The Breakfast Menu

Breakfast is going well, this week was the first full weekend and we made it through with no disasters, I am ditching that late night thing for now though. Here's what my schedule was looking like:

Thursday - work from 9:30 am to around 9 pm.

Friday - get up at 4 am, this requires two alarms set at opposite sides of the room just out of reach of my bed, get to work by 5 am to prep for breakfast. Breakfast ends at 11 am, put everything up and clean the stoves and surrounding area. Take care of any boss stuff (bank/store runs, payroll/accounting, stuff like that) and get home around 2:30, nap 'til about 8 pm and then back to work for the late night stuff. Sell 6 slices to three very drunk people at 10:15 pm then absolutely nothing 'til about 1:30 am when the drunks would start wandering past on their way to their cars as bars were closing. Sell about 6 more slices. Clean up and either sleep at the cafe on my cot or drive home and sleep there (cafe sleep is sucky, but good for about an hour more rack time), get up in time to get back to work by 5 am.

Saturday - Same as above.

Sunday - Back to work by 5 am and done and on my way home by 1 pm. Nap. Mostly a day off.

Monday - Boss shit in the morning, then off for the day. Woohoo.

Tuesday - Regular day, pretty much 9:30 am to 9 pm. Cooking, washing dishes and prep.

Wednesday and Thursday - Same as Tuesday.

Rinse and repeat.

So, yeah, fuck that late night stuff...for now. I still think it's a good idea with potential to make some good money, but not at this time of the year. Besides, it was making me stupid.

Breakfast though is going well, not real busy, but that's good. This is a completely different way of cooking than I'm used to at work. Pizzas you make and put in the oven and then you've got seven minutes to take care of other things. Everything is either prepared in the oven or from the steam table or salad bench. It can get pretty hectic on an extremely busy day, but one person can feed the fifty or so people in a reasonable about of time with little trouble. During breakfast service even a small table can throw you into the weeds...eggs are poaching, biscuits are warming in the oven, bacon and sausage frying, gravy thickening, pancakes overcooking in a second, grits turning from soup into glue as soon as you turn your back on them...and, as you can see from the pic, I don't have a flat top, it all happens in separate pans and it can spiral into chaos pretty quickly.

I've never been a short-order cook, but it's getting better, I'm figuring things out, fine tuning with nearly every order that comes in. It will get easier. I just hope that it stays slow until I find my way a little better.

Around here the Mexican breakfast is king, lots of stuff with tortillas, red and green chile sauces, and beans. And I love that. There are few things I enjoy more than huevos rancheros with pinto beans and a couple warm flour tortillas to scoop it all up with. But every restaurant in town has it on the menu and I wanted to do something different to stand out, so I went with the menu below. It's definitely Southern inspired, some of it is what I grew up eating as a kid, and I guarantee you're not going to find biscuits with chocolate gravy on any other menu in Lincoln County...I'd be surprised to see it on any menu in the state. So far, no one not related to me has ordered it, but a lady this morning did ask if I had some bacon drippings for her grits (hell yeah I did) and a couple from Virginia said that their breakfast today (biscuits with sausage gravy, fried tomatoes, and sausage) was the best they'd had since leaving home. So, I'm finding my audience.

Pretty much everything is made from scratch except for the puff pastry, I buy frozen 3" rounds for the 'nests'. The bacon is cured in-house and the sausage is also house-made. Biscuits are from scratch.

I hope you enjoy.

The Rio Plate – 2 Eggs, your choice of Bacon or Sausage, potatoes and a biscuit $3.95

Nests – Light, crisp puff pastry shells topped with one of our four sauces and two poached eggs.

