What's simpler than a menu?  You list a bunch of stuff out and people choose one and tell you, yes, give me that one.  Right?

 When I started Edzo's in 2009, I had a couple vintage pepsi menu boards with the little plastic letters you jam into grooves listing out the various items.

People would verbally just tell me their order and I would punch it into the ancient push-button cash register machine with thick plastic overlay so the buttons didn't get greasy.  That was just for ringing up the sale.  I'd have to then tick off their choices on a little order pad I had pre-printed with the various choices, writing special requests in on the side in my little squished writing, and pass that ticket down to the cooks to tell them what to make and whether or not to put onions on it.

At the end of the day, I'd do a "Z" report that would print off on the receipt paper, which I would then pore over, transferring the sales data onto a spreadsheet I created.

It was terrible.  So slow.  So inefficient.  So many opportunities to make mistakes.  And we did.

At some point, we upgraded to a touchscreen point of sale system where I could punch in the choices and tickets would print for the cooks.  Way better.  Credit cards were processed in the same box rather than a separate little machine we had to have a separate phone line for also. 

Then all the online ordering apps came along and we had to have 3-4 separate tablets sitting up by the register and when they chirped, we'd go over, read through the order, and punch it in manually on the old Micros touch screen. 

That's when things really started to change.  People got used to ordering on Door Dash or Uber Eats and looking at--and interacting with--menus on their phones.  Many folks enjoy the newfound sense of control.  Being able to look through every possible option and tick the appropriate boxes to customize their order to their heart's content appeals very strongly to a certain mindset.

It was too expensive for most restaurants to create their own in-house ordering apps so most of us found ourselves at the mercy of the third parties for a while if we didn't want to miss out on all that online ordering business.   So we used them, even though we lost money on most of the orders we took through those services and their business practices (and their drivers) were often shady.

Then the technology kind of caught up with the ordering apps.  Square and Toast came along and leveled the playing field, offering restaurants the ability to set up their own online customer-facing ordering systems which could then connect seamlessly with our kitchens.  

Someone on their computer or phone could scroll through a menu we write and maintain ourselves, places their order, pays for it, it populates into our kitchen and the money gets transferred into our bank account.  No middleman except the credit card processing fees, which we're already paying anyway.  Tickets print, food starts to get made, all without the manager on duty in the restaurant having to do anything or even touch a button or a screen.  Amazing.

So when I re-booted Edzo's in 2022, I embraced this technology, as I had embraced each new development that came before.  One of the first challenges I encountered was writing the menu in a way that it could be both customer-facing AND allow for quick efficient in-house communication about the menu items (mostly via printed tickets or touch screen monitors).

 Like for instance, on my menu that the customer looks at, the fries have always been called "fresh-cut fires with sea salt".  But on the printed dupes that the fry cook's printer spits out, it just says "small fries" or "large fries".  We dispense with the flowery descriptive language when we're just talking between ourselves, it's not necessary and it's usually too wordy.  Grilled Chicken Breast Sandwich becomes "Chix Sand".  You get it.

But the Toast system didn't allow me to vary the language for customer-facing vs. back of the house.  I just had to choose one name which would be used throughout the system for each item.  Which made for some funny-sounding conversations on expo.  

 "Can I get that patty melt on table 9, please," I would say.  My cook would look at me confused, as if he had no idea what I was talking about.  Long pause.  Then..."ohhhhhhh, wait...you mean 'The Classic Diner Patty Melt'?  Oh, ok.  coming up, 2 minutes, chef!"  Eventually, I gave up trying to use BOH lingo and just went with it.... "how long on my Classic Diner Patty Melt for table 3, please?"  After a while, it even got shortened to stuff like "how long on the Classic Diner with tomato for 11, please?"  A very strange evolution.

 There were lots of little tweaks along the way.  The "single" and "double" burger items became "build your own burger" so folks would understand what to do.  (Cause without that instruction, they didn't).  Rather than just leaving people to figure out that they should choose "no bun" if they want a burger without bread, we added a "burger in a bowl" menu item.  But "burger in a bowl" looked so similar to "build your own burger" on the ticket that cooks quickly skimming tickets during busy times kept mistaking one for the other.  So eventually the bunless burger option (sorry, no, we will not "wrap it in lettuce") became just plain ol' "Burger Bowl".  

It was a fairly constant struggle to find the right language to strike the balance between being as descriptive as I wanted to for the customer's experience and using words and phrases that our cooks with varying English language skills and education levels would be able to understand from reading a greasy 2"x2" paper ticket on the fly during a hectic rush.  

One thing I've discovered is that customers love to order items with a simple, nondescriptive name.  "Freddy's Wonder Burger" will get ordered a lot more often than "Double Mushroom Swiss with special sauce, lettuce, pickle on a pretzel bun".  

This is counter-intuitive to me.  I personally prefer non-cutesy names that are just a simple description of the food contained within over some gimmicky cartoonish faux identity that tells you nearly nothing about what the food actually is.  I've come to understand that I'm in the minority on this one.

A decade or so ago, I worked an event billed as a "battle of the burgers" and we all cooked up our creations on the patio outside Tribune Tower.  When I filled out the paperwork, I wrote in my burger name as something like "4oz. beef, Merkt's cheddar, jalapenos, spicy mayo, and Nueske bacon".  

The marketing/production people emailed me back that it sounded good, but I needed to come up with a fun-sounding title for my burger.   

 I hated that idea.  That was back when I still placed some value on not "being a sell out", whatever that meant.  This was a corporate event produced by a corporate event production company with big corporate brand name sponsors and I had somehow convinced myself that a cutesy name for my burger creation ran was the exact opposite of the DIY independent restaurant punk-rock ethos I had convinced myself I was embodying.  Can't even blame it on youthful idealism, I was in my 40's. 

Anyway, an old friend of mine and I got together one night and got really high and decided to come up with the stupidest-sounding name we could.  Long story short (too late!), our burger was named the best out of 32 restaurants there.  Thee Spicy Sconnie was the big winner!

I won an all-expenses paid trip to Miami Beach for the Food and Wine Festival where I got to meet Anthony Bourdain.  Which I think kind of brings the whole wannabe-punk-rock-anti-establishment pot-smoking poser-surburban-non-coporate-sellout story full circle.   

Now I use the cutesy names for menu items because I know people like them.  This was a good compromise for me to make because ultimately, clinging to the whole "that's not how I do it" thing seems kind of pointless.  If it enhances people's experience and they enjoy it, then what's the difference?  I guess I'm mellowing with age. 

Then there was the whole question about having a paper menu for folks to look at vs. having a big menu on the wall vs. using an app- or phone-based system where folks order digitally on a device.   I learned quickly how strong feelings were about this.  

The menu isn't just a means to an end, it's a part of the experience.    And, again, I started out being too rigid and one-dimensional in my approach and eventually, backed off.

When I first installed the order-off-your-phone ordering system in 2022, I loved how it allowed me to make changes on the fly which were then reflected immediately on what customers were seeing.  No old paper menus with outdated pricing floating around out there creating false expectations.  Items we're out of that day are never seen by customers in the first place, rather than having them ask and be disappointed when they're told we don't have that today, sorry.  

So I went all-in on the phone-based menu.  No paper menus.  No menu on the wall. Either use your phone or I can show you the menu on an iPad and take your order verbally. 

For some, the digital order-on-your phone experience was a positive, but for many, they hated it.  Many would struggle with the tech, having never used a QR code before.  At least a couple people a day would refuse to even try, and then when I offered to take their order the old way would angrily storm out.   They missed the old way and if they couldn't do it that way, the experience just wasn't the same for them.  Or they hated the technology.   Maybe both.

So I'm learning to evolve and I'm pondering how to do it better for the next incarnation.  I want to be flexible about it, but I also want to stay true to my instincts about what the right way to do it is.   I also need to be pragmatic and set it up in a way where it works for all the various approaches.  The technology is wonderful, it saves a ton of time, allows customers access to more information, results in fewer errors, and helps us run faster and more efficiently.  But I don't want lose the warmth, the humanity, the old-school vibe that I think is such an important aspect of the experience.

I think I've come up with something that will work...  I'll detail it more in a subsequent post as this one has become quite long. 

 

 

 

Yesterday I had a meeting with Chef D'Andre Carter of beloved Evanston institution Soul & Smoke.  I've been planning some pop-ups to try to maintain engagement with our local community while I'm looking for a new location so I paid them a visit and he gave me a tour of the kitchen so I could plan the logistics around producing an Edzo's pop-up there.

Now, barbecue guys always love their gear and chef Carter is no exception.  I admired his charcoal broiler cooker box with roll-out cast-iron broiler drawers, something I'd never seen before, and planned to use it to cook the burgers for the planned pop up.   Fun!  New toys to play with.

