set to start painting. After learning that he would be out of commission for 3 months, he suggested having his friend and fellow mural artist, Shayne Labadie do the actual painting.

Which she did, and a very thorough and conscientious job she did, gridding it all out and then painstakingly doing pencil line drawings of every section of the mural, before starting to paint and fill in the various blocks of color.

Shayne was super nice and just quietly went about her work for the two weeks leading up to our opening, and finished up just a few days into our official lifespan. Since she was just getting a flat fee, she could've rushed through it or given me grief when I asked her to re-do a section or two, but she was a pro throughout. She's also quite talented, check out her stuff.

Anyway, the whole mural process was so cool, because it was completely happenstance; I had no initial plan of doing a mural and it just worked out so perfectly, didn't cost very much, and added a ton to the overall feel of the restaurant. I love when things work out that way.

On Sunday, going over my bank statement online, I noticed that the bank had charged me $1.95 "currency exchange", $1.50 "change fee", and a $3.93 for "cash deposit immediate". I've been doing exactly the same thing every day that we've been open and this is the first time these charges appeared. WTF?

So I march in there this morning and the tellers can't tell me anything and the "bankers" (aren't they all "bankers"? If not, why not?) aren't there yet. Great.

So when I went back to make my deposit this afternoon, I asked my "banker", who nodded and replied that we'd have to "tweak" my account status so I won't get charged as the totals build up toward the end of the month. I was relieved to hear that this wasn't going to be a daily occurrence (I was prepared to switch banks immediately if it was), but it's still super annoying. Apparently I was depositing TOO MUCH money and so started to incur charges. Are you kidding me?

This is the same bank that charged me $38 for a stamp I didn't ask for and don't need, and that refuses to furnish me with a night deposit bag to carry my money back and forth, instead offering to sell me one for thirty-five bucks. Needless to say, they're on my short list. Get it right, "bankers", depositing lots of money is a GOOD thing, not something you should be charging trying to charge me for.

Then, just a few minutes ago, I'm going over my merchant services statement from the nice folks who process my credit card transactions and noticing that every day showed a fairly large number (perhaps 10%-12% of my total daily sales) as "non-funded card types". It showed these transactions as part of my deposit, but the total for the non-funded card types (whatever that means) was shown in red and was not included in the daily amount transferred to my account. WTF again! The total of "non-funded card types" was more than $150 just for last Saturday! Where's my money, people?

When this kind of stuff happens, I immediately see red, begin imagining that they're all out to get me, to rip me off, and there's some sort of fine print I didn't read and I'm going to be out a bunch of money. I was wondering if somehow my machine accepts debit cards, but I did something wrong and wasn't getting reimbursed for them? Really, I had no idea.

So I called the number on the statement, punched in my merchant ID number, followed by the pound sign, wormed my way through the many numbered menu items, and finally got a person, who promptly asked me again for my merchant ID number. (Why'd I just enter it if you're just going to ask me for it again?!?)

Ok, this time, crisis averted. The "non-funded card types" turns out to be American Express, and those charges are being deposited into my bank account (after AMEX takes their cut, of course, on top of what merchant services takes).

Being a cash-only business is something I toyed with doing, but given my proximity to a major university, and knowing a lot of people who use their debit cards for everything and never carry cash, I opted to take the cards. Looking at this statement and the amount of fees, cuts, and percentages they take out every month makes me regret that, to some extent. But, honestly, I think it was the right choice and so maybe the answer is just to not look to closely at the damn statement every month.

I'm going to start blogging about one specific menu item whenever it occurs to me or if I manage to snap a few decent pics. This one features the corndog.

It's hand-dipped. A basic cornbread batter. Put a Vienna dog on a stick, roll it in flour, dip it in the corndog batter. Try not to let it stick to the basket when you drop it in the fryer.

Three weeks in, and all systems seem to be go. We haven't run out of beef, potatoes, or bread. Everything else is gravy.

Running this place is starting to feel routine. Employees are showing up consistently, working competently, learning fast. I'm starting to feel comfortable with the ordering, thinking one or two days ahead in case orders show up late, and today we blew out compressors and did some deep cleaning.

Am I jinxing myself? I'll shut up now before a pipe bursts or something.

Lots of people have been downright incredulous about the fact that we close at four and aren't planning to be open nights any time soon. The conversation usually goes like this:

Customer: "Hey, what's up with you guys not being open at night?"

Me: "Yeah, we close at four everyday."

C: "Oh, but that's just temporary, right? You guys will eventually stay open later?"

M: "Nope. Four pm."

C: "What?? Why?"


