The Olive Branch - Restaurant Makeover

The Gourmet Brigade

2009-02-17T10:23:00.002-04:00

On Monday, March 2nd, the Olive Branch will be presenting "Beauty as Sacrifice," a special evening with our guest chef team, The Gourmet Brigade. The Gourmet Brigade has presented special dining events at many of the best restaurants and facilities in Atlantic Canada. This will be a six course journey in eight parts.

Tickets are available at Olive branch and at the Fine Arts Office in the Gardiner building on Mount Allison campus.

60$ per ticket - 60 person maximum. Wine pairings are available separately.
For more information, contact Jon Cleveland via email or at 506-939-2223.

The evening's menu:

Amuse-bouche

1. Oyster served in half shell w/ white wine braised brunoise shallots topped with a melon gel.

2. Tarragon scented Halibut with pureed beets and blood orange foam.

3. "Chicken pot pie" with apple and rosemary ricotta.

Palette cleanser - "shot of salad."

4. Chilled sweet pea soup with warm applewood smoked bacon and marscapone cheese.

5. Rootbeer glazed beef, roasted baby potatoes lighty splashed with rosemary infused duckfat.

6. Warm butter biscuits with peaches, spiced chocolate sauce, and creme fresh.

Pick up your tickets now, so you won't miss out on this evening to remember.

Lunch Time Hours and Specials

2009-01-28T01:25:00.004-04:00

Now that the weather is about to start getting better, we're starting to expand our day-time operations again.

Effective starting this week, we are now going to open on Saturday afternoons starting at 11:30am. This means that we'll be offering lunches five days per week - every day except Sundays and Mondays.

We're also bringing in five amazing lunch specials to impress our customers. These items are all priced on the regular menu at between approximately $10 and $12 each, but we're offering them from noon until 2pm for only $6.99. Each day is a specific special, which lets us concentrate on getting food out quickly. Each special is also a "hearty" special which will fill up any hungry diner. Here's a run-down of what we'll be offering each day:

Tuesdays: Italian Lasagna with Garlic Bread.

Wednesdays: Pasta Alfredo (Penne or Linguine with Bechemel Sauce) with Chicken and freshly grated Parmesan Cheese.

Thursdays: "Sub & Soup" - any oven-baked Submarine Sandwich (your choice of five subs that we offer) plus a small Tomato Bread Soup or small Seafood Chowder.

Fridays: Linguine Pasta with Marinara Sauce and freshly grated Parmesan Cheese.

Saturdays: Any 9-Inch Pizza with cheese and three toppings of your choice.

We're pretty sure that you'll love these new specials! And for our regular customers who are accustomed to taking advantage of our special "lunch combo deal," don't worry. We're still offering the lunch combo as a backup special.

We look forward to serving our lunch-time customers in the coming months!

Wine Appreciation for Beginners

2009-01-20T22:21:00.004-04:00

I was going through some old videotapes this past weekend, looking for a specific tape for a video project that I was working on, when I found some of my old "wine appreciation" series video masters. I realized that with the advent of YouTube, it would be quite easy to publish these videos for the world to see, so I got them all prepped and online earlier today.

The original intent for this project was to be able to present inexperienced wine drinkers with the basic information about wine that would make them comfortable in selecting and assessing different brands of wine. Learning about wine is actually fairly easy, and tasting different brands can obviously be pretty fun, so it was a worthwhile project to put together.

The videos have basically been broken down into a series of beginners, intermediate, and advanced wine education topics. The basic videos are all available online right now, with nine separate segments totalling just over an hour in length. We haven't quite finished filming the intermediate and advanced videos, but we did all the prep work for them, so hopefully I'll find some time to make those videos available soon too. Please click here for more detailed information about what is being presented. Or if you don't need the written reference material, just grab a bottle of wine and watch any of the videos listed below!

Basic Wine Information, Part 1
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLVnLf5ee_4

Basic Wine Information, Part 2
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kzdB_Lo434

Basic Wine Information, Part 3
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRS5J7Q4YMg

Basic Wine Information, Part 4
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEZdo5Tqio

Basic Wine Information, Part 5
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p67Q7YifGVw

Basic Wine Information, Part 6
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji66hK5uZQY

Basic Wine Information, Part 7
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieHlLS0u-E4

Basic Wine Information, Part 8
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi5X5Ob7aNM

Basic Wine Information, Part 9
YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqA0DM-T_Q

Lots of New Improvements

2008-12-02T22:36:00.002-04:00

October proved to be a very busy month for us, and we didn't have time to make much progress with further renovations. However, the restaurant industry is traditionally slower in November through February, and November afforded us a chance to tackle a large number of additional projects. Among other things, we got the following projects done:

- Cleaned and organized the back storage room.
- Ran a new condensation drainage line in the walk-in, so the floor stays dry.
- Braced the produce shelves in the walk-in.
- Fixed the shower in the staff washroom.
- Added several more cameras to our video surveillance system.
- Installed new lights in the pizza station.
- Bought a couple thousand dollars of additional new dishes, so we can handle larger groups and parties.
- Changed some of our propane feed lines.
- Changed the seals in the dishwasher.
- Installed an extra microwave.
- Built a lid organizer, because we always have dozens of container lids floating around the kitchen.
- Installed a couple of new paper towel dispensers in the kitchen.
- Installed a lot of white Christmas lights and garland throughout the restaurant dining room. Most of those will come down after Christmas, but a few strings are going to be left up permanently because they enhance the normal day-to-day lighting.
- Installed a second open sign in the north portion of our front windows (plus white lights), so it is more obvious when the restaurant is open.
- Added more floor mats in the front entry, so none of our customers slip when the weather is inclement and the entryway gets wet.
- Built a movable temporary stage, for special events like Improv nights and Acoustic shows. Storage for these stage pieces is going to be a problem, but we think that we can make them look like extra bookshelves and stand them up in the back hallway when they aren't in use.
- More improvements to the lighting restaurant lighting.

We also started on a few other projects which aren't quite finished yet. Once those are done, it's going to feel strange to have our "never ending" list of projects whittled down to nothing.

Late September Renovation Progress

2008-09-28T19:49:00.001-03:00

We've gotten a lot more small tasks accomplished in the past two weeks.

Last week, we had the provincial Health Inspector into the restaurant. I did a walk-around with him, and he had a number of suggestions to improve our operations. Since a number of rules and regulations have changed over the summer, the visit was very helpful. For instance, he said that he didn't want to see us storing jugs of bleach on the floor, and they should be on a raised shelf, at least six inches above the floor. He also suggested additional shelving in other areas, and gave us some documentation templates to help improve our organization of our regular cleaning schedule. He came back to visit us again, five days later, and said that he was quite impressed with all of the changes that we made.

Here's a brief list of some of the things that we've accomplished in the past two weeks:
- New spray head on dishpit sink.
- New shelving in staff washroom.
- New "collection rack/holder" for notes and paperwork that gets left for the Manager and myself.
- Extra order rack in the kitchen to hold the servers' meal orders.
- New six-inch shelving under the dish pit, for the bleach and floor cleaners.
- New six-inch shelving in our dough-making section, for the canola buckets.
- New six-inch shelving in the recyclables area.
- New six-inch shelving in our back dry-goods storeroom.
- New six-inch shelving for the kegs in our walk-in cooler.
- New brass coat-hanger installed on one of the pillars in the main dining room.
- Staff washroom door lock replaced.
- New painting of some sections of back dry-goods storage area.
- Minor equipment rearranging in the kitchen to permit a third large garbage can.

My list of "things to do" is getting smaller. Right now, there are only about forty projects on it, so I hope to have almost all of those completed by the end of October. I am looking into selling the restaurant, now that it is running much more smoothly and with higher revenues than at the old location. Before I do that, I want to get everything "ship shape" in the coming months. I'm not in a rush to sell it, but because of changing circumstances in my other job at Mount Allison University, I am looking into moving back out to the West Coast eventually to take advantage of a job opportunity there.

Little Repairs

2008-09-07T17:59:00.002-03:00

We've got a long list of small repair projects that could be done to improve the efficiency of operations at the restaurant. It will probably take until Christmas until they are all done, but if we can accomplish two or three per week, we'll get through the list eventually.

Projects that we completed in the past week include:
- Removed the CO2 tank pressure system for the draught and installed a permanent compressor setup, so we won't ever have to change C02 canisters in the middle of a shift.
- Installed a drain under the servers' ice sink. Up until now, the melting ice drained into a bucket that we had to empty every day.
- Fixed the drainage problem with one of our upright coolers.
- Fixed the drainage problem with our ice machine, so the ice is less watery and doesn't melt as quickly.
- Installed a 65-pint dehumidifier in the kitchen. That's not nearly enough to keep up with the demands of the kitchen when it's running at full-tilt, but at least it's enough to get some of the moisture out of the air overnight.
- Fixed the lights in the washrooms.

Summer Progress

2008-09-06T15:48:00.004-03:00

With Jonathan away for the summer, working on Canada's west coast, the renovations and upgrades to the new Olive Branch were mostly put on hold for several months. However, a couple of projects got started:

After our earlier frustrations with Irving Propane, Amanda Francis (our restaurant Manager) did some investigating and had meetings with another Moncton company, MPS propane. The end result was that we recently switched propane suppliers. MPS came and switched out the Irving tanks, and then installed their own tanks. Our first bill came through recently, and we had been paying about $1.02 per litre for propane from Irving. Our cost through MPS was only 72 cents per litre! That's going to save us a LOT of money over the course of a full year. Their service has been absolutely great, and we highly recommend them if you've got a need for propane in southeastern New Brunswick. Their phone number is 506-855-8459, and they are located at 968 Salisbury Road.

We also applied to the town to get permission to build a sidewalk patio. This was a huge project, which took us much longer to put into motion than we had expected. We started the initial planning and application process in March. It had to receive approvals from several entities within the town and province, so it quickly became obvious that the project could not be completed before Jonathan went out west for the summer. Kasie Morris, one of our restaurant assistants, was given the responsibility for the entire project. The Town approved the idea fairly quickly, by early June. However, at this point, Ducky's became involved. Ducky's was also interested in a sidewalk patio, and since the two businesses have worked so well together in the past, we decided to turn the project into a sort of joint effort. The drawback was that this required additional adjustments to our application, and further approval from the Town. The Town was able to grant that approval five or six weeks ago. At that point, all we needed was a construction contractor to finish submitting official blueprints, and then to construct the patio. That's where things stand right now, because we've found that it's impossible to find such a contractor who has free time to finish the project for us. Considering how late in the year it is, we probably won't be able to get the patio up and running at this point. However, on a very positive note, we'll be able to secure a commitment from a contractor this winter, and we'll be able to get our patio up quickly and early for the summer of 2009, so all the effort this summer wasn't a waste of time.

Now that Jonathan is back, you'll see more posts to this blog occasionally, as we complete dozens of additional small projects that are on our list of "things to do."

