Business has been going pretty well at the new restaurant. Every week, we seem to be making small improvements and trying to gel as a company. But we took a GIANT step backwards on Sunday.
It was my first time ever attempting an Easter Brunch at my restaurant. But I figured, I’d give it a try and see what happened. We planned, we shopped, we set up and we decorated. But the disaster still happened. First, we had one employee that was sick Easter morning and couldn’t work and another one that had some type of personal issue that kept her from working. So, instead of having four servers, we had two. Ok, maybe we can handle this. Then the biggest problem occurred that really set the day off. We had a simple Easter Brunch menu. There were four options. I tried to keep the menu as simple as possible to eliminate the possibility of any problems. We opened at 11am and there were customers immediately. And it seemed to be going well. But around 11:15, I noticed that our 6-7 tables still had the “hungry look” on their faces. And I took a quick look in the kitchen and no food was being prepared. I’m like, what the hell!!! Well, for some reason,, the new brunch items that I had just added to the menu were not printing in the kitchen. It was a simple computer error but it was a very costly one. And the bottom line was that we had 7-8 tables of about 3-6 people each and their food had not even begun to be prepared yet. That may not sound like a lot but that’s about 35-40 plates of food. And we needed it ALL IMMEDIATELY!!! So, we re-printed the tickets But I went into serious panic mode because I knew there was no way that we could catch up. We needed 40 plates IMMEDIATELY and… Sure enough, new customers were still arriving and we were just getting started with the ones that had been there since we opened. I gave out FREE DRINKS, Comped a whole bunch of food, Apologized to a whole bunch of people and did the best I could to make it right. We did what we could but it just went south from there. The 2 servers did their best but it was a long frustrating day.
UGH, Happy Easter!