And so it goes. I feel bad disappointing so many people, but....



here's why:


Life's too short for me not to spend some quality time with my wife and kids. I've spent a good part of the last 15 years in kitchens working long hours and 6-7 day weeks, and I'm at a point in my life where I need a decent balance between work/personal time. Being closed at night means that I get to read to my kids almost every night.

A very successful first couple weeks! Numbers are better than expected, media coverage has been wonderful, and, best of all, customers are loving the freshly-ground burgers.

The quick-serve restaurant burger standard is simply set so low that just by virtue of grinding our own beef, we are worlds beyond what people have come to expect, so folks are generally very pleased with what we're giving them.

The menu mix at this point is about 20:1 burgers to anything else on the menu besides fries, and I suppose that's to be expected; when you go to a "burger shop", first thing you try is a burger.

And I'm glad, because that's really our strong suit. The fresh-ground beef yields a really tender, looser texture, much better, cleaner flavor, and a ridiculously juicy finished product.

For those who get into this sort of thing, I'm sourcing beef from Nebraska; it's conventionally farmed and raised and sourced through JDY Meat, a local, family owned company that is bringing me some really nice pieces of chuck. I played around with adding different cuts to the grind, but ultimately opted to go with straight chuck, which, with its natural 80:20 fat to lean ratio, has always been the go-to cut of beef for burger grind. And for a reason--it works.

Is it a good thing when the fire department shows up on only your seventh day of business? I've been pondering this question since it happened at around 12:30pm today.

On the one hand, it means that I'm cooking so many burgers and fries that I'm generating a ton of smoke, so that's a good thing. But somehow the smoke was going into the restaurant next door (Trattoria Demi--I love the fried calamari with banana peppers) and offices above and someone called the fire department. Woo-hoo!

I tried to explain that we were just cooking lots of burgers (seriously, the menu mix has been about 30:1 burgers to anything else) and after a cursory walk-through and look-around the six or eight firemen that were suddenly everywhere seemed satisfied that our smoke was of no danger to anyone, and took their leave.

So the downside of all that burger smoke is that when it doesn't go up and out like it's supposed to, things start to cost a lot of money.

Honestly, I think the main problem is that so many people keep ordering the char burger, which is our 8oz. thick burger that gets cooked to the requested degree of doneness on the char grill. Cooking it on our really hot grill generates a ton of smoke.

In my opinion, the meat doesn't come out as nice this way as it does when it's cooked on the griddle with the smaller 4oz. patties, and I've actually toyed with the idea of removing the char burger option from the menu due to the fact that it takes longer and is also more of an adventure, since the cook is trying to hit temps--medium, medium rare, etc.

But the freshly ground beef is coming out so nice that I really hate to remove the option of having it cooked that way, if that's what one person or another prefers. But to anyone who asks, I'm recommending the griddled burger.

I had a really nice exchange today with a woman who came in just to shake my hand and tell me that the burger her husband brought her as part of a takeout order yesterday was the best she's had in years. She was really raving and heaping on the praise. I've had lots of people say stuff along these lines, and it's really nice to hear.

But, of course, no matter how many people say positive things, I can't help but fixate on the few negative comments I've gotten.

One guy was pissed off even before he was halfway through the line on Friday. The line was out the door and he was yelling at me from way back there, finding fault with the fact that we weren't able to accommodate people as quickly as we should perhaps have been able to. And while it's true that we're not able to work through a line as fast as we'll be able to in a month or so, most people understand that we've just opened and are cutting us lots of slack. (Thanks for that, if this applies to you.)

Once this guy got up to the front, he gave me three separate orders, paying separately for each, and then ended up calling back twice to complain. I felt bad that he wasn't satisfied with the experience, but couldn't help but wonder if his negativity at the outset didn't more or less guarantee that he would end up disappointed.

It's a fine line to walk. Yes, it's true that for the moment, we're probably understaffed when the crush comes and the lines are out the door. But my guys are learning and with repetition, we'll get faster and more efficient, and the same number of cooks will soon be able to handle those lines much faster. So, do I hire another person or two, and then let them go once we get faster and smoother? That doesn't seem very nice or fair. Or do I muddle through with what I believe will ultimately be the right number of employees, creating some long lines at peak lunch hours and perhaps alienating some customers?

Then today, I found a couple reviews of us on Yelp, and rather than be happy about the two fairly positive ones, I'm obsessing about the negative one, which the guy also Twittered.

So, even though there's been plenty of good--and I'm fully aware that there's no way public comment is ever going to be 100% positive--I'm finding myself being overly sensitive to the bad. It's a dangerous tendency because when one person says something--that the food's too salty, for example--my response is to OVER react to that specific criticism, instruct my cooks to scale way back on the salt and pepper, and then what'll inevitably happen is that we'll start getting comments that the food is bland and flavorless. Either that, or I'll end up telling my employees one thing one day and then telling them the opposite the next, which will result in them losing confidence in me and eroding my authority.

