Odds n' Ends / Restaurant Design / Business Plan Review

To be perfectly honest, I spaced out for most of this class. This is the last week. Monday and Wednesday of next week are business plan presentations, and Wednesday afternoon is graduation. Then we're dun, sun. There is a chance I may be TEACHING a once-a-week culinary class to high school students come Fall, and if that happens, with permission of the organization will be blogging about it here.

Anyway, odds n' ends was dedicated to discussing what we saw at Blue Smoke. Richard levelled with us, saying every time he's eaten there he thought the food was lacking. Once, he brought a management class there for their school dinner and the service and food was so over-the-top poor, the restaurant comped the whole meal and invited them to come back.

It IS a Danny Meyers restaurant, and there is a level of service and precision not expected in other restaurants, especially in a casual concept like Blue Smoke. Still, the employees who work in a place like this are different than one who would work in, say, Union Square Cafe -- Blue Smoke has the highest staff turnover of all of Meyer's restaurants.

Richard also went into a few details of the smokers we saw -- these pieces of equipment are so large and unwieldy, they had to be craned over the entire 15 story building and dropped into the backyard and slid into place. The 15-story exhaust flues that are tacked on to the side of the building needed a number of variances from the Department of Health, Department of Buildings, the condo board and on and on. Regardless, the cost and inconveniences of the smokers were built into the the idea of the restaurant from day 1. Literally, the whole concept is built around these very difficult-to-obtain fixtures.

Most of the day was comparing floor plans, casual versus luxury, and the flow. The story that is told when you first walk in is designed. If the first thing you see is a host and monster bar, that's different that a long hallway that opens up on a maitre'd station and a baby grand piano. The experience is designed.

We reviewed some ADA guidelines (a wheel chair must be able to turn in a 5 foot radius in a rest room) and logic of placement of different stations in a working kitchen. Class wrapped up with Richard showing us his CAD drawings of the coffee shop he once owned and ran, and a review of the excel spread sheets that we will fill in for our business plan finals.

In the evening, the majority of us met up at Peryali in the Flat Iron District for our final meal. It was good, with an obscene amount of wine. Funny how well you get to know people without even being aware of it.