Friday's lunch period did not go well. We only had one server working and one person in the kitchen. Our long term plan was to have two servers and two cooks at lunch every weekday, and we scheduled those extra people starting at the beginning of next week. Since we hadn't advertised heavily that we were open yet, and since we only had three or four customers at lunch on Thursday, we figured that two people could handle any potential customers. Unfortunately, more than forty people showed up for lunch.
Lunch is not a meal where most people like to sit and relax. Our usual goal for lunch at the Olive Branch is to have people seated, place their order, and receive their food within 15 minutes at the very most. Often, for less complex meals, we have have their food on the table within five minutes. This is appreciated by most of our customers, because many are on lunch breaks and cannot afford to sit and wait a long time for their meals. Anyway, because of the large crowd that showed up (with four tables showing up within a couple minutes of each other), we were completely unable to get the meals prepared quickly enough. One larger table in particular, from one of the local businesses and in therefore in a bit of a rush, was especially unimpressed (and justifiably so). Jeff, our server, was of course quite frustrated too, because he is normally able to deal with smaller crowds very well, but he was overwhelmed by the number of people who showed up. Thankfully, this will no longer be a potential problem next week once we have adequate staffing levels in place.
Friday's dinner hour was a completely different story. We had a large number of guests again, but we had three people available in the kitchen and three servers available, so it was very relaxed for the staff and easy to put the meals out quite quickly. Of course, the fact that most people are not in a rush when dining at night also helped. All of our tables in the lower dining room were full for almost the entire night, and the evening went by very smoothly. Hopefully, this is the sign of things to come. Friday evenings will always be our busiest evening, since we offer Happy Hour pricing on alcohol for the entire night, so it was quite reassuring to see that our kitchen could handle a busy night, even though we are still trying to fix several significant kitchen equipment problems.