So even though my head knows that we're doing things right, that we can't possibly please everyone, and that the vast majority are giving me big thumbs up as they wipe the juice off their chins, I can't help but get somewhat emotional and panicky as a result of every negative comment that I hear or read.

Not sure what the solution is, other than to smile, apologize, and be gracious, take the advice for what its worth (some of the criticism is, of course, valid, and offers opportunities for us to improve), and just keep doing what we're doing knowing that we're getting better every day.

Beyond that, I guess I just need to grow a thicker skin. Or stop doing web and Twitter searches and finding this stuff.

Ok, one of the really weird things about writing this blog in conjunction with opening the restaurant has been trying to consider what is and isn't prudent to write about, depending on what's going on.

For instance, I would resist the urge to blog about various things that I was worried about the health department busting me on because of the possibility that someone that works for the city might stumble onto this blog and read it. Same thing with negotiations surrounding the purchase, lease, etc.

But now that we're open, I'm going to catch up and start blogging in more or less real time. It's really a liberating feeling to be able to do so. I'll still have to consider who I talk about and how I portray them, but the whole question of time, and whether to blog this or that before this or that event takes place is now moot. Thank god.

It's been a good first week. We opened Tuesday and did ok business Tuesday and Wednesday. The articles I mentioned in my previous post came out mid-week and then we did a lot of business on Thursday and Friday. Saturday, fearing a crush of people, I came in at 6am and ground hundreds of pounds of beef, cut hundreds of pounds of potatoes, and then waited around for all the people, who never materialized. We had a pretty good day on Saturday, but it wasn't crazy like I thought it might be.

So that means today is a light prep day. Sundays, I hear, are usually pretty quiet around here, and we're closed on Monday, so no sense in bulking up on prep. This is why you find my writing a blog post when we're set to open in less than two hours.

Wow! Only two hours until we're open? I'd better get to work.

Yes, it's true. We're open.

I kept it quiet for a while. I was very conflicted about it. I wanted to be open so my life could transition from getting-the-restaurant-ready-and-I-need-to-work-every-minute-of-every-day mode to normal maintenance mode (with some continuing tweaking, of course). And I wanted to be open so that we might actually be able to put some money IN the bank for a change.

But I was also worried. Worried that we'd have too much business and wouldn't be able to handle it well, and we'd alienate people. And worried that we wouldn't have any business and the whole thing would be a pitiful crashing failure.

We'd been doing training sessions for a couple weeks, inviting people to some, giving the food away randomly at others, and towards the end of this cycle, I started answering 'yes' to people that just walked in off the street and asked if we were open. That was the tail end of last week. We did about seventy bucks in sales on Thursday and a bit more on Friday. It went well enough and I felt that the guys were moving forward pretty well, so I decided to just go ahead and open on Tuesday and do normal hours this week.

But, my plan was to leave the paper on the windows to kind of ease into it.

Well, that all changed on Tuesday. I decided to remove the paper off just one window, and once it was down, it felt so nice to have sunlight in the space and to be able to see outside, that I just tore all of it down and figured I'd just see how it went.

And it went pretty well. We're having the inevitable cluster-fucks and ticket confusion, but the bottom line is that the freshly ground beef is turning out such awesomely flavorful, juicy burgers that all is forgiven, it seems. People have been really kind and understanding and the food is getting raves. I've felt really bad a couple times when someone's ticket gets misplaced and they wait forever for their food while their friends are already finished, or the same guy gets a wrong burger two times before we finally get it right, but all I can do is sincerely apologize, thank them for their patience and understanding, and move forward.

Today was the busiest we've been, in the wake of magazine pieces in both Time Out Chicago and Chicago Magazine, and another nice piece on Urban Daddy dot com. I'd never heard of this site, but apparently a lot of people read it since we've heard lots of folks mention that they saw it, and the analytics I get on this site tell me that I'm getting tons of traffic here as a result. So, thanks, Urban Daddy!

I'm generally not one to rest on laurels and waste time patting myself on the back. Instead, my tendency is to worry about what all this good PR will bring, and whether we'll be able to handle it, so I've been focusing on making sure we have enough beef and potatoes and just putting my head down and working. But in the moments between all that, it's been pretty damn nice to see that this project that I've been working on since January is now coming to fruition and is getting a pretty nice reception from customers.

So....cat's outta the bag. I haven't Twittered or Facebooked it yet, since I wanted to feel like we had our legs under us before I put out the APB alert, but there it is. No turning back.

Health inspection passed. First try.

This actually took place about a week ago, but I've been reluctant to blog about it for fear of feeling pressure to get open and possibly do before we're ready.