Chef D'Andre Carter and wife/partner Heather Bublick have a huge old building that they operate Soul & Smoke out of and they're in the process of a massive build out that will create a whole new beautiful restaurant, event space, indoor-outdoor patio with 20-foot high garage doors, open kitchen, full bar, it's going to be amazing.

I also caught a glimpse of the huge dark red smokers in the new kitchen being built out, hulking in the background with their many tons of double-insulated cast iron fireboxes designed to create perfect constant indirect low and slow heat.  Nice.

So as we were chatting in the dining room, and I was asking them about their plans for the space, I admired the smokers.  "Those are Bewleys, right?"

 "Yeah," Chef replied, visibly shocked.  "You know about Bewley?  What?!"

Yep.  Fellow food nerd here.    Instant chef street cred.  Part of the job.  Knowing the things.

 I went down that particular rabbit hole many years ago after a barbecue dinner and pitmaster class at Jared Leonard's now-defunct Barbecue Supply Co. on Western where he schooled us all on why Bewley BBQ pits are the gold standard of smoking meats.  Then I sat up all night on the internet googling and clickety clicking until I found other places who used the same smoker, reading about why the thousands of pounds of heavy iron used for Bewely smokers creates the perfect atmosphere for unlocking all the magic that comes out of a large, slow-cooked piece of meat with lots of connective tissue that needs to get broken down so it becomes that amazing, meltingly tender sticky fall-apart barbecue we all go out of our way to enjoy.

So we bonded over that for a minute and I felt like I impressed an accomplished barbecue pitmaster by knowing a little about what he does.  That's the kind of thing that feels satisfying to me.   

At 55, I've come to appreciate the massive amounts of seemingly useless information I've accumulated in my head.  I've always placed a high value on knowing stuff.  When I was a kid, it was sports stats.  Baseball.  I was obsessed.  I would pore over box scores in the newspaper every day, making notations, noting trends.  I even went so far as to create what I now realize were early rudimentary versions of spreadsheets that I hand-wrote to track the stats of my favorite players and teams.   

Once I chose to go to culinary school, food became the focus of my endless quest to know all the things.  So when I tasted something new and amazing or a certain chef's cooking really blew me away, I would go down all the rabbit holes to try and learn everything I could about it.  

In the primitive-internet 90's, a group of us young ambitious chefs would straggle in to the upstairs cafe in the Borders bookstore on Michigan Avenue nearly every morning to drink our coffee, eat croissants, and read the glossy fifty dollar chef cookbooks we drooled over but couldn't afford to buy on our line cook $8/hr. paychecks.  

For a couple hours before our shifts started at Nomi, Tru, or Bistro 110, we would fantasize about eating or working at Gotham Bar and Grill, Stars, or The Inn at Little Washington, excitedly showing each other photos of plates, thinking through ideas about various cuisines or food cultures we wanted to explore, and debating whether "fusion cooking" was sacrilegious cultural appropriation or an inevitable outgrowth of our current global marketplace and modern connected world.

I flipped though hundreds of books and read thousands of recipes, trying to figure out what made cajun cooking different from creole and whether my roux for gumbo should be made with butter or oil.  I wanted to know "the right way" to do everything and the deeper I delved, the more it became apparent that there is no one right way to do anything.  That just made the quest for knowledge even more appealing to me.

So seeing that look of "oh, ok, this dude knows some stuff" on Chef Carter's face yesterday was one of those satisfying squaring-the-circle moments for me.  It felt like my 30+ years of obsessing over this endless quest to know all the things about food and cooking prepared me for that little moment I could've never known I was preparing myself for.

My Aunt Wilma had an expression she'd say when one of us kids was tooting our own horn a little too much, maybe acting conceited or arrogant-- "don't tell everyone how wonderful you are.  Just BE wonderful and then let people notice. Because, trust me, they will."

 More info about Edzo's pop-ups around Evanston coming soon!  Hopefully something toward the end of this month.

 

 

 

I've gotten this question more than a few times when involved in discussions or debates (mostly about politics) over the last 15 years that I've run the ol' burger shop.

 And, I mean, what can I say?  I am a burger-flipper.   No point in trying to deny that or elevate myself above my stature.  Better to maybe change the mindset about what it means to be a burger-flipper.  

I've always thought of myself as being pretty smart.  I did well in school mostly without really trying and goofing off a lot, yet I still got good grades through HS and college.  I was always a little shocked when people would tell me how I was smart because I just felt normal.  At some points in school, I tried to downplay being in AP classes or to hide getting a good grade from other kids because I worried they would think I wasn't cool.  Silly, right?

I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after HS, from '87-'91.  I graduated with a Political Science degree. My intention going into school was to study politics, which I was always interested in, as a precursor to going to law school, but at some point I lost interest in pursuing a career as an attorney.

Since I was enjoying my time at school and liked what I was studying, though, and since I didn't really know what I wanted to do, changing course halfway through didn't make a lot of sense, so I decided to finish up my four years, graduate, and then figure it out.

I worked a few restaurant jobs along the way and eventually, I ended up going to culinary school nights and weekends while working a day job and that's how I ended up here.  

Flipping burgers.   Managing burger flippers flipping burgers, at least.

The irony, of course, of a guy with a BS in Political Science flipping burgers for a living is multi-faceted.  Is it a indictment of the failed liberal arts college educational system?  Maybe.  I've never held a job that I needed my degree to get or do.  But I also wouldn't be the same person that I am if I hadn't gotten my degree.  Most of my fiercely-held personal values come from what I studied during that time and all the thinking I did around everything I was reading;  Voltaire, Vonnegut, Locke, Rousseau, Robbins, Kerouac, Kundera, Kesey, Plato, Socrates.  I was grappling with the big abstract issues like human nature and the meaning of life.

Those formative years when I was doing all that Big Thinking informs every decision I make today and every process or policy involved in making the restaurant run day to day.  How I treat people, the choices I make of what items to purchase, which vendors to use, how much time and labor cost I choose to spend on one task or another...all of those things contain thousands of tiny decisions made or options taken every day that draw from the institutional belief systems I internally wrote for myself back then.

That's a big part of why I love what I do so much.  Because I have the opportunity to live my personal values and principles out through my work.  It's a blessing--a luxury, even--that I do not take for granted.  

The hackneyed cliche of citing "burger flippers" as the go-to example of minimum wage mindless drone entry-level workers and being a job that anyone with a working pulse can get and do isn't going away.   I've made my peace with hearing it tossed out.  And, sure, it's an easy 'dis in a debate about politics when things get heated with someone who knows what I do for a living.    

 I'll take it.  Burger-flipper and lifetime seeker of knowledge extraordinaire here!   Still grappling with and trying to understand the Big Questions of Life.  I may not ever figure it all out, but at least I'll eat good while I'm trying!

originally written 12/21/2024

 

The last week of business was wild in a lot of different ways.  So many customers who came through were long time regulars who showed up for that last experience before we closed up shop.  At some point, I started just assuming that everyone who showed up was there for that reason.  

"Hello," I said to one group, "glad you guys could make it in one last time.  What's that one menu item you'll miss the most?"

Only to be met by blank stares.  "Can we see a menu?  Do you have soup?  We've never been here before."

D'oh!  Nothing like a little dose of reality to knock me back to earth.  Not everyone knows your whole career and life story, self-centered guy.  Lesson learned.  Another shot of karmic humility administered and received.

At one point, a guy came through, Ron.  ordered a bunch of food, and then asked to use a coupon he had gotten through a text message marketing service I tried toward the end as a desperate attempt to try to stoke a bit more business.  I kind of assumed he didn't know we were closing up, given the context, but then he made a point of telling me that he wanted to make sure he used the coupon before we closed, so he didn't miss his chance to cash in on it.

It felt pretty tone-deaf to me.  Then again, I'm self-centered guy as noted above.  And for Ron, this was more about his opportunity to save $5 than it was the end of the 15-year run of my eponymous restaurant.  So, sure.  Going out on a positive note.  Taking the high road.  Coupon applied, sir!  Thanks for your business. 

The best, though, was a guy named Joe.  

Joe and his friends came through, each ordering separately.  We talked about the restaurant closing, their past visits, how it felt like the end of an era.  Joe waited and ordered last.  When he was about to order, his face got all scrunched up like he was getting upset.  He clearly needed to say something.

"I'm sorry!" he blurted, "I used to come here like twice a week and then Covid hit and now I work from home and I haven't been back here since.  I feel like it's all my fault that you guys are closing!"

His friends were silent.  They looked at him, then at me, waiting for my response.  I looked down at the POS screen, absorbing Joe's confession,  trying to figure out what to say.   I took a deep breath and allowed a long sigh to come out slowly.

Looking up, keeping my face serious I said "so YOU'RE the one!  You destroyed the economy, you and everyone like you!  Damn you to hell!"

