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.