I've been doing trainings with my staff (which has now grown to include a kind of scrappy guy named Luis) and there have been some issues, mostly centering around cooking the 8oz. burgers to the requested degree of doneness, and then also some issues with reading tickets and putting the correct toppings on the sandwiches. Totally stuff that you'd expect to have to work out, but that does still need to be worked out. Preferably not on paying customers, although it's inevitable that there will be some of that.

So I've been trying to limit that as much as possible by inflicting it on my friends, who are always willing to submit themselves as guinea pigs. Down to the last, they are gracious when they receive a dreadfully overcooked and wrongly-topped burger, but it's hard not to feel sheepish and apologetic when someone I know and care about is given badly prepared food.

There were definitely some growing pains. Following one such session, where I invited a bunch of denizens of LTH forum, I got really down on myself and the restaurant for a couple days. Things did not go well and this was a group whose opinions I really valued. Everyone was completely kind and understanding, but I was embarrassed and started to question the whole crazy idea of me running a restaurant. Until the next good thing happened--I think it was nailing the corndog recipe--and then I was on top of the world again. Can you say bi-polar?

I've mentioned this before, but it's tough not to feel about as good as my last experience here, given the fact that the restaurant has no history, no momentum, no "way it always goes", to fall back on. I guess it's kind of like when you have your first kid and everything's so hugely scary...you just aren't all that confident that they won't just stop breathing one night. But you do tend to gain that confidence over time, with each night that passes and there they are, still alive and fine the next morning.

I keep coming back to the restaurant on days or nights I don't need to be here just to ensure that everything's still here and working the way it's supposed to.

So far, besides some anticipated setbacks, it is.

Getting the fries right has been a long and fairly time-consuming process. Not really difficult, per se, but I was determined to try a bunch of different things and see how they affected the finished product.

Common wisdom on a ka-chunker cut twice-cooked fry is that you blanch (par-cook) them in 300° oil, drain, cool down, then fry again at about 350° right before serving. The devil is, of course, in the details. Particularly, with this style of fries, the question of how to cool the potatoes down after the first cook.

The question of rinsing the potatoes after cutting them is also one that you'll find various schools of thought on. I decided to try a lot of different ways while I was waiting for the inspection process to progress and weigh what worked best against how difficult/easy it would be to do it that way and ensure it's done consistently.

One thing that really complicated the process was that the thermostats on my fryers were all off by 25 degrees or more (on the low side), so until I got a fryer thermometer to check, I was very confused about the results I was getting.

Basically, what was happening was that I was cooking too hot. When I set it to 300°, I was getting 325°, and ditto for the second, hotter cook. The result was a fry that browned too quickly and so wasn't fully cooked inside before being brown outside. Undercooked, still crunchy in places, soggy, greasy, and burnt-tasting. Not good.

Once I started temping the oil, the 300/350 method worked, so I started playing with the cooling down variable.

Chefs Bob Zrenner and Jason Hammel are friends, so I asked them both how they do their fresh-cut fries. Both said that the blanched fries should be cooled as quickly as possible, spread out on trays in the freezer. Bob said rinse the potatoes for 20 minutes in running water, which seemed like a long time to me.

I started with a really well-rinsed potato and found it too "clean". The fries were too perfect somehow. I played with rinsing a bit less and less until I found that the method that works for me (at least with the current batch of potatoes) is just to cut them into water, move them around a bit to rinse the residual starch, and then pull them out and cook them.

Leaving the starch is a conscious decision, but I find that to my taste, it yields a better fry. One that's somehow both quite crunchy, but also a bit chewy somehow. I'm pretty happy with how the fries are coming out now.


Yeah, and then there's the toppings. Cooking really good fries is definitely something I'm aspiring to do every day, but, honestly, you could put Merkt's cheese sauce and crisp bacon on an old shoe and and I'd eat it!

As far as cooling them down, I'm going to leave that little fact unblogged and not a part of the public domain for now. If you're that curious you can come on into the restaurant once we open and see for yourself.

Can you think of anything less helpful to someone trying to open a restaurant than to suddenly find water streaming out of the ceiling for no apparent reason? I can't.

The day had promise. A guy came and paid me $400 for the pleasure of taking away a cooler that I didn't want and probably would've given away for free. My window graphics were, I learned, done, and would probably go up today (they did). And I was looking forward to a fairly low-key day where I would tie up lots of loose little ends and move towards getting open soon.

Then, in the midst of fielding two phone calls simultaneously (a cell and a cordless up to each ear, arms crossed momentarily, fumbling), I realized that the sound of water running I was hearing was....water. Running. From the ceiling down all over everything; onto the counter, onto all the stuff stored in the line coolers, onto my cash register, my hamburger phone, and the new menus I'd just gotten back from the printer. From the light fixtures, from my menu board (still lit).