Grand Reopening Weekend

2008-03-03T16:12:00.004-04:00

The Olive Branch has been open in its new location for about six weeks now, and to celebrate, we're going to have a "Grand Reopening Weekend" theme this coming weekend. After six weeks of practice, we think we are finally ready to host this series of events - we've worked out a lot of the initial kinks in the kitchen and dining room so that we should be able to handle three extremely busy nights back-to-back, without encountering too many problems.

This special theme weekend does not mean that the restaurant is finally "complete" - in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. We still have a list of small jobs and tasks that we want to do in the near future, and that "things to do" list has almost a hundred separate items on it. Thankfully, a number of those items aren't overwhelming, and quite a few of them can be done in only a couple hours each. However, there are a couple dozen items left that are still fairly major, such as the installation of the track lighting in the ceiling, work on ceiling tiles, work on electrical issues in the kitchen, etc.

For this weekend, we are hosting three special events:

Thursday, March 6th: "Pizza and Pitcher Night."
On Thursday night, starting at 5pm, any time that someone buys a pitcher of Rickard's Red or Rickard's White Ale at regular price, you have the option of getting a twelve-inch pepperoni & cheese or mushroom & cheese pizza for only $1.50 more. In other words, you can get a pitcher of premium draught AND a twelve-inch pizza for only $14.99 plus tax. We will be open late (until approximately midnight) on Thursday night. Alcohol will be served to 19+ only, so please bring government photo ID.

Friday, March 7th: "Conduct Becoming Acoustic Show."
Starting at approximately 9:30pm on Friday evening, three separate acts will be performing acoustic shows at the Olive Branch. All three of these acts will also be appearing on this year's upcoming Conduct Becoming album. The musicians will be performing in the Rickard's Room, therefore, we will not be taking any seatings in the Rickard's Room after 7:30pm, to ensure that the room is empty by the time that the musicians need to set up at 9pm. The performances will last from approximately 9:30pm to midnight, and there will be no cover charge. However, it will be possible for guests to make donations which will go directly to the Conduct Becoming organization, to help raise funds for research in the fight against cancer. Happy Hour prices will be in effect all evening, and again, alcohol will only be served to 19+ customers with government photo ID.

Saturday, March 8th: "Cosmo & The Nicorettes."
Starting at approximately 9:30pm on Saturday evening, this well-known local jazz group will take the stage. Admission to this show will be $5, which goes to the performers. The musicians will be performing in the Rickard's Room, therefore, we will not be taking any seatings in that area after 7:30pm, to ensure that the room is empty by 9pm, in time to set up for the show. The performance will last from approximately 9:30pm until midnight.

Seating will be extremely limited this weekend. We have been running at or near capacity on every Friday night and most Saturday nights, so we highly recommend that you make reservations in advance to avoid disappointment. Our restaurant capacity, even with the expanded dining room, will not be nearly large enough to accommodate everyone who wants to come to these events. Call 506-536-0409 to make your reservations.

Mike Allison CD's

2008-02-22T20:07:00.003-04:00

Mike Allison is a New Brunswick singer/songwriter who went to Mount Allison University, and who has also performed at the Olive Branch several times.

Recently, we helped him release a new CD, entitled "Tilting At Windmills." This CD includes a new song ("When I Grow Old") which is currently climbing up the Canadian radio charts, and it also has several of Mike's other songs which have been released over the past several years. So in some ways, it is a mix of new hits and past favorites. There is even a live song at the end of the CD which was originally recorded one of the evenings that he performed at the Olive Branch.

Here's a link to the video for "When I Grow Old," as posted on YouTube:

You may hopefully see this video appearing on MuchMusic and other national media outlets in the near future. The video stars several people who are directly or indirectly associated with either the Olive Branch Restaurant or with Mount Allison University. As a hint, the "grown-up" couple in the video are Robert Campbell, the President of Mount Allison University, and his wife Christl.

Copies of the "Tilting At Windmills" CD are now available for sale at the Olive Branch, and are just $10.00 each (this is the price with HST included). We hope that many of our customers will be interested in purchasing a copy of this CD, and we certainly hope that you enjoy Mike's music. The entire CD is a mix of Canadian folk music and indie soft rock, so it should appeal to a variety of tastes.

Rickard's White Ale

2008-02-14T16:14:00.002-04:00

Our dual draught tower was installed yesterday, so we finally have Rickard's White Ale draught available on tap. I suspect that it will be quite popular. It is traditional to serve a glass of Rickard's with a slice of orange.

Baked Cheesecakes

2008-02-08T10:55:00.000-04:00

When we moved the restaurant, we had to go through a lot of steps to get the propane up and running again. During that process, there were provincial inspectors involved to make sure that all of the pipes and regulators and pressures were according to regular standards. However, despite all of our propane infrastructure being properly set up, we had major problems with our propane range for the first couple weeks of opening. We were getting a lot of yellow flame at the top of our burner tips, for the first time, and our ovens seemed to be extremely hot, and were burning all of our cheesecakes. We tried turning the temperatures down, but that didn't really seem to help.

We finally put a high temperature thermometer into the ovens after several days of experimenting, to see exactly how hot they were running. With the oven set at 250 Celcius, the thermometer read somewhere well over 400 degrees. With this scientific confirmation of our estimate that the oven was too hot, we eventually discovered that the regulator on the back of the stove was broken. We ordered a new one.

The new regulator arrived earlier this week, and now the stove is only running about fifty degrees hotter than before. That's still not perfect, but it's good enough for us to make it work. Amanda Purdy started in on the cheesecakes with a couple of successful test runs earlier in the week, and yesterday she was able to go into normal production. We make cheesecakes on an almost daily basis, so some days, she has to make as many as half a dozen cheesecakes, to get us through the busiest nights. Our customers are pretty happy that we have cheesecakes available again, finally.

Contest Winners Announced

2008-02-06T11:43:00.001-04:00

We had a flood of emails in our online Grand Reopening contest. The following were the four winners of our contest:

01. Laurie Miller
02. George Chapman
03. Kirk Estabrooks
04. Sophie Blaquiere

Each of these winners will receive a complimentary dinner for two persons, including soup or salad, appetizer, entree, dessert, and non-alcoholic beverages. The dinners will be intended for our Grand Reopening night, but could also be used any other night instead. We still have not yet picked the appropriate date for our Grand Reopening, but it should be within the next few weeks, once we have a few more kinks worked out in the kitchen.

Thanks to everybody who took the time to write to us!

Managing Traffic Levels

2008-02-05T13:58:00.000-04:00

Now that the restaurant has been open for a couple of weeks, we're starting to get a better feeling for our day-to-day operations. We've had four separate incidents where I was not happy with the customer service that we were able to provide (due to our ability to handle time pressures, not due to our servers!). However, each of the four incidents (two individual incidents, and two "rush period" slowdowns) proved to be a good learning experience for us.

Last Friday was especially interesting. Thankfully, a lot of people had made reservations, so we knew roughly how busy we would be, and when the staff should be arriving. We had a total of seven people working, which seemed a lot since we used to do our busiest Friday nights with only two servers and two people in the kitchen. However, it turned out that seven people were necessary.

The night went exceptionally smoothly, for the most part, although meals were coming out 5-10 minutes slower than we preferred. However, one important table (a large group of our regular customers who had a reservation for 5:30pm) had to wait FAR too long for their food. The problem was that five orders came into the kitchen within the space of about three minutes, and theirs happened to be the last (and quite complex, because it was a big table).

We sat down the next day and tried to analyze the reservation pattern and the times that all meals went into the kitchen (we record all of this information to the minute), and started to work on some process efficiencies which will hopefully mitigate this sort of problem in the future. We can never eliminate the problem entirely, but we are making some changes to ensure that this happens far less frequently.

Every day is a new learning experience. Friday turned out to be our biggest sales day ever, but we still have to learn to be able to handle even larger crowds. One of our first priorities will be to improve a few key bottleneck areas in the kitchen.

Food In Ducky's

2008-02-01T13:15:00.000-04:00

We reached another milestone last night when we served our first orders of food in Ducky's bar, next door to the Olive Branch. We are starting to make food available there between opening and midnight, every night of the week except Sundays. Depending on demand, we might eventually extend the hours on Fridays and Saturdays so that we can serve until 2am, when the bar closes.

The menu for Ducky's is limited. We thought about it for quite a while. We needed to pick items that retain their heat well, are suitable for "delivery" packaging, and which are good snacking food for typical bar patrons. To start, we decided to include nachos, bruschetta, pizza, garlic fingers, salads, and oven-baked subs. Salads seem a little bit out of place on that list, but I want to have a healthy alternative available, especially for when business groups come in for drinks after work on Thursdays and Fridays. If there are eight or ten people in a group like that, chances are high that one or two would like to stay away from fattening foods. My guess is that the most popular items will be nachos and garlic fingers. I'm hoping that our bruschetta proves to be pretty popular too, because I think we make a fantastic bruschetta, while our pizzas and garlic fingers are only average (although we're practicing with those a lot, and quickly getting better). Ultimately though, my goal was never to be a pizza shop (especially since there are four others in town - and our town is so small that we only have two traffic lights). We have pizza on the menus because so many people ask for it, but it isn't something that we'd ever focus on as a core product.

Anyway, getting food in Ducky's will be simple. We have laminated menus which will be left on all the tables. When someone is hungry, they just order the item from the Ducky's server and pay for it right there on the spot (which goes into our separate cash register), then the server calls the order over, and our staff deliver the food right to the table once it's ready.

The only slight confusion right now is that our prices have HST added on top, like most businesses. However, Ducky's customers are used to "tax-included" prices on drinks, like most bars. Hopefully the distinction is pretty clear on the menus, and people don't get too confused.

Stereo System is Working Now

2008-01-29T23:22:00.000-04:00

We took advantage of being closed on Monday (due to the weather) to finally wire in the stereo system. It took me six or seven hours, with a lot of help from Jeff, to get the entire system wired through the drop ceiling and working properly. However, on a positive note, I managed to get all eight speakers installed and working, not just the four that we had already hung up earlier this month. After testing the sound levels, it seems fairly consistent throughout the restaurant, so customers should not notice any problems. You would think that for a stereo system, it would be good if customers noticed it, but the opposite is true - people generally only notice the background music when there is something wrong with it (unless, of course, there is a song playing that they like).

Emphasizing Reservations

2008-01-27T13:32:00.000-04:00

We need to emphasize the ability to make reservations in our advertising for the next while, so we can better plan for our traffic levels.

On Saturday night, we were not much busier than we normally used to be on a decent Saturday at the old restaurant. However, a lot of people showed up almost at the same time, earlier than normal, because of the musical at the University. We didn't have very many reservations in advance, so we didn't get a very good sense of the rush that we were about to get. Anyway, for the amount of sales that we did, it would have been pretty easy for the two cooks if it was spread out over two to three hours, but since it all happened in not much more than an hour, they were quite overwhelmed.

