ServSafe / Opening Soon

We disgorged our restaurant experiences for Odds & Ends, and K brought in a hilarious menu from a Manhattan Italian restaurant called 'Fragolino Trattoria', which is run by some Indian folk. Just about every word in the menu was misspelled, such as 'pomomodoro', and the business card scotch taped to the front of the binder didn't help. Another student mentioned that when he went to buy his usual Tropicana OJ, he barely recognized it. As it turns out, Tropicana's parent, Pepsi, pretty much admitted to messing up and plans to revert to the old packaging. I think it looks kinda nice, with the cutesy plastic orange on top, but what do I know, I can't stand the stuff.

We watched a poorly-produced ServSafe video then reviewed a chapter about purchasing and receiving. To boil down 2 hours of blather, here it is straight to yo membrane: inspecting and rejecting inventory as it arrives means big savings and big safety. And meat inspection is mandatory and means the meat is edible, while meat grading speaks only to the quality, and is voluntary. And between you and me and the wall, meat inspection in the USA is Prime-Grade BOOOOOOOOLSH@T, underfunded, understaffed, and gutted by 8 years of Republican 'oversight'. But we're here for culinary management, not culinary politics....

The class ended with a video of "Opening Soon" about a restaurant called the Fork in Seattle. It was kind of annoying, about a fat dude who worked most of his life under his family at a casual, popular eatery, but then his mom died and his girlfriend dumped him, and he went off depressed for 2 years before wiping the Cheetos dust off his t-shirt and starting a new, fine-dining place. He starts with a lot of ideas for (bad) experiments, and sets a date for opening before he can possibly be ready. Drama ensues, and they open up without even having menus printed or glassware. If you believe the editing, they opened and all went great happily ever after.

If you read between the lines, they probably didn't open for at least 2 weeks after the official opening, and a few comments made indicated the budget went from 150K to 185K, until an off-hand comment towards the end revealed the final budget of 300K+. Fat dude started off with all these neauvelle local-organic crazy ideas, but when they did a food-porn montage at the end of the program, ALL of the dishes were standard French-American dishes....which is what sells to his clientele. And to top it all off, according to Richard, he had a student who was familiar with the restaurant, and reported that it closed within a year of its opening...

The video struck home, because in recent weeks I've been spending time at a pizzeria in Brooklyn that's struggling to get open...tomorrow we have a pre-inspection by a DOH expediter to get our certificate of occupancy and license to cook and sell food to the public. I've been writing about it a little on my other blog, and I'm not surprised to tell you that opening a restaurant is more complicated than any 30 minute (minus 10 in commercials) show can really cover.