All I could do was quickly tell both phone calls that I'd call them back and then start trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. I dashed out the back to see if it was raining. It wasn't. Duh. There are offices above me.

Then I ran up the fire escape out back and pounded on the back door to whatever offices are up there. Someone heard, let me in, and I quickly headed to the spot where it seemed like the water would've been coming from. Bathrooms. After stupidly checking the women's room first and finding nada, I went into the men's to find two stopped-up toilets, one of which was running and overflowing. I was so pleased with myself for finding the problem so quickly that I didn't even blanch at the prospect of cozying up next to the filled-to-the-brim toilet in order to reach behind it and turn off the water supply. If you must know, yes, there were floaters.

Great. Problem fixed. I yelled a parting message to the office-workers to "PLEASE, NEXT TIME YOUR TOILET IS STOPPED UP, CALL THE LANDLORD!" and headed downstairs to begin the lovely task of cleaning up the fucking bilge water that was all over my restaurant.

But not until after I called the landlord. I called my rep (or whatever you call the guy who handles your account for the building management company), left a message for him, and then called back and hit zero to talk to the operator. I very excitedly told her what was going on and her tone was about what you'd expect from someone who you just told all about the toast you had for breakfast. As if stuff like this happens every day.

"Yes, ho hum...have you called the building janitor?" (She didn't actually say "ho hum".)

"No, I wasn't even aware that I have a building janitor. What's his name and number?"

She gives me the info using the most blasé voice I've ever heard (I think she may have literally been filing her nails and blowing bubble gum bubbles at the time) and so I hung up and called Tufa, the janitor. I think his name's Tufa. It might be Futa. Or Tafu. Definitely not Tofu.

Anyway, he's an older Croatian guy shaped vaguely like a bowling ball, but with much more hair. I told him what was up and he disappeared for about twelve seconds before re-emerging and declaring the problem fixed. I asked if he'd help me clean up the mess, and he gestured that I should just show him where the mop was, but when I did, and showed him where I wanted him to clean, he balked, saying "I no mop NOTHING".

I really didn't know what his problem was, but I was in no mood to get into it with this dude, so I just kind of disengaged. Once I returned, it became evident that he had misunderstood and thought that I was trying to get him to clean the floor of my whole restaurant and once I explained that I just wanted him to clean up the overflown toilet water, he became much happier, chipper even, and started flying around cleaning up.

Which he did very quickly and effectively, I will say. I pressed him about the situation upstairs and he agreed to go back up and make sure the toilets were both working properly. So he did, and then--poof--he was gone.

I spent a good amount of time then walking around throwing things away and trying to salvage stuff. Very annoying. No call from my landlord rep guy the rest of the day either.

But, honestly, for all the annoyance, it wasn't a huge setback. When the water was streaming in, I had visions of settlements with insurance companies, re-wiring electrical, and all sorts of months-long delaying type of stuff, so the three or four extra hours I spent on this don't really seem that bad. Just a bunch of drama. What else is new?

Forgot to log this the other day. Electrical inspector came back, gave a quick look at the two fixes we had to do, and signed off on my last building inspection, which means that we're cleared to call the health department and schedule our health inspection.

The health inspector's name is Ike. He did a pre-sale walk-through for me back in July (can't believe it's been that long) when we were on the verge of buying the place.

He pointed out a few small things which I've already taken care of, so I'm just hoping to catch him on a good day or in a good mood so he doesn't just decide that another few thousand dollars of fixes need to be done, or some other random thing.

He seems really reasonable, though, so I'm hoping that it'll go smoothly.

Hello,

I'm an ice cream dipper well.


Behold me in all my stainless steel glory!

I am NSF certified! Any restaurant in Evanston that chooses to serve ice cream must use me to contain the scoops and/or spades with which they portion the ice cream. I serve one purpose. To run cold water in a constant stream over those scoops as they sit idle. I take this job very seriously.

I cost more than $500 to purchase and install, and I run through probably dozens of gallons of water per hour since, as you can see, the only single solitary thing I do is maintain a small pool of running, sanitary, clean, water.

Seems crazy, right? Very expensive and wasteful just for the purpose of keeping those ice cream dipping tools clean and sanitary, don't you think?

But. This is a nice little restaurant you got here. It'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it. Like, for instance, if the health department came in here and just one day up and decided to close you down because they viewed you as a risk to the public health, with your ice cream scoops that were just cleaned in normal soap and water.

So...most intelligent restaurant owners such as yourself--you look like a smart guy--choose to employ the services of an ice cream dipper well such as myself. Just in case. Like I said, this is a nice little operation you got going here; it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

Thaaat's right...just purchase me and install me using the handy mounting screws (included), hook up that small metal pipe there to the nearest water supply, and go buy a length of plastic tubing from Menard's to run down to the drain. There you go....that's the way. Good.