I was kidding, of course.  But also, kind of not.  We did, I believe, close due to the whole working-from-home phenomenon that has changed the economic landscape in so many areas that depended on office worker business.   I kept expecting people to finally one day come back to the offices and stream off the el and the metra every morning the the way they used to, but it may never happen.

Obviously, it's not Joe's fault.  Or the fault of any one person.  So, Joe, you're off the hook.  I don't blame you.  All the customers who now can't get their garlic fries or char burger anymore don't blame you either.

 

....not entirely, at least.

So of course when I rang up Joe for his double cheeseburger, fries, and Oreo shake I made a big show of it and announced, "that'll be $322,032.43 please!"

 I've had a lot of mixed feelings about the idea of starting a GoFundMe to help me make the transition from running Edzo's for the past 15 years to whatever may come next.

A squirrelly little grill cook named Rico who I worked with on the hot line of a steakhouse quietly told me once, in the midst of a busy service when we had 30+ steaks on the grill, different cuts, all started at different times and needing to be cooked to different degrees of doneness, with more tickets constantly streaming out of the printer..."I love being in the shit!  That's when time stops and I can really just exist!"

That stayed with me.  It was a memorable moment for me.  Because my life in restaurants has always been about navigating this strange dichotomy between control and chaos.   At the time, I thought he was crazy...maybe on drugs or something.   But I came to understand what he meant.

 Working the line on a busy Saturday teaches you a lot of things;  communication skills, efficiency, economy of movement, how to prioritize... and how to keep your mind calm and still when things feel crazy and everyone else is freaking out.

And that's a skill that I think has served me well in life generally, in addition to in restaurant kitchens.  

All my life I have been able to exist in the unknown, chaotic spaces without freaking out.  The idea is, like in the kitchen, when shit is flying all around you, just keep your head down, don't lose focus, and work through it.  Trust the process.  Ignore the noise.  You'll get there eventually, even if you're not sure where 'there' is right then.

When my first marriage ended I decided to take a leap and go to Europe without much more than a backpack and some chef's whites.  I only had "concepts of a plan", but I ended up living in Barcelona for a year, finding a great job I loved working for a chef I consider a mentor, and living in an apartment owned by the folks who ran the restaurant I was working at only a block away.  It ended up better than I could've ever planned or imagined and I never would've done it at all if I had gotten hung up on having the right paperwork, the proper work visa, or feeling the need to ensure everything was all set up for me before committing to going.

So now, finding myself at another turning point in my life, not knowing what I'm going to do next, how I'm going to pay my bills beyond the few months my personal savings will provide, I feel surprisingly ok about it all.   

Of course, I still have moments of anxiety.  I'm making lists like a madman (immediate, short term, long term), and I might actually be spending more hours per day doing career stuff now than I was when I was running the restaurant, so it's not like it feels like I'm on vacation or anything.  

It's just that I'm not freaking out.  I'm not panicking.  I'm sitting in the shit.  Existing.  The sound of the ticket machine rattling barely registers, the expediter is screaming at me for the mid-rare ribeyes on 52, I have to pee, and I just realized I'm gonna need to run back to dry storage and refill my salt dredge when I'm already way behind.  But I'm still calm.  I've been here before.

Focus.  Do what I know how to do.  Calmly, but with purpose and a sense of urgency.  Head down.  Be my authentic self.  Use the skills and talents I know I have.  Do the work.  Be diligent.  Prepare but also be flexible.  The path will reveal itself.  Things will happen the way they're supposed to. 

Thanks, Rico.  I'll always remember you fondly for showing me how to exist in the shit and enjoy it. 

 

originally written 12/16/2024

 

During the last week of business, everyone came out to pay their respects, have one last double with garlic fries, one last chocolate shake, and one last interaction with me.

On the first day, I left the online ordering open and allowed the new system to function so folks could order for themselves from the table, but it got to be too much and with our little staff, we quickly became overloaded.  So on the second day, I took it all back full circle, shut down all the online ordering, and everyone came through me, manually punching in their orders just like we did it on day 1.

It was so great to see all the familiar faces, so many regulars and friends who have been coming for over a decade now, and the outpouring of support and recognition really helped with how I'm feeling about the whole thing.

But that one question everyone asked..."so what's next?"  

And....I don't have an answer.  My non-answer became my answer as I navigated the hundreds of conversations.  "I honestly don't know," I'd say, "I've been so focused on trying to keep this place going".

 And that's true.  I just never entertained the idea that it would go under and I would need a plan B, and making a plan B somehow felt like giving up and admitting defeat. So I just never did.

My mind has gone 100 different directions since this all became real.  I've been so focused on the logistics of the shut down, moving stuff out, saying goodbyes, tying up loose ends, but my mind flashes onto sudden realizations now when I'm not expecting it.  So many possibilities.  I should relocate Edzo's somewhere on the North Shore to maintain the brand identity and good will I've built over 15 years.  I should capitalize on the social media reach with over 8,000 followers.  Maybe I'll do something something completely unrelated to restaurants!  Maybe I'll move to Portugal.  

I'm trying to allow all those flashes of ideas to hang in the air and consider them.  Part of me wants to run in completely the opposite direction of what I've been doing for the last decade and a half. Honestly, though, I'm scared that I won't be able to earn a living doing anything else.  I'm 55.  This is all I've done since my early 20's.  I'm freaking GOOD at it.  How can I change fields now, so late in my life?

So, for now, I've decided not to decide.

The good thing is, some of the good will and brand identity I've built over the years seems to be opening some doors.  I've been contacted by a bunch of people from a bunch of different suburbs about opening there.  That's very validating and feels promising, so I'll follow up with all of them and hopefully there's a situation that will make sense for all involved.  

Part of me, though, feels a newfound sense of freedom and relief as the days pass and I don't have to operate the restaurant.  15 years is a long time and I keep having these moments where I suddenly feel that "oh shit" feeling like I forgot something important--missed an employee's text, neglected to place a bread order--lurch for my computer or phone, and then realize...oh yeah, that's not a thing anymore.

I think I had forgotten how much I LIVED the existence of running Edzo's....being Edzo.  I did it for so long that I no longer remembered how it felt to just be Eddie Lakin, person, with a job.  Sure, your job is a part of your self-identity-formation in most cases, but when you own and operate your own business, it encompasses you entirely because you're never not doing it.  And when you're the everyday face of the restaurant, the brand for whom the eponymous restaurant is named, it's even more so.

 So to lose that is a little scary.  

Surprisingly, though, it doesn't feel scary at all.  I mean, sure, the financial part feels scary as in how am I going to make money to pay my bills stressful scary.  That's there, but I've been deep in that for a few years now.  The rest, though, feels more and more like a relief each time a new aspect of it dawns on me.  

I've been amazed at how much headspace has opened up for me and I'm finding that I'm taking care of other arenas of my life better.  I deep cleaned my bathroom.  I've been unpacking stuff that's been in boxes since I moved.... in 2017.  I've caught up on some reading (as in books!) and made a dent in my Netflix watch list instead of just putting on SVU at 9pm and falling asleep in 10 minutes.

I suppose that's all "self-care" and it's a good thing that I'm allowing myself some time for that after all of this.

So that's "what's next", I guess.  A period of rest, reassessment, gathering, sorting and thinking.  I'm going to honor the processes and allow myself the time to let it all unfold.  The layers of business-ownership peeling away, falling to the wayside, new ideas and fantasies that pop into my head (I want to learn glass-blowing!), old ideas that I made a note to pursue someday and shelved over the years...all of it.  I want to go down all the rabbit holes I didn't have time to go down during the last 15 years. 

I can't know what's next until I arrive in the new headspace that going through all these processes will bring about, so I'm not going to feel compelled to make a plan or a timeline right now.   When I get to the right fork in the road at the right moment, I will know.

 Oh my God!

Reading classified help wanted ads...applying for jobs.  What a wild experience.  I haven't done it since 2008.  So stress-inducing....how desperate am I?  Would I do this one?  Oh, no.  I would NOT do that one.

I scroll through jobs, experiment with search terms and ponder new possibilities (maybe I could get a remote job!)  I'm re-learning how to read between the lines and decipher the job descriptions.  For example, "demo chef" isn't a chef at all, it's a person who heats up little bits of sausage in warehouse stores and offers you a sample while you stand there and block everyone else's way while they're trying to shop.  

Yeah, no thanks.  Not quite that desperate.  Yet.

Scrolling through and picturing yourself doing the various jobs, imagining what it might be like, can be kind of an invigorating, hopeful experience, or it can be a total nightmare that causes you to think to yourself "is this really the point I've come to in my life?  That I'm considering doing THAT?"

And all that in a span of five minutes.  Yikes!  Just a little stressful.

I'm in the "taking shots" phase right now.  Finding jobs that sound super cool and interesting with good salaries and benefits that I may or may not be fully qualified for, but hey, click click click, submit a resume, answer a few questions about my demographics and I guess we'll see.  