In terms of seats, our dining room is not a lot larger now than it was at the old restaurant. Right now, excluding the sofas, our main lower dining room and coffee lounge have a total of 43 table seats, compared to 34 at the old restaurant. I'm not counting the semi-private Rickard's Dining Room (the raised area) because we only open that for reservations most nights, so we bring extra staff in accordingly. Since we don't have many more seats than at the old restaurant, and since we seem to be getting quite a bit busier, I have a feeling that people will naturally start making more reservations, to guarantee better seats when they come in to dine.

If you'd like to make a reservation, our number is 506-536-0409. We make reservations for everywhere from 20 minutes to two months in advance. The only restriction is that to reserve the Rickard's Room, we need 24 hours advance notice.

Plumbing Problems

2008-01-26T22:18:00.001-04:00

Well, we ran into our first plumbing problems yesterday, with drainage issues associated with the kitchen sinks and dishwasher. I expected that we'd run into some equipment and infrastructure problems in these first couple weeks, so I wasn't too surprised to hear about it. Naturally, as Murphy's law would suggest, it started to become a problem right at the start of a really busy Friday evening, when the kitchen staff had the least amount of time to deal with it.

Website Online Again, with Contest

2008-01-24T16:12:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, I got our website online again, rather than having users taken directly to this blog. Of course, I'm going to keep this blog available as a link from the main website for the future, as a reference/history, and I suspect I'll keep writing in it for at least a couple more weeks as we try to finish upgrades and maintenance related to our move.

I went through and tried to update as much of the site as possible when I was working on it yesterday. I still need to get better photos of the front of our new building (preferably after I paint the top of the entryway, so it looks better). I also need to go through and make some major revisions to the staff page, with photos for the few people who are missing, and biographies updated.

Finally, I went through the online menus page, and cross-referenced it to a copy of our new printed menus. I'm glad that I did. In the process of updating the online version, I found approximately 15 more minor mistakes in our printed version. I thought that was pretty incredible, especially since both Alison and myself, and two of the other staff members, went through the printed version with a fine-tooth comb after we printed the first test copy. None of the mistakes is very major, but there are enough of them that when I get back to Sackville (I'm working in Edmonton for a couple days right now), I'm going to completely reprint the menus.

I also decided to put together a small contest, since it seems that a lot of people have been following our ongoing process by reading this blog regularly. I put a notice on the main page of our regular site (www.TheOlive.ca) to let people know how to enter. We're going to be having a Grand Reopening night or weekend coming up in a few weeks, once most of the rest of the fixit jobs are done, and so for the contest, we're giving away a total of four complimentary dinners for two, which will be valid on the Grand Reopening Weekend.

New Sign Out Front

2008-01-23T15:06:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, it was snowing pretty hard in the afternoon, but we were still able to hang a sign on the front of the building so people are more aware of where we are. The roof of the entryway still needs some serious work with repainting and boxing in the hole, which I hope to address next week, but at least for now people will see our name over the front door.

We had another smooth lunch hour on Tuesday, despite a relatively large number of customers compared to what we're used to. It's so much easier dealing with bigger tables now that there are four people working for the busy period, from 11:30am to 1:30pm. The most significant issue that we decided to resolve at lunch was that we're going to start serving dinner rolls with our chowder and Mediterranean chili, rather than slices of bread.

Food Health Inspection

2008-01-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

The Health Inspector stopped by on Monday afternoon. We needed to mount a sanitizer dispenser properly, but that was the only significant problem. Thankfully, the kitchen seems to be coming together nicely, although it has become apparent that we're going to need a few new pieces of equipment as soon as I can afford them.

Our first lunch with two servers and two cooks went by extremely smoothly. It wasn't extremely busy, and with four people working, the pace seemed very relaxed. By late afternoon, we even managed to have the 2nd last menu item available that we've been waiting on - French onion soup. I think the only thing that is on the menu right now that we still can`t serve is Rickard`s White Ale. We actually have the White Ale kegs, but our draught tower only has a single tap. Hopefully we`ll have our double-tap tower installed early next week.

Art For The Walls

2008-01-21T17:05:00.000-04:00

The pieces of art were flowing into the restaurant on Sunday, after a judging for the initial round of submissions earlier in the week. Jessica Chapman is working as our official Art Coordinator, and with the help of several other fine arts students, and Alison (our own Manager) she was able to supervise the hanging of a large number of items on Sunday morning and afternoon.

We still have to wait to get track lighting installed to highlight the walls better (which will probably not happen for a couple more weeks), but even so, the restaurant is really starting to look a lot better now with the additional color on the walls.

Menus Reprinted

2008-01-20T13:21:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, we finally managed to get the menus reprinted. We haven't made a lot of major changes to the content (although we will be experimenting with new dishes constantly over the coming months), but there have been a number of small changes:

- Added French Onion soup.
- Added two more varieties of white wine by the bottle (Turning Leaf Chardonnay & Pieroth Blue).
- Added two more varieties of red wine by the bottle (Francois de Blossac Pinot Noir and Santa Carolina Arresti Merlot).
- Integrated the lunch menus into the main menu, with some of the specific lunch items being available until 4pm weekdays. Most of the dinner items will therefore now be available during lunches for people who are looking for a more upscale meal (with the exception of pizzas, which are prepared in a special oven and which will not be available until 4pm daily).
- Removed 15-inch pizzas from the menus - nobody ever ordered them, and our kitchen was not very good at making them.
- Added a new type of `suggested pizza` to the list of special suggestions: the Parisian, which has Bechemel (white) sauce, spinach, mushrooms, and parmesan cheese.
- Removed Alfredo sauce from the menu, and replaced it with Bechemel. The `white` sauce that we make is the same, it`s just that we`ve been calling it by the wrong culinary term for the past year or two. We may as well try to use the proper kitchen terminology, rather than American slang versions.
- Changed the name of our Chicken Cannelloni dish to Chicken Manicotti, since we actually use Manicotti noodles, rather than Cannelloni tubes.
- Added a special section to the menu to let people know about the artwork on the walls, with contact info for artists who might potentially want to display their work.
- Added a special section to talk about special dietary options, especially for people with gluten allergies. Our kitchen has always been pretty happy to try to tailor-make dishes with special dietary requirements, although we wanted to make that more obvious to our customers.
- Integrated the alcohol menus into the back of the main menus, so people can see the extensive lists of cocktails, martinis, and specialty coffees that we offer.
- Added Sangria to the menus (red wine, orange juice, soda water, sugar, and fresh fruit).

That`s pretty good for starters, and it`s nice not to have to hand out our old menus anymore. Now we just need to keep practicing, so we can add some more new food choices in the near future.

Friday Lunch and Dinner Reviews

2008-01-19T19:58:00.000-04:00

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.

Liquor License Approval

2008-01-19T00:15:00.000-04:00

On Thursday, the big news was that our liquor license came through! That was the last major licensing hurdle to overcome. I'm really quite thankful that the NBLLB was able to process most of the paperwork over the past several weeks, so that once an inspector came to measure out the premises, the rest of the paperwork was extremely fast.

We had a few more customers trickling in on Thursday - about three or four at lunch, and almost a dozen in the evening. Although it was a slow start, I was still happy with those traffic levels, as all of the staff were worried about what would happen if we got too many people too quickly. An article came out in the Argosy (the student newspaper at the university), to say that we'd be open by the weekend, so we spent Thursday actually enjoying the quiet and bracing ourselves for the crowds to come.

In the evening, we had a social gathering after the dinner hour (no meals, just some appetizer trays) and we were able to take some good photos that we hope to use to augment our portfolio for the Eastlink Cable advertising.

Open For Business!

2008-01-17T13:19:00.000-04:00

Well, we finally re-opened the restaurant last night, quietly and with as little fanfare as possible. We need a couple days to ease back into things before we are able to effectively handle crowds. We will therefore keep the scale of operations pretty small over the next week, with only the lower dining room and the coffee lounge open at the moment.

Starting on Monday, January 28th, we will have the Rickard's Room (upper dining room) available for bookings. Groups of fifteen or more will be able to reserve that room at any time, at no cost (reservations must be made at least 24 hours in advance). As an extra bonus, the groups will receive Happy Hour pricing on the alcohol that they order with their meals, regardless of whether or not it is Happy Hour in the rest of the restaurant. This means cocktails and mixed drinks for $2.21 each, instead of the regular price of $3.99, and large 20-ounce glasses of Rickard's Red or Rickard's White for $3.49 instead of $4.99. The room is also semi-private, and there will be curtains set up shortly which can isolate the room somewhat from the rest of the dining room. The Rickard's Room will not be available for general walk-in seating, except every Friday night, our busiest night, when the entire restaurant gets Happy Hour prices all night long.

Starting on Tuesday, January 29th, we will be offering food for sale in Ducky's, the Pub located next door. For February through April, our test period, we will keep our kitchen open until midnight every night of the week except Sundays, specifically to serve patrons at Ducky's (our dining room will still close at 9pm nightly). Our full menu will not be available - instead we will be putting together a special menu of items that would be popular among Ducky's customers.

Over the next two weeks, we certainly still have a lot of small jobs to take care of before we feel like we are "fully open." For instance, at the moment, I need to get the stereo wired up, new menus printed, ceiling tiles finished in the dining room, and most of the display artwork has not been collected yet. These are the four most obvious deficiencies for people sitting in the dining room, and these are obviously four of the biggest priorities on my list of remaining tasks (which unfortunately still has about a hundred items on it).

By the end of this weekend, we'll have our regular website back online, with all necessary updates and menu revisions. We'll also be having an official grand opening in a couple weeks, once things are running smoothly and we know that we can adequately handle capacity crowds.

Trial Runs in the Kitchen

2008-01-16T13:00:00.000-04:00

Tuesday was a chaotic day. I had a list of about thirty jobs that I wanted to try to get finished by 5pm. At 3pm, I had two of those jobs crossed off my list. However, several of the other staff members came in at 5pm, and within an hour, we had another dozen items crossed off. Among other things, we got the following jobs done:

- Put up a shower-rod and a curtain on the front kitchen entrance, so the light from the kitchen won't be so distracting in the dining room.
- Put the final coat of brown paint on several sections that needed touch-ups.
- Steam-cleaned the carpets.
- Hooked up the Interac machine.
- Hooked up the cash register and tested it to make sure that it still worked (this is the old machine - we hope to buy a better register within the next month or two).
- Hung all of our licenses and certificates for public display.
- Cut door keys for the staff members that required them.
- Did touch-up painting on the beige in several spots (there is still more touch-up painting to be done, but we'll get to that over the next week or so).
- Fixed the coffee machine.
- Installed one of our open signs, which Randy wired up after supper.

We also laid out all of the tables in the main lower dining room, in preparation for our first trial runs.