Florentine – Creamed spinach and hollandaise sauce. $5.95

Creole – Spicy shrimp jambalaya. $4.95

Moroccan – Spice infused tomato sauce. $4.95

Jacksonville – Sausage gravy. $3.95

Griddle Cakes – Short $3.95 Tall $4.95

Toast Lafayette – French toast with a crunchy, golden crust $4.95

Maple syrup, apricot syrup, blackstrap molasses, and honey are available

Biscuits and Gravy – Two buttermilk biscuits with your choice of gravy. $3.95

Cream, Sausage, or Chocolate

Sweet rice - Who says morning grains have to be healthy? $3.45

Sides -

Bacon (3) - $1.95

Sausage (2) - $1.95

Grits - $.95

Biscuit - $.95

Rice - $.95

Fried tomatoes - $1.95

Beverages –

Coffee $.50

Hot Tea $1.00

Fountain soft drinks or milk $1.50

Bottled soft drinks or juice $2.00

So, I've been up for around 31 hours right now, due to a couple of brainstorms (suicide missions) I came up with to keep my restaurant afloat over the next few months.
Ok, that's a little melodramatic...I could keep the restaurant going, but some people, people I care about, would have to lose their jobs. So I decided to stay open late on Friday and Saturday nights to catch the bar crowds and to start serving breakfast on Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings.
That means I get to stay open 'til 2 am for the bars and then close and start prepping up for breakfast at 7 am.
And since I'm the cheapest employee I've got I'm the one doing all the work. And that's ok.
Yesterday I made a hundred bucks in a hour and a half doing some PI shit. At the restaurant? I made about nothing in just over 25 hours.
Guess which one made me feel dirty? Yeah, the easy one. The bar crowd I could do without, but the breakfast menu I love. I'll post it soon. I'm really proud of it and the food (for the most part) has tested really well. I say for the most part because several items that were tested and seemed easy a few days ago failed miserably this morning on what was supposed to be our first breakfast service. I ended up closing (we hadn't even had a customer, but things were just not working out the way I wanted them to) and only cooked for a few friends who came by. I learned quite a bit and hopefully things will work out better tomorrow.
And somewhere in the process I realized that it's not only the difficult jobs that hold my interest, it's the difficult loves...the women who, for whatever reason, I just can't seem to attain, or if attained, keep.
All this became clear as my hollandaise broke for the second time while I was burning bacon and trying to nurse my grits back to life and thinking about Sam and how I couldn't wait to see her again.

True Grit

I thought this was a horrible idea, how could anyone remake a John Wayne classic? Now, after seeing the trailer and seeing just who's involved, I know where I'll be Christmas day.

Had ourselves a little punk rock show last night at the cafe, and I wanted to share some of that with you all.

Sean Bond Goon

Aka: Sean Davis. Sean used to work at the cafe, starting way back in 2001, I think. I knew him from before that, from my cop days. Sean never got in any trouble, let's just say that I was at his house a number of times when he was a kid because of the adults in that house and leave it at that.
When he started at the cafe, as a buser, I think he was around 17. We had hired his friend Kluthe around that same time, both of them were in a punk band called Backwash with a couple of other kids, one of whom, Joel Hixon, is now the front guy for Absent Minds down there.
At that time smoking was still legal in restaurants here and the owner then was aggressively pro-smoker. The restaurant is tiny, but even if it had been larger I don't think John would have created a smoking area. If someone asked, they were told that the whole place was a smoking area. And that included behind the counter. Everyone smoked. I think that the one waitress (John also had a rule against hiring women, an attitude acquired from the first owner, and one that he eventually softened on) and I were the only two out of a summer staff of around 14 who didn't smoke.
John did have to tighten up on the smoking a little bit though when one day Sean and Kluthe were both working as busers and were filling an ice cream order. Kluthe was bent over the ice cream freezer, his eight inch multicolored spiked hair threatening to knock all the junk that immediately fills any blank spot at the cafe into the open freezer. Sean was standing behind him, holding two ice cream cones, waiting on the third to take them to the table, all with a lit cigarette in his mouth with about an inch of ash hanging.
I can still picture him standing there, this awkward and shy kid, trying to portray to the world a toughness that I don't think he's every really had.
Sean lives in Las Cruces now and runs a small restaurant there and plays punk as Sean Bond Goon and his Psychological Voodoo. He's a true one man band, playing guitar and drums all by himself. Hit the link up there and give it listen. It's rough and it may not be your thing, but it's all him.

Absent Minds

I've known Joel for around the same amount of time. He was already balding at 14 or 15 and has Tourette's which causes his head to rock to the right. So, of course, his friends dubbed him Tick Tock.
Joel eventually ended up working at the cafe as well, as a prep cook and then pizza cook. He's funny as hell but slightly exhausting because he argues about everything just to argue and is extremely opinionated. He and I have had an ongoing argument for about six years now about the historical origins of cheese.
Once, a few years ago, we were both on the line and there was this very pretty girl sitting at the counter. Joel kept looking back toward her and then leaned in, his head bobbing from side to side, and said, "Dude, that chick is totally into my shit, she wants to fuck my brains out." This was something Joel was convinced of any time any female showed him more than any passing interest or, in some cases, none at all. He said that exact line so many times that Brett and I still say it from time to time when an especially pretty woman comes into view.
Later that night, when I mentioned this to the waitress who had been taking care of the young woman, she snorted, "No, she told me that she couldn't stop staring and him and asked me, 'What the fuck is wrong with his head?'"
After high school Joel moved to Portland and got a bachelor's degree in a field he'll probably never work in. At least I hope not. I hope he keeps playing music and living his dream. He's been playing with Absent Minds for a few years now in clubs around Portland. For the past couple of weeks they've been touring, playing several shows in California, before moving on to Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and finishing up tonight in Denver, CO.
And Kluthe, their spiked friend and former band-mate? He's traded his spikes for sideburns and is starting his second year of law school and is brewing some pretty damned good beer in his house. Like Joel, he is opinionated and argumentative...so I think he'll be happy as a lawyer.

Just thought I'd show off.
I was about to cut this and send it out when I thought, 'Wow, that's the perfect meatball sandwich.' Good thing I had my camera today.

Sonja left to do grownup stuff, like go to college and live with her fiance. She'd been with me a long time, off and on for about five years. Before that I used to take runaway reports on her when I was a deputy.

She can drink far more than her size suggests and still cook, she curses and talks shit on a level that few teenage boys can match, loves to talk about food, and is always down to start a fight.

She can also name the designer of a pair of sunglasses (or any other accessory) in low light from a block away.

Farewell Sonja, the place is a lot less pirate without you.

Blech.