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.

Trial Runs in the Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.