At about 7pm, we invited most of the staff members to bring in a guest or two apiece, for a small trial run of the kitchen. Tiffany and I wanted to get practice making a dozen meals or so, to let us start to discover any equipment problems in the kitchen that we had missed. However, far more people showed up than I had invited, so our "small trial run" turned into complete chaos. We got through it eventually, with the help of several of the off-duty staff members (thanks especially to Ali & Sarah & Emily), but it wasn't what I had intended for our first test of the equipment. One consolation, however, was that we at least discovered several problems in the kitchen that I'll have to rectify before we open to the public.

Fire Marshall Inspection

2008-01-15T14:43:00.001-04:00

Monday was an extremely busy day. A food order arrived at 10am, which I had placed under the assumption that we might be able to open this week. I didn't order much produce, just in case, but I ordered all of the dry goods and non-perishables that we would need. Tiffany came in and started prepping some of the less expensive foods that we would need if we got permission to open within the next few days.

After lunch, the Fire Marshall inspector showed up. He was pretty careful when looking at everything - not surprising, considering that half of the block burned down just over a year ago, on a property beside us, owned by the same landlords (click here to see footage that I filmed from that fire). Anyway, after a lengthy inspection, he declared that we were permitted to open to the public, as soon as I fixed a number of small problems (such a moving fire extinguishers to better locations, and preparing a Fire Safety Plan). As soon as the Inspector left, I sent the staff an email to say that we were in business, and I immediately started working on the deficiencies that the Inspector had pointed out.

After supper, we had a staff meeting to go over planning for the rest of the week. We need to do some practice runs with the kitchen before we open to the public. With any luck, we should be open to the public by this weekend. There still isn't any indication of when we might get approved for our liquor license, but now that the Fire Marshall inspection is complete, I hope the liquor license will be approved fairly quickly.

Menu Revisions

2008-01-14T09:45:00.000-04:00

Sunday was another quiet day, with Alison doing some more sewing on the slipcovers for the sofas, and with myself out of the country. However, I did manage to get started on getting the menus ready for reprinting. We aren't going to make a lot of major changes to the menu at the start, because there have been too many other things to worry about. We'll ease back into getting the restaurant open first, and spend a couple weeks making sure the equipment all works, and then we'll start slowly making more changes to the menus after we doing some more training with our cooking staff.

Quiet Weekend

2008-01-13T15:54:00.000-04:00

Not much happened on Saturday. I spent the day in transit for a DJ show I was playing last night on the other side of the country. Allison worked on upholstery of the second sofa in the coffee lounge. This is basically a quiet weekend, while we catch our breath and wait to see how our Fire Marshall inspection goes at the start of the week.

Electrical Work Started

2008-01-12T22:46:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I spent a few hours putting verathane on the table tops, running to Kent Building Supplies for two more bar stools, and doing a number of smaller errands.

The big news was that Randy Clare stopped by after supper for a few hours to help out. Randy, an electrician, installed a light in the front entry-way, installed switched plugs for our open sign and lights, fixed the light fixtures in the back of the kitchen that were not working correctly, and fixed one of the lights in the dining room.

Once we start hanging art on the walls (hopefully next week), we'll still have to install some appropriate track lighting to illuminate the artwork, but we can worry about that in a few days.

No More Tools

2008-01-11T22:55:00.001-04:00

A few minor jobs got done on Thursday. For instance:

- I learned how to make zippers from "scratch" with parts bought from the fabric store.
- Jeff and I managed to get rid of some of the stuff that was remaining on the old Olive Branch patio. However, we couldn't find a key to unlock the chains on the benches, and I broke two sets of wire-cutters trying to cut through the chains, so we gave up on that project for the day.
- I went to Kent and bought some neat stuff, including a bar stool, and a heavy-duty shelving rack.
- I put another coat of black paint on the tables.

Most importantly, I cleaned up the tools. I had about 15 milk crates full of random tools lying around on the floor in the front of the restaurant, and now that the minor maintenance work is almost complete, I felt like it was safe to clean up. I spent about four hours sorting tools and parts into some very neatly organized crates, and set up a tool section in the storage room in the back of the restaurant.

Just About Ready

2008-01-10T10:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was another of those days where it felt like a lot got accomplished. Among other things:

- The rest of the supplies got shelved and organized in the kitchen.
- Took an old broken filing cabinet and removed parts of the drop-down facing, and converted it into a shelving unit for heavy canned goods in the kitchen.
- Hung four speakers in the dining room (although they still have to be wired).
- Hung a curtain rod to separate the "Rickard's Room" from the rest of the dining room (although we still need to make curtains).
- Installed a couple of blinds on the side windows.
- Sanded and put the first coat of paint on the inherited tabletops from the previous restaurant. They were a pretty bold mix of bright colors, and we're painting them black to match our other tables from the old Olive Branch.
- Installed a shelf in the kitchen for all of the coffee and tea supplies.

I actually got to go home early last night, stopping work at 11:30pm. I even had time to finally open my Christmas presents when I got home, which was fun.

We're still waiting on the Fire Marshall inspection to determine when we might be able to open.

Memory Loss

2008-01-09T22:54:00.000-04:00

Tuesday was so busy for me that I can't even remember everything that I did. I spent half the day working up at the university, and while I was at the restaurant, I spent most of the time starting to put the rest of the supplies and equipment away on the new shelves in the kitchen.

After supper, I had to do some more work at the university, and ended up serving for a while early in the evening because the Pub busy so early in the evening. After that, I came back down to the restaurant and washed an unbelievable number of loads of dishes - around 120, I think. It's a good thing that the dishwasher can do a cycle in about a minute - even so, running at almost full tilt, it took me hours to finish the pile of things that I wanted to wash. Luckily, none of the dishes were "food dirty" - they were just dusty from the move.

Board of Health Approval

2008-01-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

Monday was a fairly big day. Again, I was up extremely early, so I could get several hours of stuff done before breakfast.

Some of the minor things that got done yesterday included:
- Kitchen floor completely scrubbed (with SOS pads) to get rid of the layers of grease & grime.
- Both washrooms scrubbed, with the paint cleaned out of the sinks, and drops of paint removed from the floors.
- Shelf for the pizza sheeter and mixer built and painted.
- Shelves over the recyclables painted.
- New thermometers for the fridges and coolers, and all equipment turned on and tested.
- Eighty percent of the lumber cleaned up out of the dining room.
- Seats installed on the rest of the dining room chairs.
- All shelves in the kitchen given a final coat of proper kitchen-grade paint.

The Board of Health inspector came in to look around, and approved us for a food permit. He was extremely helpful in walking around, making suggestions and answering questions. That was a big relief, to know that part of the approval process is out of the way. I should be able to pick up the certificate in Moncton on Thursday of this week, he thinks.

I called the Fire Marshall next, and didn't have as much luck there. The person I talked to asked me for a report that I had already sent them on December 20th, which was quite frustrating. However, I talked to him for quite a while about the challenges of getting open quickly, and it seemed like he was going to look into the file immediately. I hope so - we have a number of people who want to book major events in the restaurant next week. I guess we'll see how things are going later this week.

Sunday Progress

2008-01-07T14:21:00.000-04:00

I was up very early on Sunday morning, but it was not to be a day of rest. I spent the morning catching up on more paperwork at the university, then I got a bit more done at the restaurant. I managed to finish the back storage shelves that I hadn't finished on Saturday night, when I found enough lumber to finish the job. I then tried to prime the shelves, but I only got halfway through that job before I ran out of primer.

I then spent most of the rest of the day trying to catch up on emails. I had several hundred messages to answer, having been essentially away from the internet for more than a week. I managed to get about halfway through them all, then called it a night.

More Shelving

2008-01-06T12:28:00.000-04:00

Shuffling boxes and equipment around, as I work on various sections of the restaurant, is kind of like playing one of those "move-a-square" games that were popular when we were kids. My biggest goal yesterday was to put away the rest of the kitchen supplies, so I could work on chairs in the upper dining room, but there wasn't enough storage space in the kitchen yet. I looked at the back of the kitchen and realized that there was a lot of unused space there, so I started building some more heavy-duty shelves. That went well, until I ran out of lumber.

Aside from that, half of the chairs had their seats reinstalled and paint touchups done, and I also did a major cleanup throughout the dining rooms and hallways. For once, I feel like I actually accomplished more yesterday than I had expected. Usually, I make a list of things to do for the day, and it turns out in retrospect to be more than any normal person can accomplish in a week. However, it is always good to have goals.

No Progress on Friday

2008-01-05T22:13:00.001-04:00

I got practically nothing done on Friday. I spent most of the day catching up on paperwork for my job at the university. About the only useful thing that I did at the restaurant was to look around and take stock of what I needed to do on Saturday, and spend a few minutes out at Home Hardware, ordering a small load of lumber to work with.

"Break Week" Summary

2008-01-04T22:51:00.000-04:00

I was out of the country for the past eight or nine days, but while I was gone, some work continued to take place, under the supervision of Ian Allen. While I was away, the following major jobs got done:

- The propane installation took place. We're now up and running one stove with eight burners, plus two ovens. We had a ten burner stove in the old restaurant, unofficially, except one pair of burners didn't work very well. I'm going to order the parts so I will eventually have all ten burners working again.

- The propane setup was inspected by the provincial inspector, and passed.

- Ralph and Peter did several additional jobs for me. They installed a circulation fan which will move air from the kitchen into the restaurant at certain times (useful for minimizing heating expense in the winter), put up new wainscotting in the dining room in one section that didn't have any, installed a few additional heavy shelving units in the kitchen that I had built, drilled a hole from the draught cooler down to the basement for our pressure lines, and did a couple of repair jobs at the old restaurant.

- Jamie & Terry finished up some more plumbing work that was needed in the staff washroom.

- Kevin, our accountant, was finally able to get back to work processing some paperwork, which he had to defer for a while when the office wasn't functional.

We still need to finalize the three last major inspections: The Fire Marshall, the Board of Health, and the Liquor Licensing Branch. Because of uncertainties surrounding those inspections, I still don't know how soon we'll be able to open.

Propane Installation started

2007-12-27T13:38:00.000-04:00

A pleasant surprise for Boxing Day - Maxon showed up to start working on the propane installation. They spent the entire day at the restaurant changing connections and pipes, and getting the lines ready for the hookup. Since the current lines were installed a very long time ago (we think that Remy just hooked the tanks up himself, without proper authorization or permits), they needed some major changes to be brought up to the current building codes.

Boxing Day was my last day in Sackville, as I am going to be away for a week due to a major commitment that I made several months ago. However, Ian Allen is going to be in charge of supervising renovations and upgrades while I'm away. I'll continue updating this blog site when I return, on approximately January 4th.

No word yet on a possible reopening date. If things go smoothly over the next week, we are hoping to re-open on approximately January 10th, but that's very tenuous right now. Happy holidays!