I can see you're a really smart businessman. I believe we're going to have a long and fruitful relationship. I've got a great feeling about this little venture of yours.

It's been a pleasure doing business with you.

And, yeah, that took me pretty much the whole day. It's incredible, sometimes, how long stuff takes.

It's our lone prep table, and It's going to serve as the main base of operations for the meat grinder and the deli slicer, which will both be used daily. As I've been working through the food, I've been noticing that the table careens wildly when I do anything on it, so I determined that it needed to be attached to the wall.

So, after my 349th trip to Menard's to fetch a pair of heavy duty brackets, I set to work. First thing I needed to do was figure out how to attach the brackets to the table. It wasn't easy, since the table is really just legs with a stainless top and backsplash, so other than the top/backsplash, there's not a whole lot there to attach brackets to. But, in an ideal world, you're not supposed to have screws or bolts sticking out of your seamless stainless work surface, since little bits of food and gook can get lodged in there and the health department doesn't like that. I mean, that's why restaurants use a single, seamless span of stainless steel--it's easy to clean.

But, as we all know, we do not live in an ideal world. And I couldn't figure out how else to attach the brackets, so I lined it up, marked it off, and began drilling through the stainless.

In the midst of doing that, of course, I fielded phone calls ("Hi, we're calling from Ontario about your credit card processing terminal--how you doin' on thermal paper?"), handed out job applications, did a couple brief interviews, tasted a couple different kinds of sausage, and some other stuff I probably forgot completely about by now. (I'm actually composing this post today, Monday, but the table in question was bolted to the wall in question on Friday, so forgive me if I leave out any essential minutiae).

Because it's so busy around here during the day with phone calls, walk-in visits, and such, I'm usually not able to do anything that involves any long-term focus until evening, so around 6 or so, I re-engaged with my bolting a table to a wall project.

Of course, if you've got a table that's going to be bolted to the wall, and you pull it out to attach the brackets, you really will want to do a thorough cleaning behind it, since it's probably the only chance you'll have to really clean back there for a long time. So I did. Cleaned down the walls, deck brushed the floor, lots of de-greaser, squeegeed the whole mess over to the floor drain. Looked great.

Then I scraped all the silicone off the wall and off the table so I would have a nice clean surface to work with. Great. Ready to bolt.

Ok...drilling through stainless steel is difficult. Very difficult. Even with my hammer drill and a titanium bit, each hole still took about 8 minutes of solid drilling to punch through the steel. I had to stop and let the drill cool off a couple times during that process. I've burned out more than my share of drills being impatient.

Then I realized that the screws that came with my brackets were too long and would butt up against each other the way I had the brackets configured, so I had to walk over to the local Ace Hardware (which I can't believe I didn't figure out was only a three block walk until after making dozens of car trips to Menard's/Lowe's/HD) and get some shorter nuts and bolts.

Got'em. Picked up some dinner on the way back, did a bit more drilling, ate dinner while the drill cooled off again, and by 8:00 or so, the brackets were attached to the table.

Mercifully, attaching it to the wall was fairly effortless. I moved it into place, marked spots where I needed to drill, moved it away again, drilled, sunk anchors, then pushed it back in and, zip, zip, zip....the screws went in and the table was suddenly--a mere 12 hours after I started--attached to the wall.

A couple beads of silicone where the table meets the wall and the dish sink, and I was done. Yep, another successful day in the glamorous restaurant biz!

I'd include a picture, but it's a friggin' table bolted to a wall. Not much to look at.

That was my lunch today.

We've been working through the menu, a few dishes at a time, for a couple days now, running through the process, putting things where they need to be, and trying to just learn how to best do what we're trying to do. Some things are going well, some are proving harder to nail (like the fries).

Polishes are easy. Score the ends with a plus sign and let'em curl up when you toss the sausage into the deep fryer for about a minute, before finishing it on the char grill. It's a Chicago classic. I tried a few different types of Polishes before settling on Vienna; some of the others were good, but had pork in them, which disqualifies it from being a Maxwell style Polish in my book.

We did a few milkshakes today, as well, after the cooking was over, including a chocolate malt, a vanilla-maple shake, and a banana shake with fresh banana. I'm experimenting to see how much pureeing the mixmaster can handle; it's not really made to do that. It came out ok, but I think a pre-smush while still in the skin would help next time. Details....

Lots of good media interest continues as well (probably in no small part due to this blog). Chuck Sudo from Chicagoist stopped by today and we chatted for a while. He was too late to get food, but we're doing trainings next week as well so maybe he'll be back.

