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.

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