Christmas Day Social

2007-12-26T16:38:00.000-04:00

I started Christmas Day off by having a meal with the family in Truro. We ate at The Belgravia Bed & Breakfast, which is owned and operated by my sister Anne and her husband D'Arcy. After a very tasty breakfast, it was a quick trip back to Sackville. The breakfast was very interesting to me, as a restauranteur, because I got to see how carefully the Belgravia caters to special dietary needs. We try to do the same thing at the Olive Branch (ie. having gluten-free options), but Anne & D'Arcy have had a lot of practice at it.

I was supposed to fly to Toronto after lunch, but my conscience felt that there was too much work left undone. I figured that with one more solid day, I could move the restaurant from a state of "me panicking for a week, while I was away," to a state where it felt like the restaurant was getting close to being ready to go. I changed my flight to Boxing Day, so I could keep working.

In the end, I was glad that I did. I worked all afternoon, evening, and night, so I got an incredible amount accomplished. Sleep is over-rated. I put away a huge pile of extra stuff from the upper dining room in the afternoon, and by the time I was done, I could see the carpet again! I estimated that there was only about 10% of the equipment and supplies left to be sorted out. I need to build a couple more shelves in the kitchen and in the back storage room, and once those are done (probably not until January 5th), I will be able to put the rest of the stuff away.

I was pretty amazed by the amount of traffic though downtown Sackville for afternoon of Christmas Day. I had a guy from Amherst coming in to ask if I knew of any bootleggers. Surprisingly, I don't know any - I like to plan ahead and have lots at home, so the issue has never come up for me in the past. I also had a great visit from Matt Jonah, a friend of mine who works at the University. He talked to me about some supply possibilities on used equipment, and he also brought to my attention a very exciting idea for a special "international cuisine" night. I can't go into details yet, but I think that his idea was brilliant.

It's amazing how many people stop by to give suggestions. And it's pretty funny that many of them are diametrically opposed to each other. Everybody wants to offer advice, and thinks they have fantastic ideas that would benefit the restaurant. For me, it gets a little overwhelming to listen to so many ideas, but it's worth it, because some of them are real gems.

I also had several people walk by and peek in the windows, and wave to me while I was working. Some days I feel like I'm on stage when I working in the dining room, now that the newspapers are down. A few people have said that I should have left them up, for the element of surprise, but I like the people from Sackville to be able to look in and see what we're working on.

The majority of my night was spent on repainting the chairs that were inherited from Remy's Bistro. Although the vinyl seats had already been re-covered, I still had to paint them. I ended up spending about nine hours repainting 53 metal chairs, and after experimenting earlier in the week, I had quickly determined that spray painting would be far more efficient. It was a tedious and messy nine hours, but I did learn one important thing: there's no need to spike the eggnog on Christmas evening when you spend it in an enclosed room, spraying off thirty cans of spray paint.

Even though I'm now in Toronto, I've turned supervision of some of the tradespersons over to an associate of mine, Ian Allen, so at least you'll still be able to read daily updates for the next couple of days.

Christmas Eve Accomplishments

2007-12-25T19:29:00.000-04:00

Monday was a day to try to accomplish as many last-minute jobs as possible before the Christmas holiday. Jamie & Terry came in to work on the plumbing starting at about 9am, but unfortunately, I didn't get much accomplished during the morning.

After lunch, things became more productive. I managed to get the following tasks done:
- I spent a few hours chipping away at the enormous pile of stuff in the upper dining room, trying to figure out where to put it all.
- I went to the bank.
- I dug around until I could find all of the boxes of paperwork for the office, and sorted that and put it away.
- I paid a bunch of bills.
- I decided that the mess on the floor was too unorganized, so I started sorting some common items into milk crates. I ended up with a crate for extension cords (with about 20 cords), a crate for recycleable (dead) batteries, a crate for coaxial cables, a crate for light bulbs (with about 50 bulbs), a crate for security camera equipment, and a crate for speaker and telephone cables.

To the casual viewer, the restaurant still looks like a war zone, and it doesn't look like I got a lot done, but at least I felt like I had accomplished a fair amount. I also squeezed an airport run into the middle of the afternoon, to drop Grover off for his flight home. That was a pretty quick trip, because my meeting at BDC had been cancelled. Anyway, by the time that I got all of this done, it was past 7pm, so I decided to call it a day.

28A York is Now Empty

2007-12-24T22:51:00.000-04:00

I spent most of the day working on paperwork, but at supper, Kasie & Grover came to help me for a few hours. We went to the old restaurant, and our goal was to finally finish emptying it out and tidying it up. Kasie started cleaning, and Grover and I started moving the last of the equipment out. Most of what remained was fairly heavy, but not heavy enough to require more than two people. We pulled out things like the air conditioner, the three compressor motors, the draught machine, and a couple more trailer loads of loose ends and boards that got missed earlier in the month. By about 10pm, we were just leaving with the last load, as Kasie finished mopping the floors. It's amazing how big both the basement and the dining room look now that it's emptied out and cleaned up. Most customers probably didn't realize that we had an enormous basement downstairs that we were able to use for storage.

There is still some stuff on the patio that I'll have to dig out from under the snow and remove, but at least it's another milestone in knowing that the inside of the old restaurant is now completely bare and ready for the next tenant, whoever that may end up being.

The Grease Trap

2007-12-23T13:10:00.000-04:00

The best thing about yesterday was that I was finally able to start organizing and shelving things. The pile of equipment and supplies in the restaurant was enormous, but there was finally enough substance to the kitchen (and shelving in place) that I could start figuring out where all the small stuff was going to go.

I worked from 8am to midnight, so I got quite a bit accomplished, including the following:
- Moved a bunch of broken equipment out of the building.
- Set up the recycleables area, and moved the cases of pop and juice to a proper storage section.
- Built a bit more shelving for the kitchen.
- Bolted the server's safe to the floor.
- Built a display rack behind the bar for the older "display only" wine bottles.
- Pulled more equipment out of the old restaurant.
- Washed about forty loads of glassware and put it all away.
- Did some vacuuming, cleaning, and scrubbing in the kitchen.

Jamie Weeks and Terry Geddes also showed up to work on the plumbing project for the landlord. However, I mentioned to them that the dishwasher still wasn't draining, and asked them to look at the grease trap while they were here, since that's part of the landlord's territory. We didn't have a grease trap in our old kitchen, because we don't deep-fry any of our menu items, so opening the trap was an interesting new experience. Basically, a grease trap is a structure which is a couple feet across, and it acts as sort of a filter so that a lot of the grease coming out of the dish pit gets stopped in the trap rather than running through the entire sewer system of the building. The grease trap is accessible right in the middle of the kitchen floor, so it is far easier to clean that out on a regular basis than to try to rip up plumbing in the basement or walls, if that became plugged instead.

The problem with our grease trap was that it probably had not been cleaned out since Pizza Delight had a restaurant here, about six or seven years ago. It certainly didn't look like it had been cleaned when Remy's Bistro was here about three years ago. I would even venture a guess that Remy probably disposed of his old grease from his fryers by pouring it down the kitchen sink drains. And since the trap hadn't been cleaned in several years at least, it was not in good shape. The grease in it had sat and coagulated for years, and it was truly disgusting. We could smell it standing outside of the restaurant, and I thought I would have to go buy bandanas for everyone to cover their faces. Jamie & Terry fought with it for most of the day, up to their elbows in the mess, and hauled out about 10 or 12 gallons of slop. I truly don't know how they managed to get it clean eventually. The photo that I have of Terry (below) was taken late in the afternoon, when most of the hard work had already been done, and after going through multiple pairs of gloves and cleaning up again.

So I have a very well-deserved endorsement for these guys ... if you ever need any plumbing done in the Sackville or Moncton areas, and you're looking for hard workers at a reasonable rate, give these guys a call. Their company is called Roof Edge Construction, and they do bathroom renovations, roofing, windows, decks, siding, and several other types of carpentry and plumbing. I highly recommend these guys.

Sleeping In

2007-12-21T09:07:00.000-04:00

Thursday was not as constructive as I would have hoped. I was at work until 6am the previous night, so I slept until mid-morning. I had appointments with several people, but I had booked them all for 1pm and later, so it worked out pretty well.

I spent most of the afternoon running around, trying to get more paperwork out of the way for the licensing processes. Peter and Ralph came in and replaced the door going into Ducky's (the bar next door) for me, and also hung the two racks that we hang all of our wine glasses on. The ceiling where I wanted to hang them was made of a very light sheetrock, with no backing, so they had to get up inside the drop ceiling and put some wood reinforcements there, that the wine glass racks could grab onto.

In the evening, I did some painting on some shelving and doors, and built several new heavy-duty shelving units for the new kitchen. I spent some time setting up the bar, although since we don't have a liquor license yet, all I could do was put all of our "fake" wine bottles on display, to make it look good. We have a collection of several dozen old bottles from the past decade, all of which have been filled with water and red food colouring, and which have the corks glued back in place, so they make a nice display arrangement behind the bar. I also started to put the stove back together, installed some coat hook racks, and started to sort and rearrange some minor equipment. I am still confident that by the end of the weekend, the restaurant will start to look like a restaurant. As long as the propane gets hooked up in time, we should have a fully functional kitchen by Christmas Eve.

Licensing Headaches

2007-12-20T21:27:00.000-04:00

The guys from K&D Glass came in yesterday and replaced all the hardware on the side Fire Exit door, so it has an emergency "panic bar" opener which is standard in fire exits. Also, Scott Refrigeration came in and got our walk-in cooler up and running in the new location.

I spent quite a bit of time on Wednesday afternoon trying to sort out forms and applications. We're in the process of getting Fire Marshall approval, so I needed to get some forms together for him (sprinkler inspection report, floor plan, etc.). I'm also trying to get the food and alcohol licenses transferred over. The food license probably won't be too difficult - the food (Board of Health) inspector was already in, a few weeks ago, and we reviewed all of the steps that needed to be taken to get the new premises up to provincial requirements.

The liquor license is going to be more of a problem. I was under the impression that it would simply be transferred to the new location, by submitting a new floor plan and having the inspector come do a walk-through once the Fire Marshall submitted an approval report. Well, that does have to happen, but so do a whole lot of other things. Essentially, they have to cancel my old license and I have to apply for another one, brand new, from scratch. The only thing that is even remotely helpful is that they already have my "personal history" report on file, but I need to submit all kinds of other things over again, even though the corporation is unchanged, and the menus are unchanged. The drawback is that the process of getting a new license may take as long as three weeks at the best of times, and with the holidays, it could be even worse. Hopefully though, I'll have everything together and on the desk of the right person in Fredericton by Friday or Monday, and she'll be able to process it fairly quickly. It would be quite sad if we couldn't serve alcohol on our grand reopening night. This may delay our re-opening until the middle of January, unfortunately.