Also some interest from Chicago Magazine and Time Out Chicago. It's great and I'm flattered and pleased with the interest, but it also makes me concerned that we're going to get completely slammed when we do our "soft opening". It's only soft if you're not drumming up business by blogging the whole thing, I guess. Duh.

Anyway, Polish and cheese fries were more or less a success. Merkt's spread is so good. Need to keep working with the brat, char burger, and, of course, the fries, which I think could've used another two minutes of blanching. Onward. Tomorrow's a slow day.

Amidst a very busy morning of repair guys, our first day of staff training in the kitchen, and receiving our first deliveries, the fire inspector showed up and gave me the stamp of approval.

So that's three out of five. The fourth should happen soon enough--I'll have the fixes from the electrical inspection done by Thursday, I think, and hopefully we'll get a re-inspection fairly quickly. That just leaves the health department, who inspect me and issue my business license.

We had a very successful morning of training. I ground beef, cut fries, cooked burgers, fried fries, and did an abbreviated set-up and breakdown with Carlos and Rodolfo. We had about six or eight friends drop by and so we served up burgers, fries, shakes, and I got to do the first road test of my inside-out grilled cheese. Everything went well. The beef, in particular, was a home run. We froze all the grinder parts this time, the beef was nice and fresh, and it came out just beautiful--beefy tasting, juicy even with the 4 oz. burgers cooked through, and with a great crispy, lacy edge from the flat top.

The fries were a bit of an adventure, since, after mastering them on one of my three fryers, I fired up the second one for the first time and discovered the temps are way off on that one as well.

One minor bummer was that the pop machine and ice maker were down and I didn't have time to try and figure it out, so I just advised everyone to bring drinks for themselves. A few people were nice enough to bring me cold waters and iced tea as well. Thanks!

Turns out it was just one of the GFCI outlets. There are a number of bad ones around, and I'm already having the electrician replace them when he does the other stuff for the inspection, so that's no big deal.

It was again fun to have some friends in to sample our wares, and our neighbors Steve and Wendy, in particular, since they went to the trouble of making Edzo's shirts and wearing them! I don't even have an Edzo's shirt yet!

So. A good day. I'm super tired. Setting up, breaking down, and cooking is always pretty stressful at this stage because you're just doing so much *thinking* as well as all the actual physical work. Once things are figured out and we all know where stuff goes, and how it goes, it starts to feel much easier.

I'm hoping to get four of five done this week and call for the health department to come in early next week!

I left here around 8:30pm last night and got here around 9am this morning, but somehow in that time span, the awning company came and installed the new awning with my logo on it.

I haven't posted the logo here yet, and I've only showed it to a select few people, but since it's now above the door and officially out there, take a look.

It was done by Paul Koob, who did a great job on it. Thanks, Paul.

I told my Vienna rep to look around for any old signage he might have laying around so when he got wind of another place closing, he asked me if I wanted the sign when they took it down. This was a few weeks ago.

Today, I get a call and a couple of eastern European guys show up in a van with a cherrypicker thing attached to it and lay this cool item on me. Nice.

This day was fun, but not particularly productive. My wife and kids and a couple other early tasters came down for lunch, so I spent the morning getting set up; cutting and blanching fries, slicing cheese on the new slicer, and firing up, for the first time, the hot dog rig.

I don't have a steam table and didn't come across one cheap enough on any of my forays into the unseemly underbelly of Chicago restaurant gear buy-n-sell to pick one up, so I'm using a countertop steam bath unit with deep half pans--one for the dogs in water and one for buns.

Things went, overall, pretty well, although it's always very difficult and stressful working in a new kitchen, figuring out where every little thing is going to go, but that's the point of working through it now rather than later.

Other than the cool sign above and the run-through on some burgers, Polishes, fries and dogs, (oh, and I did make shakes as well--almost forgot), not a lot happened today. I'm noticing a distinct pattern of nothing getting done on Fridays.

Wait. One thing I did forget was that the electrician came by and looked at what I need done for the city to write me an estimate.

Oh. Another thing that got done was that I had my pest control person, the incredible Al Howard in to do his thing.

Al is quite a character. I worked with him at my last job and he did an awesome job for me. He is one of those rare people that takes great pride in doing a really unpleasant job. And he does it well. He's really quite dedicated. He'll also talk your ear off! Anyway, I served him up a dog and some fries and by the time he had gone over the place, and done what he needed to do--with lots of chatting along the way--about three hours had gone by.

(No, he doesn't bill by the hour. Al's deal is that you pay him a set amount per month (it varies, depending on the size, location, etc) and for that much money, he makes sure you don't have any pests. Regardless of how many times he has to come back. Which is a big part of why I like him.)

