May 11th, 2021 - Soft Opening by Colin
We're soft open! We opened the restaurant/bar doors for the first time Friday evening.
Friday evening was busy! Saturday was kind of slow and Sunday, Mother's Day, was just about right. We received a lot of positive and constructive feedback and many compliments throughout the weekend.
As expected not everything went smoothly, the grill caught fire and the control knobs all fell off because the plastic inside them started melting. The dishwasher we hired was a no show so I did them myself. I've never washed dishes in a restaurant before, it was fine until the kitchen closed and I suddenly had all their equipment to clean!
The point of sale system was installed at 1pm (that's three hours before we opened) and the configuration was still being tweaked while the servers and barstaff were working. Everyone did an amazing job of working with a payment system they'd never used before; a testament to our great staff and the excellent system. Thank-you to Jon of VersiPOS for driving from Portland, Oregon that morning to install it, and to Bubba and Lyssa and the other staff who made it possible in the incredibly short time we gave them.
There were also serving hickups of course. One poor family were waiting about 45 minutes for their food after the ticket printer in the kitchen ran out of paper and I reloaded it incorrectly. The fantastic new sales system handled it seamlessly by sending the kitchen orders to the bar printer, but due to a lack of training at that time the bar staff didn't realise that they needed to take the tickets to the kitchen. When we eventually realised what was happening the orders got mixed up and made in the wrong order. Sorry again for that!
All things considered (staff that had never worked together, in a restaurant/bar they'd never worked in, with unfamiliar equipment and sales system) I feel like the weekend went amazingly well, and I'm looking forward to Thursday when we open again.
For the moment we're only going to open Thursday and Friday from 4PM, and Saturday and Sunday from noon. Once we have more staff we'll be open more.