I applied for a job as a Culinary Manager for World Central Kitchen that entails packing a go bag, being ready to ship out within four hours to a disaster relief site somewhere in the world for weeks at a time dealing with "high-stress, dynamic environments affected by natural disasters or conflicts", and to oversee production kitchens in "in challenging environments with austere living conditions. For example, responders may not have access to running water, communications, or electricity and they may have to sleep outdoors and use bucket toilets."

Sound cool?  This appeals to me somehow.  I found myself really wanting this job.  Definitely would be a change of pace!

I actually think I'd be really good at it.  My experience bumming my way around Europe on the cheap and summers camping while following the Grateful Dead around the midwest has made me pretty comfortable with "austere" living conditions.  The ten years I spent working Lollapalooza, cooking for 400,000 people in a 10'x10' square booth in the east gutter of Columbus Drive in Grant Park taught me how to improvise in the field, rig up malfunctioning equipment, and keep my calm when things are swirling uncontrollably around me.  We dealt with floods, epic lightning storms, a derecho wind, multiple full park evacuations, refrigerator trucks failing in the 100 degree heat, electricity issues, propane equipment malfunctions, and managed to still keep cranking out the food and giving customers friendly service.

So I feel like it's stuff I can do and that I kind of get a thrill from being able to do.  And the fact that it would be working for such a great organization and helping folks in need would be such a wonderful motivating factor for doing the work.  I was picturing myself leading an international ragtag squad of pirate cooks like I was Duval in Apocalypse Now. Confidently striding through his zone of control as explosions rain all around, giving commands, never flinching once, clearly pumped on the adrenaline, the ability to function amongst such chaos.  "I love the smell of polenta in the morning" I would say.  

Or something.

Anyway, it's a fantasy, and looking at the classified help wanted ads is kind of an exercise in fantasizing, mentally trying on a bunch of new hats and seeing how they feel, and part of the whole PROCESS that I'm fully in now and fully trying to embrace as it's all part of what I need to go through to move forward and get some distance from the Edzo's era of my life.

 started 12/13/2024

 

Part of the whole process of closing a restaurant I've been running for 15 years is clearing out.  I'm losing a lot of storage space that I've taken for granted for quite a while so I now find myself sifting through all the stuff of my life.  And that's a real process in and of itself, I'm discovering.

Every object, box, milk crate is being looked at critically.  Keep?  Dump?  Sell?

So, that's meant a lot of Facebook marketplace listings, cleaning out my entire house to make room for whatever incoming unpartables I deem worthy, and even going down the rabbit hole of scanning old family photos into digital format.

This restaurant closure has coincided with a whole bunch of other life-changes for me.  My parents just recently moved to a smaller, one-story situation, so they ended up unloading a lot of the "stuff of life" onto me, and that included a few boxes of family photos.  Rabbit holes = distraction = not thinking about being unemployed!  I'm in! 

I take a carload of stuff from the restaurant every day, unload it into my garage, and sift through the stuff in the evenings after work.  It's wild how going through the stuff you shoved into a milkcrate decades ago can bring you right back to that moment and how you felt about yourself and your life at that particular time.  My high school letters (never got the jacket), a few game balls from little league, weird random highlighted scrawlings I saved from college, zines I bought in Barcelona, handwritten menus from the restaurant I worked at in Bologna....Every single item brings memories, feelings, smells, insecurities, situations flooding back.  I can still remember the musty smell of the sub-basement I had to climb a ladder down into to get Francesco the menu paper so he could write the menu for that night's service.   

At 55 years old, you start to let go of some of the sentimental attachments to the STUFF.  Especially after seeing my parents' accumulation and how hard they ended up working to thin it out when they moved.  Can't take it with you, right?  Just stuff.  So I've been doing a lot of letting go.

And that's hard.  Because when you toss certain things into the garbage, it often means letting go of the dream you had around that thing.  The potential.  The use you could've gotten out of that thing, the cool project you were going to use it for.

Or sometimes, it's the memories around it.  As I tossed the last of my bootleg Grateful Dead cassettes with their trippy hand-drawn paper sleeves emblazoned with "Ithaca" or the "Warfield 1980", I felt the sting of letting go of the memories of duping those tapes, drawing those sleeves, and listening to those shows with friends I've slipped out of touch with. 

But the cassettes are gone and I still have the memories. I hadn't listened to the tapes for multiple decades. I don't even have a cassette player anymore.  They're just chunks of plastic taking up space because of sentimentality. 

I took a huge 60-lb bin full of my beloved beat-writer-era books to the used bookstore thinking I was dropping valuable treasures on them and realized halfway through that they were basically doing me a FAVOR by paying me $4.50 for all of it.  Including the bin.  

Parting with the memories of the time in my life when I read all those books, though, and how it felt to live vicariously through those writers felt almost like abandoning a future potential version of myself.  There was a long lost loose dream still kicking around in there where maybe someday I would be the protagonist in a Kerouac novel.  An artist.  A traveler.   Free spirit.  A Writer.   Someone who does something creative, original, and makes a mark on the world with it.  Something that's maybe borderline important, even if the world doesn't fully appreciate it as being that at the time I'm doing it.

 Folks who care about me would probably say that's exactly what I did by creating Edzo's and running it with all my heart and soul for 15 years.

That's a comforting thought as I continue to sift, assess, ponder, and go down the rabbit holes of my life, flashing back to my past selves back when I was full of plans, potential and dreams vs. where I find myself at 55.   Hopefully I can allow myself to buy into that thought. 

12/12/2024

 

 

And so...that's the big question, then.  What next?

How am I going to earn money to pay my bills?  Can I salvage anything from the Edzo's Burger Shop brand that I put every part of myself into and all the good will I've amassed for it over these 15 years?  The thousands of social media followers, the hundreds of (mostly good) reviews, the "intellectual property"...does any of that have any value going forward?  

That's my next challenge.  To figure that out.  

In 2022, when we were first re-opening after having been closed for 9 months and remodeling in an attempt to "re-boot" in a post-covid world, I did a GoFundMe fundraiser to try to offset some expenses I was dealing with to get my exhaust hood fixed.  Our folks really rallied and I managed to raise nearly $20k in a time when the restaurant wasn't open, I wasn't generating any revenue, and money was flying out to contractors and repair techs at an alarming rate.  I was pleasantly shocked at how much money I was able to raise to get me out of the jam I was in.  And folks were happy to give it.

I started thinking around then about the sentiment that existed out in the community that would bring about such an outpouring of generosity from folks, what that meant, and whether this sort of model was going to become normal or expected for restaurants at some point in the near future.

We're all familiar with the concept of patronage, where donors support individuals or organizations that they value as being a part of the wider community, and it's long been accepted for artists, but it's not a model that's been employed for businesses that would normally be for-profit, like restaurants.  At least not that I've seen.  

But if we value the role of certain establishments in our society, if we value certain traditions, certain cultural institutions, shared experiences, or equitably-accessible public spaces, we need to support them in order for them to survive.  We all agree that city parks are important so we prevent the impact of the free market from making the land so valuable that it all gets bought and covered up with buildings. 

Maybe at some point we will reach a point where beloved stores, restaurants, or venues come to be seen in the same regard and we stop allowing them to exist or vanish based solely on the whims of capitalism and the marketplace.

 Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying taxpayer dollars should be given to keep Edzo's open because we're some kind of special restaurant.  Or that restaurants should operate as non-for-profit charities because they do so much good.

  What I'm really doing here is trying to figure out whether what I have focused my life on for 30+ years--hospitality-- still has value in this world.  And if it does, where does that value come from and how do I and other folks in the hospitality industry pay my bills based on what I can still bring to the table...(and where IS the table, even?)

Is it via social media?  Maybe I should start a TikTok channel and try to monetize my social media presence?  I mean, people make actual money from that, right?  So I've heard.  But honestly I can't even fathom how.

The idea of doing another GoFundMe is appealing in many ways, but I'm struggling with how to FRAME it.  Other than just asking for money to pay my bills while I search for a new location for Edzo's and try to develop different revenue streams, I don't yet have much of a plan.  Can you make a GoFundMe to buy yourself time to make a plan?  That seems pretty vague, I'm not sure folks will buy into that.  Fund my pivot?  Too presumptuous?  Maybe.

Between the GoFundMe we did a few years ago, though, and the crowds that turned out for our final week to tell me what Edzo's has meant to their lives over the years, I can't deny the fact that there's a community that's been formed around what I created.  And I'm not ready to just let that dissipate into the air and float away.  Community and these relationships we've all formed over 15 years seem really important right now, both in general, in our society, and for me personally, at the turning point moment I find myself in at 55 years old.  I'm going to do what I can to keep hold of it and nurture it.

