Blue, you're my boy!

ho-lee shit.  what a day that was.  ok, so i was supposed to work at nine today so i got up all early and took the bus and was forced into conversation with a deranged old man who absolutely out of the blue says "i'm gonna go see that 3-d movie!  with them blue dudes!" and it took me a second to realize he was talking to me, cause i was looking at the new menu.  and i said "yeah?  you going now?" and he goes "no!"  anyway, yeah, the bus sucks.  nice bus, i guess, but i haven't ridden a bus in years and of course there was a fucking lunatic on it.

k, so i get to work at nine and el chefe is there and it doesn't look at all like a place that's gonna be open in two hours serving food...the bar wasn't stocked at all, the dining room was full of boxes and random shit and not at all put together.  i get to the kitchen and el chefe goes "oh, whoops!  i forgot to call you.  i told everybody else not to come in till noon cause we aren't going to open until five."  which bummed me out considerably but we hung out for a while talking food and finally i was just like "what are you doing now?  can i help?" so i ended up printing out all the menus and chiseling some fucking grout out from around a drain.  i mean chiseling, dude...with a hammer and chisel, and all it was was silicone grout, but it was wicked old.  anyway  we did all that and had planned to start food prep at noon but didn't really get going until two.  and since i was technically only scheduled until five all el chefe was planning on having me do was prep, but i conned my way onto the line for dinner, cause i wasn't about to miss opening day.  the bar got pretty full before we started serving cause it was our floor manager's birthday, and she had a shitload of family and friends come in.  and we were planning on going live at five (haha, that sounds like a news guy) but it wasn't until six we decided to go and right off the bat we had tickets upon tickets upon tickets, and we were all like "ok, who does this and when do we have to start that and do any of us really know the menu or the equipment?"  and for like, a half hour, the answer was a very strong NO.  but we got into the groove, kitchen wise, although it took a little longer to get on the same page as the servers cause for the first time ever for me, i worked from handwritten tickets, and didn't really know the servers names and our window is too small and the heat lamp is too small and we were pounding food into the window and it sat there for too long.  i'm not sweating it at all, and nobody else should, and i promise by this time next week all will be good to go.

anyway, we knocked out dinner, i worked the fryer and the appetizer station.  my folks came in and so did the wife and gator bobb.  took forever for them to get their food, but all were understanding, and most complimentary about the new digs.  i think my dad was honestly impressed.  the new joint is very much a different beast than old joint.  i think the dining room/bar is beautiful.  it was a dining room at six.  it was a bar by 8.  but by that time it was a bar serving pretty good food...

there was a lot going on but one thing that sticks out to me was that when i got to the prep part of the day (i spent almost two hours editing and printing the menus) el chefe and sous chefe were listening to limp bizkit super loud, and i was like "ahhh...i'm home."

i know, the three of us are probably the only three people on the planet who still love limp bizkit, but there ya go...kindred spirits, i tell ya!  this thing is gonna be fucking awesome!

big ups to mushmouth on nailing the major league quote, by the way.  i love that movie.