Little Repairs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.