One of the guiding principles of how I've run my business over the last 15 years has been "be yourself".  I wanted to present an authentic representation of who I truly am through my restaurant and I figured folks that "get it" would appreciate it for what it was and, for some folks, it wouldn't be to their personal taste and that's ok too.  Eventually, the result of that became kind of a self-"curated" group of folks who liked me for just exactly who I am.  The gratification I get from that has been like nothing I've ever felt in my entire life.  It's been so validating.  As Sally Field famously said..."you like me.  you really like me!"

So if this resonates with you, thanks for supporting me and my vision over the years.   I'm exited to share with you what comes next.  

Once I figure it out.

originally written on 12/11/2024

 

 Well, it's been 12 years since the last blog entry here, so I guess I can't complain too much.  It's been a good run.

I figured I would bring things full circle and document the closing of a restaurant in the same forum I documented opening Edzo's 15 years ago in 2009.

I feel compelled to say all the things...thanking customers, employees, the community that supported us over the years.  And I will say all that stuff, in person and on social media.  This blog has always been about the stuff that's harder to say, though.  The internal conflicts, the doubts, the vulnerable stuff.  So I'm gonna stick to that right now here.

The last 4-5 years since Covid have been wild.  I can't attribute the restaurant closing entirely to Covid, but it definitely made a huge impact and has been the focal point (whether dealing with it or wondering if this will be the year things "finally go back to normal").  They never will.

I had grand plans prior to the pandemic hitting in 2020.  I had taken out loans to expand, I had multiple new locations I was considering and one deal signed for a food hall in the Loop.  Once in the pandemic, I availed my business of the loans available to sustain us.  I tried to run things in a way that was consistent with my personal values so didn't fire anyone or cut hours.  I figured we would just ride things out.

A lot happened over the years.  A lot changed.  There are probably 20 blog posts worth of material that I should've written.  Maybe I'll catch up. 

The biggest thing that changed, though, is that we stopped making money.   I'm really not a business guy.  I'm a chef and I love cooking and sharing good food with people, being hospitable and making folks feel good.  For the first 10 years or so of running Edzo's, my main financial metric was "is my bank balance going up"?  And it usually was.  So I didn't go deeper into it.

When we started, in 2009, we used paper tickets that I wrote the order on.  We handed the paper down the line and the cooks made it.  I would ring up the sale on a manual cash register with 1000 buttons, each of which was programmed to be one menu item.  Credit cards were swiped on a separate little box connected to the telephone line.  It was a different world.  Things were simpler.  

Seeing the bank balance go backwards over the last four years, taking out loan after loan and seeing them slowly disappear little by little has been excruciating.  I've raised prices to be in line with what we're now paying, I've streamlined, I've reconfigured to be more delivery/pickup-facing, I've tried new marketing, I've instagrammed every day.  The numbers just keep going the wrong way.  And the loans and relief programs have gone away.  It's been demoralizing.

Owning a business is a real double-edged sword.  You get all the credit when things go well, accolades, best-of lists, congratulations and that all becomes a part of you.  YOU did that.  You start to sometimes believe your own hype, even if you strive to stay humble and not let it go to your head.  It's impossible for it not to because when you run a place and you're the face of the place, the namesake, it's all on the line.  If they love the restaurant, the experience, your food, they love YOU.  

But then when they don't....well, it really sucks.  It's impossible not to take it as a personal rejection.  Even though I tell myself, no, it's Covid, it's people's and society's habits changing, it's inflation, it's increased property taxes...whatever.  and that's all completely TRUE, of course.  But then I drive by other restaurants that are still jammed every day even with high prices and can't help but think..... how did I manage to fuck this up?

But beyond that feeling of personal failure and rejection, there are so many other levels.  I mean, I'm losing my job too, and my only source of income.  Well, to be honest, I've barely been paying myself for the last couple years.   My personal income on my 2023 taxes was in the low 30's and this year I've paid myself $13,100.  Yikes.   I've been supplementing the restaurant and keeping myself afloat with personal savings for some time now and hoping things would turn around. 

And then there's the level of feeling like I'm disappointing so many people.  The customers who will miss us when we're gone.  My employees who depend on us to be able to earn a living.  The banks, creditors and vendors who call and email every single day at every phone number about the money I should be paying them.   I've been doing the "steal from Peter to pay Paul" dance for a couple years now.  Sending checks when online payments would be quicker, letting certain bills be late for a while until they start sending second notices, counting on the sales from the coming weekend to pay the bills that are due last week.  It's been exhausting.  

 I have a hard time separating the "business" end of financials from the feelings they stir up in me.  So when I get a call about a past due electric bill or something, I have to deal with the actual logistical concern and handle it so as to keep the lights on, but as the owner, as the guy responsible for not paying his electric bill for months to the point that they call and actually threaten to disconnect it, this rush of adrenaline hits me in a wave of "shit, I'm in trouble" thoughts.   It's impossible not to feel like a fuck up, a failure, an idiot who doesn't know how to run a business and this is why you're closing.  

Even when I know it was a conscious choice, that I was doing what I felt I needed to do in order to stretch funds until things finally turned around and was painfully aware of how overdue the bill was, I still can't help but feel that way when that call or "final notice" comes, it feels so emblematic.  And it's just so demoralizing.

Because it starts to spiral and every little thing becomes a reminder of another aspect of this 15-year endeavor that's going wrong, every little minor repair I can't afford becomes an existential crisis for both the restaurant and for me personally.  If I can't get this piece of equipment fixed, then I can't operate and continue to bring in money.  If my cooler needs to be serviced and the health inspector comes, I could get shut down temporarily, which I can't afford.  But I also can't afford to proactively fix the cooler.

 I run numbers comparing year to year, week to week, holiday weekend to holiday weekend looking for reasons to be optimistic and keep things going until "things go back to normal", I try to figure out ways to cut labor costs a little more, reducing hours enough to help make a difference in my bottom line but not so much that it causes one of my reliable employees to leave seeking more hours.

All of it just leads to the inevitable conclusion:  there's no use throwing good money after bad.  Business isn't ever coming back.  I need to face reality.

 

 

Well, we're prepping for Lollapalooza, which is next weekend.  We're ordering and processing some really staggering amounts of food (we'll probably go through 15,000-17,000 pounds of idaho russet potatoes over the three days).  So since we're in the process of cooking up more than 250 pounds of really great quality country bacon from Broadbent Farms in Kentucky for our Wisconsin Bacon Cheddar Burger, we've got gallons of extra bacon fat on hand. 

So?

No-brainer. 

BACON.  FAT.  FRIES.

Yep, we're draining one of our fryers and filling it with the smoky, porky, delicious hickory-scented Broadbent bacon fat, and then cooking up fries special in the bacon fat and selling them to you for seven bucks.

All weekend.  Because we didn't want this fantastic fat to go to waste. 

Get in here.

Well, I'm largely absent from blogging these days, but the urge hasn't completely left me.  Mostly I'm too busy running the restaurant to take the time to sit down and blog, but we've been going through some shifts in our plate tectonics over here lately, so maybe after all the shifting, blogging is something that I'll have more time for.  I hope so.

But not for a while.

For the next six or nine months, I've got my work cut out for me.

In early August, we will be a part of Lollapalooza's Chowtown, where we'll be a part of feeding the some-300,000 concert-goers at the massive annual event.  I'm psyched, but it's a daunting event to plan for.  I've been told by those in the know to expect to sell 3000-4000 burgers a day (plus fries to go with 'em).  I had to get my calculator out, but once I crunched all the numbers, I decided that multiplied out to around two tons of Slagel Farms beef, more than 15,000 pounds of russet potatoes, 50 lbs. of white truffle salt, 250 lbs. of Broadbent country bacon, and lord only knows how many aprons, hand towels, spatulas, and other essential details that I'll be hoping not to forget about. 

Suffice to say I've been making a lot of lists and phone calls.  Bread will be delivered daily to the site by Highland, my normal supplier of buns.  Linens will be delivered and picked up daily.  Armored truck for change and drops is being worked on.  Hotel room booked across the street.  Refrigerated truck + driver w/class C license nearly in place.  Special event insurance policy underwritten.  Etc, etc, etc....  I'll be thrilled when day 1 is over, I've got a read for how it'll all go, and I can relax and just sell burgers and fries.  Gonna be fun, but a ton of work.

Thankfully, Lollapalooza happens to fall within the timeframe of our annual vacation.  We close the shop every August for 7-10 days and everyone takes a summer break.  So, once I was asked to be part of Lolla, I just added an extra few days onto the beginning of our vacation.  The restaurant will be closed from August 1st-15th.

Then, once we've left it all in Grant Park and then gone up to Wisconsin for our annual battery re-charge, I will hurdle head-on into working towards opening our second location of Edzo's, at 2218 N. Lincoln Ave. in Lincoln Park. 

