My report of the kitchen being up last week was, unfortunately, premature. We're still whacking away at the griddle. If you'll recall, it's wired to be plugged into a 220 outlet, but I don't have such an outlet anywhere near the unit, and I don't want to start re-wiring electric, which would require me to pull permits, etc.
After all my hand-wringing, my appliance guy, Paul, finally opened it up and discovered that it was originally built as a 110-type unit, and that someone else had previously re-wired it to work in a 220 outlet, for no particular reason that we could figure out. And, he said, they did a pretty poor job of it.
So he's going to re/un-do it in such a way that will allow me to use it, but he keeps not having the right parts and/or enough time to get it done. He was hear last week on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. He managed to get everything else working, but keeps putting me off on the griddle. He was supposed to be out this afternoon, but just called me to reschedule for tomorrow morning.
Which is fine, since I've been working on my vendors for samples since last week and still haven't gotten anything except 100 pounds of potatoes from my Sysco guy. So I can't grind/cook beef on my griddle, since the griddle isn't working, but, since I don't have any beef (I suppose I could go buy some, but I'm trying to be frugal), it doesn't much matter anyway.
But...time is a-wastin' and I really want to be able to have at least a few days to work through some of the recipes/procedures before I start training my employees on them.
More crappy news. Jason, the guy I hired to paint a mural on one wall, who's in possession of a fantastic portfolio and who did an amazing sketch and mock-up of the mural he was planning on painting for me, broke his elbow in a bike accident over the weekend. He needs surgery and it's going to be about THREE MONTHS until he's back to normal.
I feel for him; it sucks that this happened and, obviously, the problems this creates for him are worse than the problems it creates for me. But I'm me, and I'm focused on myself and this restaurant and this really sucks.
I was really psyched about this mural, it was going to be a fantastic mood-setter for the place. I just spent a bunch of time peeling off the old wallpaper in anticipation of him starting and now I have a 15x10 foot framed-out square of patchy white plaster and a talented but one-armed artist with a great plan but without the ability to bring it to life.
It's not an essential part of opening, but it would've been nice and the whole thing bums me out.
On the up side, city inspections are starting to happen. I booked the building and fire people last week and the first guy came out this morning. He was a very congenial older guy who was already familiar with the space and when he learned that we didn't make any changes, he did what was a fairly cursory look-around and signed off. That's the first of three buildings inspections, (they do plumbing/HVAC, electrical, and structural) and then the fire department inspects before everyone sends their paperwork to the department of public health, which does the final inspections and issues the business license.
So that's step 1 of 5 or so that's been cleared. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it all goes as smoothly.
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