The Hardest Day

2007-12-19T15:14:00.000-04:00

We have now passed what I consider to be the "half-way mark." I don't mean that in a chronological sense, or in the sense that half of the moving jobs are finished, but we just got "over the hump." Yesterday, we got the hardest jobs done of the move:
- We moved the pizza room equipment, including the dough mixers, the pizza oven, and the sheeter.
- We moved the last of the office equipment, including the safes.
- We moved the washer and dryer.
- We moved the stove and propane tanks.

The stove and propane tanks in particular will go down as the most challenging part of the entire relocation. I had Will Russell, Travis MacLellan, Scott Chamberlain, and Jeff Coull to help me, and even with the five of us, we barely made it happen. The two propane tanks weighed around 400 pounds each, by my estimate. That isn't that heavy - any two of us could lift that weight if it was properly distributed. However, the tanks were in a recessed shed in the patio, and had to be lifted straight up and out. It isn't easy lifting shiny tanks like that, with nothing to grip, in the snow. However, by removing part of the shed and attaching some chains, we eventually got them out, and rolled them over to the new restaurant.

When it came to the stove, there were certainly more places to grab, although the stove probably weighed about 500 pounds. However, the problem with the stove is that when we originally put it into the restaurant, we brought it through the front door. And after that, we built a wall between the stove and the front door. We thought we should be able to just go out the back door instead, but it wasn't nearly wide enough, so we ended up calling Peter and Ralph over for help (they were doing some minor carpentry for me in the new restaurant). They quickly removed the door frame entirely, and after all that was pulled out, we had a quarter inch to spare. We got the stove out with all seven of us working together, and brought it over and into the new restaurant. Luckily, the door going into the new place was bigger.

Who needs a boom truck when you have a couple of football players and a couple of rugby players?

Excellence in Business

2007-12-18T10:29:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was an exciting day. Alison, our restaurant manager, found out that she won a Frank Sobey Excellence In Business Award. This award goes to someone with an outstanding performance in studies in commerce, combined with extra-curricular and volunteer activities. This is a very prestigious award, so we're all pretty excited that she won it. Congratulations Alison!

As for the restaurant, we spent several hours moving more equipment out of the old restaurant. At this point, about all that is left is a dozen pieces of the heaviest kitchen equipment. I also spent a few hours yesterday evening and got the first couple of videos cameras installed, to provide coverage of all the doors for security purposes.

One other really important accomplishment yesterday was that Darren from Brunswick Fyr & Safety came in to make sure that all of our extinguishers, exit lights, and other fire-prevention related equipment was in good shape. Now we can call the Fire Marshall's office and schedule an inspection. As long as we pass that, we'll be able to transfer our food and alcohol licenses without too many hassles.

Storming Again

2007-12-17T19:18:00.001-04:00

There was a major storm forecast for yesterday evening, but I wanted to drive to Truro to borrow my mother's sewing machine so we could make some slipcovers for the new sofas. We looked at the forecast at lunch-time, and the snow looked like it was going to hold off for a few more hours, so I headed into central Nova Scotia for a quick trip to pick up the machine.

When I got back to Sackville, later in the afternoon, it was just starting to snow. That was fine by me - I intended to hole up inside the new restaurant and try to get several more hours of work done. We finished re-covering the vinyl chair bottoms last night, and that was about the most significant accomplishment.

Other than that, I moved some shelving and doors around and painted some of them, and did some cleaning and organizing, but not much else. I wanted to try to get home before midnight for a change, so I could be up early on Monday morning. The drive home was a bit of an adventure - this winter is already shaping up to be worse than most of the ones that we've seen in the past several years.

Four More Sofas

2007-12-16T20:08:00.001-04:00

We reached our sofa/chesterfield quota on Saturday, with a quick trip to the Salvation Army discount outlet in Moncton. We picked up four sofas for a total of $201, which is pretty cheap. We ended up being able to pack two of them up with the Echo for the trip back to Sackville, and we'll have to pick up the other two later this week. After we got the couches, we went to Fabricville and bought a brace of cloth so Alison can spend a couple days making slipcovers for the sofas, so they all look the same.

We also went to Kent Building Supplies and looked at bar stools (we want two for the front counter area), track lighting, bulletin boards, and other lights. Kent is my favorite store to visit, except for maybe MusicStop. I definitely have to stay away from Kent as much as possible, or the budget will be absolutely destroyed.

Security System Installed

2007-12-15T23:19:00.000-04:00

The first visitors on Friday were the installation technicians from ADT Security, who set up and activated our intrusion alarm system. While they were working on that, an agent from Advanced Plumbing arrived, to do some looking around so he could provide an estimate on some work that we wanted done on the staff washroom.

My next visitors were a welcome sight - they were the guys who were sent by Irving to look after the propane setup. These guys were very good to work with. We disconnected the old tanks, then looked at requirements for moving them to the new location and getting them hooked up properly, and filled out an application for a license to make everything legal, since New Brunswick just started a permitting process for this kind of thing a couple of years ago. The biggest issue was with the removal of our old tanks. They were located into a sunken shed within the patio of the old restaurant in such a way that the tanks couldn't just be pulled out easily and moved. The guys suggested that they'd have to bring in a crane to pull them out, which sounded pretty expensive to me. I told them that if they could give me a couple days, I could get them pulled out by hand with the help of a few of my friends on the MTA varsity football team. They said that it would take a few days for the permit to be processed, so that would work for them. In the end, we decided that they would come back next Friday to move the tanks, replace some gas piping going into the new restaurant, and do the final hookups to our stoves. I was pretty happy to get this all sorted out, even though it was going to take another week before everything would be working.

During the afternoon, Tiffany worked on some of the tough cleaning work in the old basement, while Jeff and I brought more loads of stuff from the old place to the new place. We are definitely running out of room to put anything in the new location. Lois-Anne MacGregor arrived in the afternoon with some vinyl fabric, and she and Alison spent several hours doing re-upholstery work on the old chairs that were left behind from Remy's Bistro, the previous restaurant. The old chairs are the same style as the chairs from our restaurant, so we just have to spray-paint the metal black, and re-upholster them, and everything will match nicely.

Missed Meetings

2007-12-14T23:21:00.001-04:00

On Thursday, Amanda and Tiffany spent several hours moving truckloads of supplies and small equipment to the new location. I had cleared out the Upper Dining Room area the previous evening, and they started filling it up. While they were doing that, Jeff worked on removing pieces of equipment that were temporarily fixed in place, like security cameras, and coffee makers.

It is starting to become painfully obvious that although our dining room and kitchen and office areas will all be several times as large as the old restaurant, we are going to be far more cramped for storage space in the new location. There are only a couple of small storage rooms, whereas we had an enormous basement for storage at the old location. It looks like I’ll be building a lot of shelving in the next few weeks.

I was supposed to have several early-morning meetings on Thursday. ADT was supposed to install the intrusion alarm system starting at 8am, but they called to say that there had been a mixup in communications and wouldn’t be able to show up. Advanced Plumbing was supposed to show up for a consultation at 9am, to provide an estimate for some work in the staff washroom, but they called to say that they had been diverted by an emergency repair call.

I spent the afternoon and evening doing random jobs:
- Bringing paperwork and files from the old office.
- Getting supplies for repairs at Home Hardware.
- Buying an ice sink for the bar counter at Happy Harry’s.
- Testing three different types of paint on some metal chair frames.

Propane Progress

2007-12-13T08:27:00.000-04:00

Yesterday’s adventures started out with headaches because of the propane. Irving still hadn’t called back to let me know what was happening with the moving of the propane tanks, so I decided to start investigating elsewhere. I called Kevin Munroe, the manager of the Superior Propane outlet in Moncton, and explained the situation. Although he knew that I already had an account with Irving, and wasn’t necessarily going to switch suppliers if I could things settled with Irving, he was extremely helpful and answered a lot of questions that I had (which was more than Irving had been able to do up to that point). He told me that he could probably get someone down to help me within a day, if I decided that I definitely needed their assistance, which was good news.

After talking to Kevin, I called Irving back and told them that I had called three times without any satisfactory answers about when the tanks could be moved. After explaining quite clearly that I was going to get Superior to do the work if Irving couldn’t resolve things quickly, I finally was told that Irving would send a contractor down on Friday to take care of the problem. I’m still not holding my breath that this will go smoothly, but at least it sounds like things are finally in motion. However, knowing what I know now, if I had to start over, there’s no question that I’d set up an account with Superior.

Jeff spent most of the day packing items up at the old restaurant, and removing the cabling for the old security system, POS terminals, ethernet lines, and that sort of stuff. He filled half a dozen milk crates with cables and connectors and equipment. It’s going to be a challenge to reinstall all of that stuff in the new restaurant. While he was doing that, Alison did a lot of painting and touchups. I spent most of the afternoon running errands and “facilitating” activities, and got the office set up so the computer and printer can be used again.

Finally, Amanda and Tiffany moved all the patio furniture from the old restaurant to my house. I now have the best equipped patio on my street. In fact, I could probably have a “patio party” that fills my front lawn. Not having a patio at the restaurant next summer is going to be a major problem. Sackville is a very tough market in the summer, when the students at the University have gone home for a few months. With the US dollar being punished, our tourist traffic is probably going to be decimated next summer. Add the loss of the patio to that, and I am very concerned about our ability to function effectively in June, July, and August. Without question, I am going to have to seriously scale back operations this summer, or possibly go back to being a seasonal operation. The only possible thing I can think of that might keep us open for regular hours in the summer would be if the town would permit us to set up a sidewalk patio like the Bridge Street Cafe has, but I don’t know how receptive they’d be to that idea.

Old Dining Room Emptied

2007-12-12T11:30:00.000-04:00

Again, yesterday was a very busy day. Tiffany and Amanda started their day helping Alison paint the stalls in the two washrooms. After that, they spent all day packing kitchen equipment and supplies, and using Amanda's truck to move tables and chairs into the new restaurant. While they did that, Alison finished painting the trim in the upper room (I need to come up with an official name for that room). Tiffany also stayed later in the evening and scrubbed out all of the freezers and fridges.

I finished the rough coat on the ceiling tiles, sort of. There were about twenty tiles that proved to be a big problem. To paint most of the tiles, I just took them down and used a roller on them on a table, and then let them dry overnight, and reinstalled them the next day. However, the twenty special tiles were in place before the building's sprinkler system was installed, so the sprinklers were cut through the tiles, rather than tiles being put up in separate pieces around sprinkler heads. I was too nervous to pull down or cut out those tiles, because all of the sprinklers have glass heads on them which burst in high temperature. If I had accidentally broken one, it would have set off the sprinklers. I presume it would have only been in the one I broke, but I wasn't positive, and I didn't want to risk setting off the sprinklers in the entire building (including in the apartments of the 27 students living upstairs). Therefore, I had to paint those specific tiles while they were on the ceiling.