News of this was broken earlier than I'd planned, so many of you may have heard about it already.  I was planning to make the announcement much closer to Lollapalooza, in order to try and capitalize on some of the hype that event will generate, but some nosy food blogger sniffed out the info on some real-estate transaction public listing after I signed the lease, so the cat's out of the bag.

Anyway, I'm busy hiring people, training them, and trying to step away and allow them to grow into autonomous employees that can help things to run without my direct involvement 100% of the time.  To be honest, that's much more of a challenge for me than it is for them.  I've been very lucky to have found some very capable people with great experience and they've been catching on quickly and taking control of stuff that I've been the sole person responsible for since the restaurant opened nearly three years ago.  It's a challenge to relinquish control.  I'm not finding it easy.   Yesterday I drove a load of stuff down to the Lincoln Park location just to get out of their hair during service.  Today, I'm sitting composing a blog post at peak lunch rush time.  Baby steps.

Wish me luck....gonna be a crazy 6-month-to-maybe-a-year scramble as everything kind of falls into place (hopefully), but after it all shakes out, we'll have two Edzo's and I might just have a little more time available to write blog posts. 

Yesterday, after we'd closed, the phone rang and when I picked it up, the woman on the phone asked me which "express" she would need to take to get to Edzo's.

I asked her to repeat her question, since I didn't understand it, and when I heard it again my assumption was that she meant "expressWAY", but it could've also been express train or bus...depending on where she was coming from and how she was intending on traveling here. But I didn't know that since she didn't actually even tell me where she was coming FROM.

But as soon as it became clear that she was asking me for directions, I began to beg off.

"Oh, you're asking me for directions? I see. No, sorry, I'm not good with directions and don't want to tell you the wrong thing and have you get lost." This is my standard (true) answer.

"But I'm calling from South Holland," the woman on the phone says.

I resisted the urge to make a crack about how it'd take a long time to get to Evanston from The Netherlands and told her that I truly have no idea where that even is, so I don't want to try to give her directions on how to get here.

The caller yesterday seemed to understand and accept my rationale for not wanting to give her directions, but other callers have not been able to let go quite as easily. One woman calling from Skokie was so incredulous that I wouldn't walk her through the entire trip, turn-by-turn, that she just kept asking me the same question over and over again until I finally said a polite goodbye and hung up, and then she called back, insisting that I must give her directions or she wouldn't be able to come.

I didn't give her directions. She came anyway. And scolded me for not being more helpful.

Don't get me wrong. I'm fine with answering a few simple questions. Address, cross streets, "just a bit north of Pete Miller's", Davis St. Purple line stop, etc, etc.... But I'm not going to tell you stuff like "turn right" here or there. I deal with north, south, east, west, not right and left. My wife used to (before the era of smart phones) ask for directions using the right/left format, and I always refused to accommodate what I view as a stubborn refusal to utilize the basic language of speaking about location and directions.

Bottom line, if you can't be bothered to learn the basics about navigation, I'm not going to serve as your personal GPS.

Oh, and while it occurs to me that a blog post might not be the best medium from which to send out this message to its intended audience, it seemed like a mildly interesting subject for a blog post. Happy Travels!

Ok, so after my last blog post was published, a bit of a ruckus ensued.

To be honest, I wrote that blog post in one furious spurt, clicked 'publish', and then kind of forgot all about the whole thing. After I got it out of my system, I felt better. I knew that I'd handled it pretty much the way I wanted to handle it, and kind of just closed my mental book on it when I put the blog post up.

As luck would have it, Chicago's premier food blogger just happened to be in line with his kids at the exact moment that the incident went down. So of course he wrote about it in his daily column. So I saw that, and got a chuckle about it, but then noticed the links to Yelp embedded in the Grubstreet piece, went and checked out the couple negative reviews that were (presumably) written by the aggrieved Rude Woman or her proxies and got a bit of a chuckle out of those.

And then....I figured that'd be the end of it. A few folks were outraged on my behalf due to the Yelp reviews, but I wasn't at all concerned because Yelp routinely removes (or filters, actually) reviews that are clearly grudge-driven, or that contain insults, or whatever.

But, of course, that wasn't the end of it.

A flurry of *positive* posts followed the two negative reviews from Rude Woman or her proxies. Some of my regulars who read either the blog post or the Grubstreet article must've decided that it would be a nice idea to go sign onto Yelp and write a positive review of my restaurant. Or to respond to the claims made in the Rude Woman's (or her proxies') reviews.

Which was nice. I was honestly touched. I did not, of course, ask anyone to do that, nor did I go sign up with a fake name or do it myself. As I've stated, there's really no need for that, since I figured that Yelp would pull the two negative reviews (as they've now done). I recognized a few of the positive reviewers by name or face when I read through them, and made a mental note to thank them for the support but to also let'em know that what they did was completely unncecessary (although the thought was much appreciated).

But, of course, before I could do that (and before Yelp could pull some of the positive reviews that were clearly driven by a desire to respond to the negative reviewers), some folks read those positive reviews, assumed I was behind them, and wrote a negative review about me based on THAT assumption.

Whew! You following all that? Crazy...convoluted, and with lots of assumptions piled atop more assumptions. Not a great recipe for solid factual info.

Here's an example, from one of the original Rude Woman proxy reviews (by "Truth T"):

After giving this dive a one star review, I want to downgrade it to negative 100 stars. All in the same day, I got 3 Yelp messages from people that obviously own the place or are related to the owner. All 3 of them (probably one person using 3 different yelp accounts). They all sent me nasty emails and they all happened to sign up for Yelp today. Then they all gave this dump 5 star reviews. Funny how they all signed up today and the only reviews they have is for this dump. Now we know the owner of Edzos has violated the Yelp rules. Perhaps the owner needs a lesson in customer service, much like Soggy Paws. Oh and when Soggy Paws kept doing this, that owner was banned from posting on Yelp.

Interesting. "Truth T." seems to know quite a lot about Yelp's rules and politics, which makes sense considering the fact that the same day he wrote a terrible review about my restaurant, he wrote 26 other reviews on Yelp as well. Perhaps he knew that Yelp pulls one-star reviews written by people with very few other reviews and wrote a bunch of other reviews in order to try and ensure that his rants about my restaurant would stick.

They didn't, though. Yelp removed his posts, along with those from "Ed S." of Munster, Indiana, who made a clear reference to the Rude Woman incident. In fact, all told (and this is to Yelp's credit) they removed everything from Rude Woman and her proxies, and most of the positive posts from folks who came to my defense. A couple still remain, but I'd wager that they'll be pulled pretty soon as well. All told, six reviews posted in the wake of the incident were placed into the "filtered" area, and four more were erased entirely for violating Yelp's rules of content.

The review from "Ed S." just disappeared completely (perhaps he erased it himself), which is too bad because it contained one of my favorite lines from the entire episode. After going on and on about what a dick I am for trying to ensure that all of my customers get the opportunity to sit at a table while eating their food, he went on to talk about how horrible the food was, and stated that his burger "spurted blood and grease" at him as soon as he picked it up. I got a good laugh out of that visual along with some cognitive dissonance about the idea that lots of "blood and grease" is somehow a bad thing when it comes to burgers. One guy on Twitter quoted that, saying "is that supposed to be a bad thing? I'll take two!"


Anyway, here are couple of choice excerpts from the fallout of the whole thing from various spots out there on the internet:


Some people felt compelled to comment kind of offhandedly on the situation, within the context of an actual substantive review--

I kind of don't want people to know about Edzo's, simply because every time I go, there's a line out the door. And sometimes people grab empty tables before ordering (I'm looking at you, certain Northwestern kiddos. Also, stop riding your bikes on the sidewalk), which is majorly rude and I hate it. And rude people don't deserve Edzo's food. But they still get it, because our world is not a just place. --Jasmine R. (5 stars)

Some decided that responding directly to the Rude Woman (or her proxies') claims was the best way to go:

Sorry, Ed S. is full of it. Angered over slights largely imagined...In short, yes, Edzo's gets crowded. But I've never seen Edzo himself be anything but pleasant to his customers. If he was being rude, perhaps he was merely returning it in kind..
--Fill B. (5 stars)


Interesting that the last two posters had such a terrible experience when all previous reviews -- hundreds of them -- seem to be in the 3-5 range. I have a feeling that there's something else going on with them. Not sure of their motives. But here's the real story.... --Julie C. (4 stars)

Others just resorted to outright mockery of the entire Yelper phenomenon:

Okay look. Listen to me right now please. This place is the best place in the world and there is nothing better in the whole wide world I mean that I really do for real. Their burgers are so darn good oh my gosh. Their fries (whether truffle or garlic or crazy or cheese or regular) are so darn good oh my gosh. Their shakes (whether nutella or chocolate or whatever) are so darn good oh my gosh. Basically, this place is so darn good oh my gosh. I love it. Go eat there. You'll love it too I hope. --JJ B. (5 stars)

In addition to all that ruckus, there's also been endless comments from customers here in the restaurant, the overwhelming majority of them from some of my wise-ass regulars who walk in and put their coat on a six or an eight-top and then loudly ask if it's ok to hold a table before they order. But many were just folks who felt like it was important to note that they understood and supported my policy and my actions. Which is nice.