Ok, so now that I look at it that way, I did, actually, manage to get a few constructive things today. But the list is long and I'm going to wrap this up to go work on costing menu items.

Had a guy out for the electrical portion of my building inspection today and he dinged me on a couple little things.

Which isn't really all that big a deal, I guess, but it requires pulling permits from the city and everything else that goes along with that. So it's going to cost time and money. Of course.

The first thing was that an outlet is required for every four feet of food prep counter space and I only have one across a six-foot span of counter. There's a plate on the wall where it looks like an outlet might have been at one time, so it's just a question of installing one.

The second thing is that I have an neon "open" sign in the front window and the cord for that runs up the side of the window and up into an outlet in the ceiling. It reaches just fine and the cord is secured well, but the guy said that the code requires such an outlet to be at least eighteen inches from the window, and this is 24 inches. So I have to have the electrician come out and do some sort of extension on it.

Both of these rules are designed to remove the likelihood that people will use extension cords, which, apparently, are quite hazardous. (I don't know, maybe they really are.) I had no plans of using an extension cord in either case, but that doesn't matter. Just gotta get these things fixed.

I called three local electric companies (I have to use an electrician that's licensed by the city of Evanston). Two didn't answer their phones so I left a message. The third seemed confused by my request to have a guy come out and give me an estimate, and transferred me twice before I got to the right person, who seemed incredulous when I told her I was hoping to get someone out today.

But, after a few hours, I got an appointment for a guy to come out tomorrow and take a look. It's probably going to end up costing me at least $300 for what's probably less than an hour of (completely unnecessary) work.

It's not really that big a deal, but right after the guy left, I was working on one of the line coolers and when I plugged it in, it didn't start up. So I checked the outlet and realized that the outlet's not working. I tried fiddling with the test/reset switch, but they appear to not be functioning the way they're supposed to. That made me realize just how many of the GFCI outlets in this place are kind of wonky and I started getting all paranoid, thinking that nothing works right, that the electric is a big mess behind the walls, and it's all going to cost me tons of money.

This is how it goes. I have a good day where I get a few things done, maybe do a little cooking or hang a sign and suddenly I feel like I'm ready to open tomorrow!

Then the next day, things stall, people cancel appointments, something breaks or shows itself to be a potential problem, and I'm totally down, thinking we'll never get open, pushing things back.

I'm sure it's best to just keep a steady course and realize that the setbacks are going to happen, but because I'm not getting all that much sleep and I'm hyper-focused on every teeny-tiny detail, it's hard to keep perspective and stay cool. There's a certain sense of momentum that restaurants have, once they're up and running, they kind of tend to just keep on running, because that's how they've always been.

But when you're starting up, you don't have that, and it undermines confidence. You start to wonder if you'll ever get open, if you'll be able to find any good employees, or if anyone will even want to come in and buy what you're selling.

So that's where my brain is at today.

Things continue to happen, though. I got my ice-cream dipper well installed and leak-free, my big garbage cans arrived, and my Quickbooks person came by and tidied up my financial situation so that what I see as my balance jibes with what Chase says is my balance. That's always nice.

The knife company came back with my deli slicer, and they brought the right one this time. They picked it up last week and yesterday the guy shuffled in with one that looked similar, but, although I didn't really remember what the one I sent out looked like, I didn't think it was it.

It wasn't. A quick call revealed the fact that they repaired two very similar slicers and got them mixed up. So I sent the old guy away and he returned today with what is a much more solid, somewhat larger unit. Nice. Much better, thank you.

Oh, and I got another call from Penny Pollack, from Chicago magazine, who said they're planning on featuring me in a small blurb in their November issue, which comes out in mid-October (thanks!). She wanted to know for sure that we'd be open by then. I confidently said 'yes' while crossing my fingers. I told her I'd call her on a day that we were training and she could come by and have a burger and fries, but she reminded me that she works anonymously.

I was actually pretty surprised to hear that. I didn't think any restaurant critics, outside of maybe the New York Times or something, still did that. But it's a good thing, I think, and raised my respect level for their reviews a couple of notches. We had a brief, somewhat humorous discussion about the ethics of restaurant reviewing, how things have changed with the advent of bloggers, Yelp, and the fact that everyone with an internet connection is now a critic, and that was that.

The big thing that happened today, though, was beef. Beef arrived. I got a bit yesterday from one vendor, I bought some more today from the grocery store, and then another vendor came through with a whole cryovacked piece today.

So while the day has been somewhat frustrating, I'm planning on staying late, grinding some beef, cutting some potatoes, slicing some onions, and doing some cooking. Which is always a good way to remind myself of what the point of all this is.

Anyone reading is welcome to give me a call or a tweet and maybe I'll let you come in and sample my experiments around dinner tonight.