The drawback, of course, is that the tiles are porous, and it is impossible to use gravity to get the paint to run "up" into the holes when a tile is upside-down (on the ceiling), so I taped off each tile and spray painted them brown. The brown doesn't quite match the brown latex that I used on all of the other tiles, so they still stand out a bit, but I'll brush a coat of latex on them later this week to make them match a bit better. Anyway, the long and short of it is that the ceiling is NOT done yet, but at a quick glance, it looks like it is finished.

Nick finished painting the final coat on the bar area, and then finished the trim in the rest of the restaurant. I'm glad that we can finally clean up most of the painting equipment and supplies. While Nick was finishing the painting, Jeff did dozens of odd jobs, including removing all the lights and signs and stereo system/speakers from the old restaurant, and also disassembled the old office. The old restaurant is already looking very different, now that it is starting to get emptied out.

Busy Start to the Week

2007-12-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

For the first time in several days, a lot got accomplished on Monday. I had originally hoped to be completely finished painting by Sunday evening, but that fell apart on the weekend. However, yesterday I spent a lot of time working on ceiling tiles whenever I had a few minutes free, so that major task is finally almost finished. Also, Nick added a few more coats of paint to the walls and counter of the bar.

Tiffany and Amanda Purdy started to help move equipment, and Jeff and I worked on heavier items throughout the day. First our two upright freezers were emptied into a large chest freezer, and then Jeff and I got them out of the basement and moved over to the new location. After that, he and the girls packed up a pretty significant portion of the stuff in the old kitchen and serving area, and then he spent a few hours disassembling the portable equipment such as the metro racks, wine racks, and similar items.

One problem that we've run into so far is with Irving Propane. I've called them a couple times now to inquire about when they are moving our propane tanks. They keep saying that a contractor is going to call back to arrange an appointment, but the problem is that until the tanks are moved, we can't make an appointment to move our stoves, and I wanted to have the stoves moved and certified by this Friday, so I could start working on staff training for the week or so before Christmas, while there is lots of "free time." Well, it's not really free time, but at least we aren't open to the public, so that's as good a time as any to work on cook training. If I don't hear from them soon to at least book an appointment, I'm going to start making calls and see if there are any other propane companies in the area who will respond more quickly.

ADT Security came in and did an inspection of the place and we laid out the blueprints for the security system. We also got all of our recycleables out of the old restaurant, and did a major garbage collection.

It doesn't really sound like a lot got accomplished, but it was a good start. The time-consuming stuff isn't moving the equipment and loose items from one place to another, it's just trying to finish the painting and get the kitchen ready to receive equipment. In fact, I'm pretty sure that we'll be completely out of the old location by the end of this week. The tricky thing to consider is that our new kitchen is quite a bit bigger (as you can see from the "before" photo below), but I want to move things in an orderly manner and set equipment up as I go, to make the transition happen more smoothly.

Day of Rest

2007-12-10T11:01:00.001-04:00

Again, not a lot got accomplished yesterday, a Sunday. I spent most of the day trying to catch up on some music projects, but I wasn't able to do much at the restaurant itself. However, we start moving kitchen equipment today, so I suspect there will be a lot to write about here in the coming week.

Saturday Progress

2007-12-09T22:50:00.001-04:00

There was not much progress on Saturday. Although Friday was our last night to be open to the public, last night was the last night of operations at 28A York Street. We finished things off by hosting a private Christmas party for one of the businesses in town.

Other than that, Nick got some more painting done in the bar area, but I didn't get much accomplished because I had to spend most of the day doing some work for one of my other jobs.

Friday Confusion

2007-12-08T23:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon started to get tricky. We don't start moving equipment until Monday, but I had a number of questions to answer yesterday afternoon. We were trying to get our hot water working, and ADT came in to check out the layout of the restaurant, and I was trying to run errands and get painting done at the same time. It wasn't that confusing, but I'm pretty sure that was a forerunner of next week's fun.

Tonight was also the last night at the restaurant. Last night was our last night being open to the public. It didn't seem like it was the "last night," but probably that was because we're so focused on the new location right now.

Painting The Bar Area

2007-12-07T12:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a solid workday. We looked at the bar (& cash register) area for a while, and decided that rather than keeping it in dark blue colors, we'd paint it to match the theme of the dining room. The alternative was to pull all the tiles off the counter and walls (which is still possible), but we thought we'd like to try painting them first. We primed them with a BIN primer product, then started to apply a heavy melanine paint that supposedly dries into a nice countertop finish. The process was very time-consuming, and Nick worked on it all afternoon and all evening. By the time he was done, he finished all the priming and then finished the first coat of brown on the counter, which looks ok today. However, the second coat will tell the tale.

The first coat has slight ripples in it, and we want the counter to look like real tiles. When we apply the second coat this afternoon, we're going to lay it on fairly thick and apply a hair dryer the whole time behind him, so the heat and gravity should smooth the surface out better. Hopefully that will give us the effect that we want. The walls are less of a concern - if those surfaces turn out to be rough, I can live with that, so at the very worst, we'll only have to install new tiles on the bar countertop.

Also last night, the strangest thing happened. At 1:30am, we had our first customer. Now you have to realize that at the time, there were about 50-60 ceiling tiles spread around the restaurant, covering all of the visible floors and tables. And there were about 14 milk crates of old tools in the entryway that had to be navigated to get into the restaurant. Add several trouble lights, newspaper on the windows, a missing ceiling, and paint buckets spread out everywhere, and you are probably starting to get a good mental image. The restaurant looked like a cross between a construction site and a war zone. Anyway, the gentleman that came in looked around for a minute, then he looked at me and said, "Are you open?" I was slightly taken aback, and said, "for what?" He said, "Can you make me a pizza?" I laughed and told him that I'd love to, but it would be about four weeks.

The only other notable thing that I got accomplished yesterday was talking to some of our major suppliers to arrange times and dates for changing services, ie. NB Power, Aliant Communications (to move our phone lines), Irving (to move our propane tanks), and ADT Security (to set up a new alarm system).

Today is the last day that we're open to the public in our old location at 28A York Street. We have a private Christmas banquet tomorrow evening, then we can finally start moving equipment into the kitchen next week to start the second phase of our move/expansion.

Tour of M&S Foods

2007-12-06T16:41:00.000-04:00

Again, yesterday was another day without a lot physically accomplished in the restaurant, except a few more ceiling tiles painted. I do still hope to be finished the ceiling by Sunday night.

Yesterday afternoon, Alison and I went over to Amherst to take a tour of the M&S Foods distribution center. M&S is the Atlantic Canadian subsidiary of GFS (Gordon Food Services). We have predominantly used Sysco as our major supplier for the last few years, and only use M&S occasionally, but we have noticed that the quality at M&S appears to have been improving over the past couple of years (they have only been in business in the new distribution center in Amherst for about four years). Although we didn't plan to switch suppliers, it's good to keep informed about what's available in the marketplace.

We started with an office tour, and while doing so, ran into a friend from MTA (Rory Faulkner) who is now working in the accounting office there. After the office tour, we spent about an hour walking through the warehouse and looking at various products, which was the most important part of the visit. It quickly became obvious that their inventory system and product quality has come a long way in the past few years. While we didn't find any compelling reasons to switch suppliers just yet, I certainly feel more comfortable using M&S more frequently in the future, based on what I saw of their food quality control systems (especially on produce). I think I will monitor comparison pricing quite carefully in the next few months to see which company has the overall advantage for us in terms of minimizing food costs.

Cell Phone Problems

2007-12-05T20:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, due to the snow storm, I didn't get a whole lot accomplished. I did spend a little while painting some more ceiling tiles though. I wonder if I'll have them finished by the end of the weekend.

One thing that I've recognized as a major problem in the past couple days is the fact that for some reason, I can't get proper cell phone reception on my Aliant cell phone when I'm in the new restaurant. We're located in downtown Sackville, so for a company that bills itself as having the best cell coverage in New Brunswick, that's a major problem. The cell phone will work fine in some places on the street outside, but other times I have to walk up or down the street to receive a call. That will be pretty annoying after Christmas if I start spending a lot of hours down here (although I do dislike getting constant phone calls, so maybe this is a blessing in disguise). Anyway, I currently have my house phone forwarded to my cell phone when I'm out of the house, so maybe I'll also have to forward my cell to the restaurant line when I'm at work (although I don't know if the phone network can handle that double-forwarding). That's something to look into tomorrow.

One other small but important thing that I did manage to accomplish yesterday was that I wrote letters to about thirty of our most important suppliers to let them know about our change of address for mail and deliveries. However, there are still seven of them that I want to call and talk to in person tomorrow, just to be safe (Sysco Food Services, Pepsi, NB Power, Aliant Communications, ADT Security, Irving Propane, and our debit/credit group). This is kind of a slack week for the renovations and move, because now that the majority of the painting is done, I have to wait for next Monday before I can start moving equipment. I am going to try to get that schedule planned out in the next few days.

Snow Day

2007-12-04T14:25:00.001-04:00

It's amazing how much work a person can get done in a day when you start working early in the morning at 4am, and keep working until well past midnight. Unfortunately, most of the work that I got accomplished wasn't at the restaurant. I spent most of yesterday catching up on paperwork for my other job at the university.

I did manage to sneak up to Moncton for an hour in the afternoon though, and picked up a couple of black sofas. And late last night, I got a couple dozen more ceiling tiles painted. By the time I left the restaurant, at 3am, Sackville was experiencing a raging snow storm. We were expected to get 40 centimeters of snow between last night and today. University classes are cancelled today (it was supposed to be the last day of classes for the fall term), so most of the students are probably lying in bed studying right now, or getting ready to go out for drinks this evening.

Ceiling Tiles

2007-12-03T07:36:00.001-04:00

Sunday was another day without a whole lot getting accomplished. We had another Christmas banquet last night, so I ended up helping out in the kitchen for that. I haven't been cooking much since last Christmas, but that will change when we re-open. I'll be working nearly full-time hours in the kitchen again, to improve quality control and to start working on eventual menu improvements. We don't want to make a lot of changes to the existing menus when we initially re-open in January, because there are too many other things to keep us busy right now, although we will have some minor changes and additions. Essentially though, I'll be working a lot of night-time hours throughout the week starting next month, and I'll basically be acting as the Kitchen Manager. That way, Alison (our overall Restaurant Manager) can focus more on the dining room and make sure that our servers are providing the best possible table service to our customers.

So anyway, last night I got the lights fixed in the emergency exits, and worked on painting of ceiling tiles for a while, and made some revisions to our budget forecast.

Christmas Banquet Season

2007-12-02T16:32:00.000-04:00

Saturday was a busy day at the old restaurant. We had two large Christmas banquets at dinner-time, back-to-back, so we didn't actually get anything accomplished at the new restaurant.

