Let’s check in on my New Year’s To-Do List:
An April Fool’s opening is not happening. That was an extremely wishful, not to say foolhardy, thought, as well as a kick in the pants to the crew. What will happen by April 1 is that the interior of the restaurant will be completed and we will start on the exterior — the parking lot, curbing, landscaping, walk-in fridge, signage.
• Hire a great chef. Almost. Have met with many, eaten with a few, chosen one. We are in the final stages of negotiation. I am keeping my pretzels crossed.
• Stop calling the restaurant “the restaurant” and pick a name. Check. The name is chosen and will be unveiled at the right time (when the trademark and domain name and other legal intricacies are in order).
• Get O.K. for the ramp’s new location. Check. Needs planning board re-approval.
• Build an impressive front door with a peek-in window. Front door is designed and ready to be built.
• Get final inspection for insulation, sprinklers, ducts, electrical, plumbing, fireplace and drywall. Check, check, check, check, check, check and check.
• Drink local white wines. Check. Enjoying Paumanok and Roman Roth.
• Remind the liquor license attorney that time is nigh. Check. License can be issued within one week of restaurant’s physical completion.
• Resubmit application for the health department to install kitchen. Check. Have received conditional approval, which is tantamount to no approval when it comes to building — we can’t start until we get full approval. We now know that everything is right save a problem with the septic system application. Working on it. Will untangle soon.
• Build knee wall for bar and get Liberty Iron to complete Dumpster bar. Check. The metal bar is being welded this very day.
• Have Coca-Cola install the soda equipment for the bar. Coca-Cola is one tough cookie. Hard to reach, hard to pin down and more expensive than any competitor. If rum didn’t need Coke, and if Pepsi didn’t taste like Pepsi, I would have abandoned Coke long ago.
• Decide between Micros and Squirrel as the point-of-sale system. Add Aloha to the mix. All the wiring is in place, the locations of the POS stations are set, and now it all depends on the manager and staff. No sense training everyone on Squirrel if they all know Micros, or vice versa.
• Read Peter Matthiessen’s “Men’s Lives” and Richard Ellis’s
“The Empty Ocean.” Read? What’s that? The crew is on the site at 7:30, and so am I. But the dog needs walking, the bills have to be paid, and there are exit signs to order, water heaters to research, and architects to argue with before 7:30. Oh, yes, the architect is gone. He says I fired him. I say he quit. Anyway, when you rise at 6 a.m. — without an alarm — you get into bed that night and you read the same paragraph as the night before and then you dream of wooden pegs and steel words. The worst part of this whole enterprise is being only half-awake half the time.
• Hire a credit card processing firm. I am still trying to figure out the pros and cons of this move. Some merchants love them, some do not.
• Design a social media strategy with Catch Interactive. Need the name first.
• Line up a staff, from bartenders to waitresses. Not a single hire yet. Haven’t had the time. Hope the chef and manager-to-be will help.
• Take Spanish lessons and write a Spanglish blog post. I am learning on the job. Will take formal lessons this summer. Me prometo.
• Drink more local beer. Check. Enjoying Captain Lawrence, Kelso, Saranac, and Blue Point.
• Put down the reclaimed hemlock floors. Waiting on the floors. The floors are late. What can I do?
• Pour Ardex floors in kitchen and bar area. In the planning stages.
• Go to the movies with lovely wife. Buy tub of popcorn. Saw the Hurt Locker. Edge-of-your-seat thrilling. In my self-absorbed moments, thought it might be a metaphor for building a restaurant. Land mines and explosives are around every corner, under old floorboards, and foes look like friends and friends like foes, and when you finally finish your tour of duty, when the project is over, you swear you’ll never do it again, and you return to normal life and realize you miss the risk, the adrenalin, the challenges, and you decide to re-up and do the whole dumb thing again. God bless us.
• Clad the walls with recycled hemlock from pickle barrels. Check. Sort of. The pickle barrel wood retains a faint scent, like cedar, and would interfere with dinner, so they are the wainscoting in the lavatories and provide a natural deodorant.
• Listen to “The Needle Drop” on NPR to catch up on new music. New music? What’s that?
• Build five booths with approved railroad ties. Hang pendant lights above bar and tables. Hang chandeliers. To be done.
• Purchase used kitchen equipment, plates, pots, pans, chairs and tables. Got wait stations and chairs. Still hunting.
• Join a gym. Go to gym. Moving wood all day is all the exercise I can handle.
• Import organic soil from East Hampton and plant the vegetables and herbs in the garden adjacent to the restaurant. See previous post, “About That Garden…“
• On Sunday, April 4, drive into the city for fantasy baseball draft. It will be nice to see old friends and totally forget about constructing a restaurant — until someone bids on Kerry Wood. And Kevin Millwood. And Taylor Teagarden. And, lest we forget, A-Rod!
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