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.