One of the banquets was for about forty people, which (as you can see) is about the maximum number of people that the old restaurant can hold. The new restaurant will be able to hold about 45-50 people in the lower sections, in a much more comfortable environment, without having tables uncomfortably close to each other. For a banquet, we will probably be able to accommodate as many as 65 people in the lower seating areas. We are going to use the two lower sections as general dining room seating which is always open to the public. The larger of the two sections will be tables only, and the smaller of the two sections will have a couple of couches, coffee tables, and a few regular dining tables, so that it can be used as an informal area for people who are having casual coffee in the afternoon, or drinks before dinner in the evening.

In addition, the new restaurant has a special raised section in the back which can comfortably accommodate 20-25 people or more. This section will not normally be open to the public on a constant basis, but will always be available for large groups (15 or more people) who want to reserve it for special occasions. We'll probably offer permanent happy hour pricing to large groups in this upper area, so I can envision it being used frequently in the evenings by groups wanting to have corporate dinners, or for special family oriented events, and also by groups of students at Mount Allison who want to have residence floor dinners and gatherings like that.

I would also like to try to have a projector and screen available for this special room, both for corporate events that involve presentations, and also so commerce and other faculty groups at the university can schedule meetings in the afternoons for classes or presentations. We will have some heavy theatre drapes on the main side of this section so that it can be turned into a more private area at the discretion of the diners using it. We can even use this section occasionally as a stage for performances of live music, so we can occasionally feature local jazz musicians, or students doing coffee-house or acoustic performance events.

Painting Is Almost Finished

2007-12-01T18:39:00.000-04:00

We got a lot of work done last night. The top layer of brown is finished and the washrooms are finished - they used to be a very boring sterile white, so we changed the top half to a light green that is a bit friendlier.

All that is really left is the trim at the top of the walls, the ceiling tiles, and repainting some chairs and tables. So actually, there is quite a bit of painting left to be done, but at least it feels like the dining room is almost finished.

The Office Is Painted

2007-11-30T17:14:00.000-04:00

The biggest accomplishment yesterday was finishing the painting of the office. It's now a dark brown, in fact, very dark. I'm sure that most managers would prefer the original white color that was on the walls, for being bright and getting work done. However, I prefer the really dark background, with some good lighting of all work surfaces, because I find that it makes it easier for me to focus on what's in front of me, instead of focusing on my surroundings. Besides, the walls will probably lighten up considerably once all the furniture is rearranged and I get some bulletin boards and fixtures installed, so I think it will be a pretty relaxing place to work once I'm finished. Here are the before and after photos:

Melissa Markovich and Tiffany also finished touching the up last few places where the brown trim needed a first coat, and started the first coat of paint in the two washrooms.

While the girls worked on those other sections, I painted another batch of ceiling tiles. The tiles are very time consuming. I can only do about one eighth of the restaurant at a time, because I need to take them down, roll them, and then spread them out on table-tops and drop-sheets to dry. The moisture from the paint gets into the tiles and softens them up considerably, so even though the surface of each tile dries within two or three hours, it takes about ten to twelve hours before they stiffen up enough to maintain their integrity to be reinstalled in the ceiling. So in other words, even if we get all the other painting done this weekend, I'm still going to have to be working on batches of tiles every day next week. The tiles also suck up an amazingly large amount of paint (these are the "hard" ceiling tiles, not the new type with the soft plastic surface layer). In fact, I've wondered whether or not it might be cheaper to replace the existing tiles with the new type, because the new type would use a lot less paint. But then I'd have to buy the new tiles, and the labour involved would be a bit more, so I probably wouldn't be any further ahead in the end. Anyway, despite the headaches, the ceiling is looking a LOT better where it has already been painted. Besides, the brown paint will hide the water stains where there have been minor leaks in the ceiling.

Wednesday Night's Progress

2007-11-29T15:53:00.000-04:00

Pippa managed to remove the old wallpaper from the walls in the washrooms yesterday. We decided that the "toy fish" motif was not quite suitable to the theme of the restaurant. Hopefully we can start painting them this evening.

We completely finished the beige coats last night, except for future touch-ups, and we also got the first coat of paint on the office. As it stands right now, we might be able to finish the majority of the painting by tomorrow night or Saturday, depending on how many helpers show up this evening. The final coat of brown is going to be a very time-intensive coat - there is a lot of trim involved, and since the beige is "done," the final coat on the brown trim has to be done pretty slowly, to minimize touch-up requirements.

That's all that's new for today. Time to start painting again ...

Change of Address

2007-11-28T15:05:00.001-04:00

We now have a new mailing address finalized. It is:

      The Olive Branch
      96 Main Street,
      Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada
      E4L 4A7

Our old mailbox will remain open until December 31st, but we can start receiving mail at the new address starting effective immediately.

In other news, I also started to set up an advertising contract on the local Eastlink Cable community channel yesterday, which will run for a full year in 2008.

As far as painting goes, we didn't get as much done yesterday as most days. We did finish the final coat of trim for the beige, and did some brown trim too (we started the entryway) but that was about it for the night.

First Coat of Brown Paint

2007-11-27T17:37:00.000-04:00

Well, the restaurant is finally starting to look like we had envisioned it, after a fairly major painting party last night.

The painting took quite a while, since we've having to be a bit more careful now that we're getting closer to being finished. Also, the wainscotting around the base of the dining room has grooves in it, every couple of inches, so it all has to be done with some careful brushwork.

Other than the painting, I didn't get too much else done yesterday. I did buy a car, but that's about it. It's actually the car I've been driving around for the past several years. The lease apparently ran out in October, so I went over to Amherst Toyota yesterday after to talk to them about my options. I had thought for a while about upgrading to a hybrid, but in the end, it just seemed a lot easier to buy the car that I already have (a Toyota Echo). At least it gets extremely good fuel mileage, and in the four years that I've had it, there has not been a single mechnical problem with it.

First Coat of Beige

2007-11-26T17:05:00.000-04:00

Last night was a very productive night. We started and finished the first of the two coats of beige (the upper half of the dining room) throughout the entire restaurant. Jeff and Ali were here helping for a little bit, then Tiffany and Zach Ball and I put in a really long evening and got it done.

We also finished painting & touching up the iron railings, did some carpentry in the entry-way, and got rid of about a pickup truck load of garbage. That's about it, but I was pretty happy with getting that much done on a Sunday evening.

Budget For The Move

2007-11-25T15:14:00.000-04:00

I put together a tentative budget yesterday for the move. As always, once I started writing things down on paper, I realized that the move is going to be quite a bit more expensive than I had initially envisioned (around $25,000). However, that includes some major upgrades to our equipment (vacuums, steam-cleaners, new cash register, etc.) and a much-needed training budget, so I think it is probably accurate. Here's a link to what I've come up with:

http://www.theolive.ca/budget_for_move.html

I'm going to try to keep that budget page updated fairly often as I come up with revised estimates for some of the costs, or as I finish parts of the renovations and can start inserting some actual amounts.

Aside from that, not a lot got done yesterday, as it was a Saturday. Sarah and Alison worked on some more of the trim, and John Kamau and Carolyn Dubois came in and did some of the finicky work on repainting the railings, which is a pretty time-intensive job.

At least I did manage to get a bunch of shopping done at Home Hardware, so I think we now have all the supplies that we need for a major painting party today and tomorrow.

Priming is Almost Done

2007-11-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I finished doing the minor carpentry work that needed to be done in the dining room, although I still have a bit of plastering and caulking to finish up.

Shawn and Ali and Sarah helped me for several hours, and we now have about 95% of the priming done in the entire restaurant. The only parts of the priming that didn't get finished last night were a bit of the trim in one section where we ran out of primer, and some work around the entrance canopy. The priming is the easiest of the three coats that have to go down, but at least the dining room is starting to look a lot different. Hopefully I can round up a whole lot of helpers for a major painting session on Sunday, and I expect to be working in here from about 2pm to 2am tomorrow.

In the meantime, today I'm going to see how much I can get started on the first coat of the finish paint.

Renovations Begin

2007-11-23T05:36:00.001-04:00

The Olive Branch is moving. After about six years in the original location at 28A York Street in Sackville, I'm moving the restaurant around the corner to 96 Main Street. I've wanted to expand for some time, but opportunities in our current building have been limited, and I was unable to purchase that building outright. The restaurant's dining room space has been one of its biggest weaknesses for years - it's been too small during peak periods, with a cold and uneven floor, and with poor lighting, sound, and ambiance. Last month I decided that I had three options: to wait for an opportunity to expand in the York Street location, to find a new space in town, or to close outright. After several weeks of deliberations, I decided that the restaurant had too much potential opportunity to close, and I decided this past weekend to move into a larger facility.

The chance to finally have the kind of dining room space that I've always wanted is very exciting. I've always considered the Olive Branch to be a "work in progress" rather than a mature business, and over the past few years, my focus has been on areas which I had some control over, ie. the menus, marketing, making operations more efficient, and basically trying to make the business run smoothly as a small and lean organization. Although there are still improvements to be made in all of those areas, I have been mainly happy with our accomplishments to date. However, the chance to finally have a large venue is going to turn the restaurant into a much more impressive dining destination in our region. This blog will give me an opportunity to provide regular progress updates to the staff, our families and friends, and our well-wishers in the southeastern New Brunswick region. I hope to make almost daily updates to this blog over the coming six to seven weeks, as we wind down operations in the York Street location and start operations in the Main Street location.

So far this week, there hasn't been a lot to talk about. My restaurant manager (Alison Starratt) visited the Main Street facility with me several times early in the week. We moved in a bunch of tools, tried some sample paints on the walls to pick a color scheme, and walked around and started to make some tentative plans. We taped up the front windows so we wouldn't have so many curious onlookers, and started to paint. In the past two nights, we've had help from people like Kasie Morris, Cathy Cowe, Shawn Calhoun, Pippa Elliot, Sarah Milligan, Amanda Purdy, and Jeff Coull. Shawn especially is proving to be invaluable since he's got a lot of painting experience, and he isn't taking courses (almost all of our other helpers are students at Mount Allison University, so with exams coming up in two weeks, a lot of our potential helpers have to worry about academics). We've got one section of the dining room almost completely painted (so we could get a better feel for the color scheme) and the primer has been finished on about 50% of the entire dining area. We're concentrating on that before we start to worry about the kitchens, since we can't start moving equipment into the kitchens yet anyway. Also, the former color scheme in the dining room is pretty scary, so we want to cover up the bright reds, yellows, and oranges with a more conservative and tasteful beige/brown scheme.

My goal is to have all of the painting finished by November 30th. We have several Christmas banquets booked in the old restaurant during the first week of December, but we will probably be open to the public until about December 7th in the York Street location. After that, our goal is to have all of our equipment moved into the new location in the following two weeks, so we will have vacated the York Street location by Christmas.

As mentioned, I'll try to make regular posts on this blog, to keep everyone informed of our progress. Consider this to be our "Restaurant Makeover" blog!

- Jonathan (Scooter) Clark, owner/operator
The Olive Branch of Sackville