Anyway, I just thought I'd do a little re-cap, since I had some positive things to say about Yelp and the way they deal with their reviews and wanted to note that. Yelp gets a very bad rap from food media types and professional amateur diners like the folks that frequent LTH Forum, but undeservedly, I think. I believe that the sheer volume of reviews that Yelp generates, along with their system for vetting posts, results in a pretty fair picture of most establishments.

Truth be told, I found this whole ruckus pretty informative and educational. A big part of why it worked out that way, I think, was the fact that I vented my spleen in my original blog post and, after that, I wasn't very deeply invested in the whole thing emotionally. That allowed me to kind of step back and view everything more objectively, I think. Which was good. Laughing at this ruckus was really the appropriate response. The lessons I learned were a bonus.

Ok, I don't usually do this because writing a blog post when you're angry about something is usually a really bad idea. But, whatever. I'm pissed and need to get this out.

We have 50 seats here at my restaurant. On a busy Saturday, like today, we sell about 400 burgers. About a third of the orders are placed as to-go orders. So, you can do the math. Long story short, it's damn busy and it is not an easy task to try and ensure that everyone who wants to dine in gets a place to sit and eat their burger.

So, long ago, for this reason, we put up a sign politely asking people not to grab tables and occupy them until *after* they've placed their food order. We find that, regardless of how busy we are, if people follow this rule, we nearly always have enough room to fit everyone in.

And don't think that because Edzo's is just a counter-service, order-your-food-and-grab-it-yourself-when-we-call-your-name kind of place, that I'm not paying attention to what's going on in the dining room. I am. I monitor everyone. I watch tables in order to make sure that the young mom with three kids gets a place to sit down, or that older woman with a walker doesn't get squeezed out, or to see if the guy in a wheelchair needs some help getting his drink out of the soda machine. To me, this is all part of the idea of providing hospitality to my customers. Serving them great food isn't good enough, if they're not provided with a comfortable environment in which to enjoy eating it.

Usually, I don't have to enforce the "no table-grabbing" rule. Folks either just know about it, or they see the sign, which explains that this is the best way to ensure that everyone has a comfortable place to eat their food, and, since it (hopefully) makes sense, there's usually not a problem.

Today was an extremely busy day, though. And Saturdays are often the day that we get the most new customers (who probably don't know the rules and maybe don't see the sign), and when it's so busy, folks start to stress about finding a table, and sometimes they can get a bit grabby. So it's not uncommon for me to have to go out into the dining room, politely point to the sign, and ask people to not save tables for their group until after they've ordered. When I do this, folks are usually extremely accommodating and even apologetic (which is unnecessary, I assume ignorance rather than malice).

One woman today, however, was simply not able to accept the fact that she shouldn't have grabbed a six-top before her group even ordered. When I asked the person who was holding the table to get up so that two other groups (who already had their food in their hands) could sit down to eat, the woman rushed over and tried to tell me about the many reasons why it was absolutely essential that her group be permitted to make an exception to the rule.

So she did know about the rule. She just decided that she was entitled to disregard it. As soon as I hear that, that's strike one. It's not that she didn't know. She knew, but decided that she was entitled to blow off the rule.

I tried to politely explain to her that these other people were standing with their food in their hands, but nowhere to eat it, and that this is the exact reason why the rule exists; to prevent a situation in which a group of people THAT HAVEN'T EVEN ORDERED YET are occupying a table for 20 minutes while others with food in their hands have nowhere to sit and eat it.

This woman wasn't hearing any of it. She, again, had a mouthful of extenuating circumstances that made her apparently inconsiderate behavior completely necessary. And, besides, she claimed, they were *almost* up to the front of the line.

I didn't have time to continue arguing with her, and the folks with food either found a spot to eat or graciously agreed to take their order to go, so I just shook my head, walked away from Rude Woman, and allowed her to get her way. I did not try to hide my irritation with her. The rest of her group was clearly embarrassed by her behavior as well. But she got what she wanted.

So they ordered, and then they got their food and ate. Comfortably. Unlike some of the other paying customers who got shut out of a comfortable table to sit at because of Rude Woman's selfishness. Ok...not ideal, but, again, folks were very gracious and understanding and I think they kind of got a sense of what was going on.

Later, after the group was done eating, Rude Woman came up to the register to talk to me. Nevermind that she'd already gotten what she wanted. Nevermind that there was a line out the door and I was already juggling twelve tasks at once. Rude Woman wasn't entirely pleased with how the situation played out, so she was determined to put the screws to me.

First of all, she says, it was rude of me to "embarrass her" in front of her group and the other customers. Seriously??? *I* embarrassed you? Because you chose to break a rule and you chose to be inconsiderate to your fellow diners and I had the nerve to actually call you on it? I do not think so, Rude Woman.

"No, ma'am", I said, "if you were embarrassed, it was because of your rude, inconsiderate behavior. Not due to the fact that I pointed it out."

She didn't like that.

Then, she countered, I didn't charge her correctly for their food. "Why was it forty-eight dollars?" she asked.

"I don't know, ma'am", I said, "lemme see your receipt".

"I don't have a receipt, you didn't give it to me."

Ok, then. So I go into the computer, find the name, and reprint her itemized receipt. Handing it to her, I say (irritation again evident), "ok, here's your itemized receipt, so you can go through that item by item and maybe you can find something to complain about."

She didn't like that either. But, at this point, it was pretty clear that she was just pissed about being embarrassed, she believed that her embarrassment was my fault, and she wanted to make me pay for it. I was not about to allow that to happen. Personally, the way I feel about it is that if you're going to be a selfish inconsiderate jerk, then any feelings of embarrassment you might have about being a selfish inconsiderate jerk are your problem, not mine. I left plenty of room at the beginning for her to back out graciously and she chose not to do so.

So she stood there and pored over the receipt for a few minutes. I ignored her and continued working through customers, taking orders, calling tickets and sending food out, trying not to let my irritation with this situation color my interactions with other customers. Her family, clearly embarrassed and uncomfortable, implored her to give it up and just leave, already. Eventually, she did.

If that were the end of it, I wouldn't be hot right now. But it wasn't. So I am.

A few minutes later, the phone rings. The caller ID tells me its a cell phone. I answer, and a very familar-sounding woman's voice asks for a manager. I respond that I'm the manager, and how can I help her.

"No, she says, you're the guy who took my order. I want to speak to an owner or a manager."

I chuckle, because now I know just exactly what this call is.

"Yes, I'm the guy who took your order. I'm also the owner. AND the manager. How can I help you?"

She keeps it up. "So, wait...you're the owner?"

"Yup," I said.

"Is there a manager?"

"Just me," I said. "How can I help you? I have a huge line of people waiting to order right now, so I can't talk on the phone with you for very long".

"......so you're the only manager, then?"

[click]

I just hung up. I explained it twice. I explained that many other people are waiting while you're asking me questions that I've already answered multiple times. Either tell me how I can help you or the phone call is over.

Obviously, she wanted to go above my head to get me in trouble. In my situation, that obviously won't work, but it really pissed me off to think about the fact that this woman was doing this. She was the one who refused to follow our policy about table-grabbing. She got her way. But that wasn't enough for her. She felt embarrassed because I didn't allow her to get her way without pointing out that she was being rude and inconsiderate, so now she was going to try to get the poor counter guy in trouble. The poor counter guy, who was just trying to do his job and ensure that all the customers have a decent chance to have a burger comfortably, is going to, if Rude Woman has any say in it, get written up or maybe even fired for it.

Nice. Really fucking nice. You can't let it go, can you Rude Woman? You got what you wanted, it's all over now, and you're in your car with a stomach full of freshly-ground burgers, hand-cut fries and great shakes, but rather than just be content, you've got to keep pushing it.

So, yeah, I hung up on her. Right in mid-sentence. Click. Bubbye, now!

She called back, of course. Multiple times. But thanks to the wonders of caller id, I could see when it was her and not answer. I let the machine pick it up a few times (after six rings each time--one thing you can damn sure say about Rude Woman, she doesn't give up easily).

I don't have a pithy wrap-up paragraph for this blog post. I'm still hot, although less so now, I suppose, that I've vented this all out. There's no lesson here (except, possibly, don't be an asshole, but don't we all already know that lesson already).

This incident put a real damper on an otherwise great day. We were super-busy, we cranked out tons of great food, and nearly everyone seemed very pleased with their Edzo's experience. So it bums me out that I'm dwelling on this one interaction and letting it get me down. I have very high standards and want every single customer to leave my restaurant super-pleased. Rude Woman didn't, and I suppose that was my fault. I could've done what was necessary to placate her and she would've left super-pleased, but I made a conscious decision not to do so.

