bistroJerb

The long slow painful backroad to renewed sentience

/ status report / , , , ,

It’s been a busy week over here:

  • bartendJerb: I was non-ceremoniously put in charge of the winter drinks menu. The previous-previous bar manager neglected to leave his builds behind so… we got to come up with new ones. We think there are two good cocktails, two decent cocktails, and one iffy cocktail. But they’re done and mostly ready for launch barring ingredient availability. Yellow chartreuse is not cheap.
  • mgbarJerb: It is having new-restaurant issues that we personally thought would not happen at all given it is a corporate rim enterprise with many other venues all over the United States. And yet we keep having logistics issues all over the damn place. Also, la barra fue diseñada con las nalgas (designed with the ass cheeks. Pencil held between them). But hopefully we’ll be able to implement changes that will make life easier for our barbacks and our servers.
  • bistroJerb: Gossip says they’re looking for another bar manager. It will be their fifth of this year— just this year. That’s in addition to the slow season coming up for them. The temperature dropped a solid 35 °F from yesterday. The joint is supposed to be featured on a tv show one of these days and bistroBoss is hanging all of his hopes on the business picking up for the business because of it.

All in all it has been busy and we are making money after taking a li’l menty break hiatus over the summer. Our big expense has been going out to eat and drink but we are currently in the process of reconstructing our kitchen space so we can actually cook at volume. The lack of counter space once again comes in to haunt us in our tiny little galley kitchen but… it is much better than the lame tiny space we used to live before.

Slowly we regain the ability to concentrate and think. We lost that for a long, long time. We fucked up a lot of things during that time.

Going to try and do these reports to myself more often. They help to keep track of dates and events.

Fucken drama, seriously

/ rucksack / , ,

So much stuff happens at bistroJerb that I think it’ll just be better for my long-term memory if we dump it on here instead of attempting to remember it all.

In the past week:

  • Monday: no activity, thank gods
  • Tuesday: Four servers hired.
  • Wednesday: GM is out. She’s new to the job and already went off on vacation (she’s coming back but not yet)
  • Thursday: All bartenders are unavailable for me. Full patio buyout, full dining room. bistroBoss understaffed so badly he had to take tables and he absolutely sucks at it. We fang dinner service on our own.
  • Friday: Two people staging cos this is how bistroBoss gets free labor out of everyone that wants employment. Three people are actually training and they’re supposed to be paid for it.
  • Saturday: One of the new hires walks out. One of the bartenders walks out. He was going to pay them both below minimum wage in Minneapolis­— as of July 1st it is $15.57 an hour no matter the size of the employer! We close the bar as the other bartender has a health condition.
  • Sunday: 13 hour shift as there are no other bartenders available.

Every single day the schedule went through multiple changes cos bistroBoss doesn’t know how to use 7shifts. He’s still intent on having a hospitality charge instead of tipping and our guests absolutely hate it.

We have the day off today and we’re being productive, which makes for a nice change. See y’all next week in this post series lmao.

Fucken’a bistroBoss

/ rucksack / , ,

Where to even fucken start, ugh. These past few months have been a whirlwind. And when the wind hits you try your best to keep your head down.

Except we’re too fucken good (and proud of it!) to keep our head down. This has the unfortunate effect of leaving our neck exposed.

But if our head rolls, so will the owner of the restaurant we work at.

We’re the sharp end of the stick. We’re the one cancelling the apocalypse on a regular basis.

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