02.19.07

A New Record

Posted in The Story at 10:56 am by Chef Matt

Saturday night is always a busy night in kitchens. Everybody else is as deep into their weekends as they can get, so they figure why not live it up a little? Tomorrow will be Sunday, and that usually means church and/or chores, so now is the time for them to go out and have a little fun, right?

Well, that seems to have been the thought pattern for all of Northern Virginia last night, and coincidentally they all were thinking that the ideal place to undertake their weekend celebration was Restaurant Vero.

I mentioned a few weeks back about how we all entered a pool to guess how many covers we would have during a Saturday night. I actually ended up winning that night with my spot-on guess of 120. We did this pool a few more times after this instance, but it soon lost any feeling of random guessing as the number of guests who would come in on a Saturday night was consistently falling between 118 and 124. There was such a lack of variety in the outcome that we soon all wondered why we should bother to create a pool to see who was the lucky bastard that guessed the right number out of only 6 or 7 possible outcomes.

“You’re a Baldwin, right?” “Yes.” “Which one are you again?…”

So the cover pool is no more. I retired from it with a record of 1-4. (Nobody ever won twice.) Which means I made money on the venture when all is said and done. (Which I lost in a bet as to which Baldwin brother was in “The Hunt for Red October”. Could have sworn it was William…)

The most covers we had ever done on any night to date was 127 - we did that shortly after our great review in the Washington Post came out. People really do read the reviews, and most of them think that the best time to come to a restaurant is right after it goes to print. I personally like to give it some time so the crazy scramble to get a seat can subside. But in our case, the average Saturday night was still only 6 or 7 covers off the record anyway. In short, Fridays and Saturdays have always been busy for us since the review.

Which brings us to last night.

Wandering into the kitchen I saw what can only be described as “the usual scene”. The same people that I would expect to see at 2:30 in the afternoon were all present, and the attitude in the kitchen was completely casual. I started about my duties, with no real concern as to the night’s schedule. The levels of all five of my vinaigrettes were low, so I had to make a fresh batch of all of them. Though I noticed that perhaps there was still enough apple cider vinaigrette for the night, provided we didn’t have too busy of a night.

“Hey Jay, how many covers do we have on the books for tonight?” I asked, hoping to perhaps weasel out of making more of that dressing.

“We got one hundred eleven on the books tonight,” said Jay.

“Yeah, 111 covers… that’s the ticket…”

Now most people would react with shock to such a high number of reservations. But you have to keep in mind, as I have mentioned before, that Jay is a master bullshitter. In fact, he usually gets the number on the books, and then tells us about double that just to scare us. So my reaction was based on these many past experiences - not out of some chip on my shoulder.

“Bullshit, Jay.”

“No, really!”

I still didn’t really believe him, but thankfully one of our waitresses, April, was walking into the kitchen just then, so I asked her about the cover count.

“Well, we just had a cancellation,” she started, so I expected a relatively normal count of about 65 or so, “which brings us down to 109 for tonight.”

“Holy crap!”

“Told ya!” said Jay.

I still don’t believe too much he says, but he was actually telling me the truth this time. (For once…) I began making more of the apple cider vinaigrette.

The night proceeded in pretty much the fashion one would expect it too when we were almost completely booked on reservations. Every time one of the waitresses would come back, they would regale us with horror stories about the dining room - about how there were too many people in there for them to even move around. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to offer much sympathy as our lines were usually 8 orders deep and constantly growing. For the first time in months I had to ask for Dave’s help to bail me out and help me with some dessert orders. I was about 10 or 12 salads behind, and had three full dessert tickets on my station as well. The frantic pace of the kitchen was truly a sight to behold for about an hour or two there.

Many people ask me what it is I love most about being a chef, and I have to say that to some degree it is the fast-paced mosh-pit like crush of a busy night. You either live off that adrenaline rush, or you get out of the kitchen. Well, this night was like an overdose. I was doing fine on the levels I was seeing before, and this was a heavier dose than I was used to. But hey - that which doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger, right?

The list of dishes that we ran out of was relatively short considering how many orders we had filled. But with only three tables left we seemed to have run out of the unthinkable. Kim came back and asked me, “Do we have any more bread?”

We had enough bread to feed over 130 people. One would have thought that would have been enough…

I was stunned by the thought that we might be out of this most basic of restaurant staples, but sure enough, the tub of sliced bread from which we fill our baskets was empty, and I didn’t see any in the usual spot where we kept our reserves. I jumped over to the fridge by the bread station and frantically began to shove blocks of butter and cartons of eggs to the side in a desperate hope to find…. yes! There was one slab of focaccia left. I pulled it out, sliced it up and began to warm it in the microwave. Hopefully this last pile of freshly sliced bread would last us until we clos….*sigh*.

It lasted about 30 seconds.

With one more table still sitting down, we again tore through the kitchen in the quest for any sort of bread suitable for serving to our customers, and Dave found a half loaf of bread somewhere. (I still am not sure where he found it, but it was indeed fresh…) We sliced and warmed that as well, and with careful portioning were able to make that last the rest of the night.

There is perhaps no better description for how busy a restaurant was on a given night than to say, “It was so busy - we ran out of bread.”

Well thanks to the unrelenting march of time, the night finally came to an end, and the feeling in the kitchen was a healthy mixture of exhaustion and relief. My hands were brittle from being washed so many times, my feet were sore from running all over the kitchen, and I felt that if I had to push one more waitress out of my way from standing in front of my dessert station I was going to have to kill them in the process. But the night was over, and that was all that mattered.

Such record-busting had not been seen since Takeru Kobayashi doubled the hot dog eating record in 2001 by eating 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

Our hostess came back into the kitchen to say goodnight, and as we always do, we asked her about the cover count for the night.

“One hundred thirty five,” she said.

“Wow! A new record!” we all said.

“Oh wait, we had one last table of two… One hundred thirty seven.”

“Holy cow.”

We broke the old record by ten covers. Sure, that may only be an 8% increase over the previous record, but think of it this way:

When was the last time you had 10 people over to your house and you had to cook for them? Was that easy going for you? Now imagine they all ordered something different, but you wouldn’t know what they wanted until they showed up… Yeah, ten people can be a bit of work all on their own, but add them on top of 127 previous customers, and well, you have yourself quite the record-breaking evening.

I wonder who would have won the cover pool this time if we had run it?…

Matt

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