Was that the right call? The wrong one? I'm not entirely sure. But it's the one I went with at the moment, and I feel ok about it, even though the incident left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Yesterday was by all measures a fairly normal Tuesday. A welcome respite of a less-busy restaurant after a weekend that included Veteran's Day, and the NU football game/parents weekend combo.

But a sequence of random events happened that got me thinking about blood, and the thought of it as it relates to food and eating. It's a strange and interesting phenomenon how blood is this taboo that repulses people, but they'll gladly eat nearly every other part of whatever animal they're consuming.

There is, of course, a deep multi-cultural history of rituals and beliefs relating to blood and the question of whether to partake of eating/drinking it. Lots has been written, including a really good article in Food Arts by Brad Farmerie.

When customers come into Edzo's and say something about "blood" with regard to the burgers that they're ordering, they're under the impression that the red juice that drips out of a nicely-prepared burger is blood. It's not, of course.

Now, I could try explaining to the guy trying to order a burger "medium, but with no blood" that all the blood is drained from the animal at the slaughterhouse and what he's seeing when he eats his medium burger is mostly just water that resides within the muscle tissue that is subsequently thrown off during the cooking process as the proteins in the meat tighten and shrink, pushing out the moisture.

But that's not very appetizing. So it's kind of a hard situation to handle.

Most of the time, folks that specifically talk about "blood" in their burgers want well-done, so it's not an issue that needs to be grappled with. They're just trying to tell me that they don't want to see any red or pink in their burger. Which, you know, I'm not in love with doing, but I'm happy to oblige for paying customers.

But the "medium, no blood" requests are more difficult. I usually ask something like "so, you want a pink center?", and often the person says "oh, no!", so it's clear that they just don't actually understand what "medium" refers to. Yesterday, a woman asked for "medium, no blood" and when I asked about the pink center, she said "yes", enthusiastically. So I repeated it back to her "You want it pink, but with no blood?"

"Yes," she said.

Ok. I didn't bother trying to delve into the question of what distinction she would make between juice and blood, although I considered it. I just called it out and rung it up as a regular medium char burger.

Coincidentally, this happened at a time when Rob and Allie Levitt from The Butcher & The Larder were in having lunch, so Rob and I were naturally chatting about beef as I bopped around the restaurant doing this and that.

At one point, Rob and I were up by the counter talking, and the "no blood" lady comes up, holding her burger up above the paper tray. It looks awesome and it's just dripping juice, but she's making this "I'm kind of repulsed" face and is clearly not pleased. I try and reassure her that what she's seeing is not blood, but juice, and is a good thing, a sign of how fresh the beef is. I start to swap out her juice-filled paper tray for a new one, and Rob and I chuckle about the fact that her burger was made with beef from Slagel Farm that Rob cut and I ground, and that the animal was alive maybe 5 days ago.

I tried explaining this to the lady in a way that she'd be able to understand, without getting into too much detail. This is an interesting thing that's happened as a result of this recent farm-to-table trend that's happening. Some people aren't quite ready to be so close to their food. Being closer to our food means sometimes seeing stuff that we believe we're supposed to be repulsed by.

If someone truly believes that all moisture in a burger is "blood" and they believe that eating "blood" is repulsive, then they're not going to enjoy a juicy burger. Anyone who's stubbornly forced a kid to eat something and then watched them truly gag on it (or been forced to when they were a kid) knows this.

But other people are ready. Or maybe they're close to being ready, and they just need a bit of education in order to be able to get past their hang-ups. Thankfully, that was the case with yesterday's "no blood" lady. I explained to her about how the Slagel Farm beef we get is free of hormones and antibiotics, and how it's sourced from a local farm that raises the cows using humane, sustainable methods, by a butcher who brings in one or two whole cows a week and cuts the meat himself, in his local butcher shop. And I gave her a brief glimpse into how we take care here in the shop to handle the meat minimally as we cut it, grind it and shape it into half-pound patties, waiting until it hits the fire to season it with just a bit of salt and pepper.

And I explained that all of those factors combined are the reason that the burger has so much juice, which most people see not as repulsive "blood", but as a delicious liquid--almost like a small quantity of freshly-made beef 'stock--that is created during the cooking process, and is something to be savored. I see customers dipping the remnants of their buns into the puddles in the paper trays all the time.

"Give it a minute to rest", I said, as I swapped out her paper tray for a fresh one. "Then cut it in half and take a look inside. If you want me to put it back on the fire and cook it all the way, I'll be happy to do that for you". She did as I suggested, and was over at her table quietly eating for a while. I went back and checked in on her after a bit and she seemed to be enjoying the burger, rosy pink center and all.

So that was nice. I'm not entirely sure if she saw the light, or if she just didn't want to deal with asking me to cook it more. She didn't come up and rave about having a revelation or anything, but I wasn't expecting that. Hopefully she'll be back in soon and it will be interesting to see how she orders her burger next time.

I had a brief encounter with a customer today that has stayed with me.

I work the counter at my restaurant every day and while I do a pretty good job being nice to every customer, I can sometimes be short or impatient with people. I take all the food/drink orders, work the cash register, answer the phones, and expedite the food myself, so it gets hectic at times.

Today a woman walked in--a very short, older black woman with a wild frizz of hair. She looked like she weighed about 88 pounds. Wisp thin, gaunt. She seemed angry and suspicious, and somehow I felt like she was blaming me for whatever it was that she was so upset about.

She was kind of muttering under her breath to herself, and she took a while looking at the menu. I greeted her a couple times and helped a couple other customers while she was figuring out what she wanted.

When she was ready, she began asking me questions very tersely. Almost combative. Her lips were pursed with doubt and pessimism as she asked me what toppings we put on our hot dogs. She appeared to strongly disapprove of the way I quickly ran down the list of classic Chicago hot dog toppings. I got the feeling, via her facial expression, that if she were asked to name one term to describe me, the term she would choose would be "whippersnapper", and her use of that term would not be intended to be ironic. She looked me in the eye very intensely. As if her questions about sport peppers vs. giardiniera were of the utmost import and she had no patience for a fool like me who didn't view them similarly.

Once it became evident that she wanted to order a hot dog, I turned the questions back on her, getting her order ("no mustard. tomato, pickle, sport pepper, celery salt. NO! MUSTARD! understand?") asking her if she wanted fries (no), and then whether she wanted a drink.

She seemed shocked, and personally affronted that I would dare ask such things! My youthful impudence was clearly not appreciated at all. Yet she answered my questions quickly, tersely. Her inquiry about the price of my drink cup ($1.29) and whether said price included free refills (it does) felt downright adversarial. As if she, in the role of a consumer, had been taken advantage of many times in the past by shady soda fountain operators.

At some point in the ordering process, I realized that this was a customer that certainly presented me with the opportunity to lose my patience and become short or rude in my responses to her. But I also realized that I was better served to see it simply as amusing. I took a deep breath and smiled genuinely and answered her questions, resigning myself to kill her with kindness. I asked her what her name was (Helda), which of course led to yet another round of incriminating looks down her nose at me, and then I took her four dollars, returned to her eighteen cents in change, and said "thanks," giving her a big smile.

"When you fix me my drink, I want a Diet Pepsi with ice," she said.

I paused. She said it so disdainfully. Out of the downturned corner of her mouth. Her head casually tossed back, almost as if she was spitting at me as she turned away from the counter.

Now, customers help themselves to soda from the fountain here, but lots of people aren't aware of that, so they ask for "a Sprite, easy ice" or whatever, and I usually just let'em know drinks are self-serve and wave them over to the soda machine where they can help themselves.

Part of me wanted to do that with Helda. But another part of me remembered I was supposed to be killing her with kindness, so I quietly asked Tufo, my batidero, to go get her a Diet Pepsi with ice.

Then, as Helda turned away from the counter, I realized that she was using a walker. Somehow I hadn't noticed this up until that moment. And she was moving incredibly slowly. She headed over to a two-top just opposite the counter where I take customers' orders--only three steps away--but it took her at least three or four full minutes to move herself away from the counter and slowly make her way over to the table and into her seat.

We were busy, so I went right into helping the next customer. Helda got her hot dog and was quiet for a while. I was monitoring her but she seemed content. At one point as I passed by her table, I made eye contact and asked if everything was ok. She gave me a head nod signaling assent.

She stayed for quite a while. Rodolfo bussed her table at one point, I think. Finally, when she got up to leave, she made a point of coming up to the counter and saying how great the hot dog was and that she'll "come back again sometime soon". And she gave me a big smile.

Interactions like this one today with Helda make me happy to be in the restaurant industry. I'm gratified that I was able to improve her mood and hopefully her day, but I'm also grateful for the lessons that I get to take away from how the situation unfolded.