What does a typical day look like running a BBQ restaurant? Most people who have never worked in a restaurant before probably thought most of their time would be spent creating and cooking food, right?
WRONG! It turns out cleaning is the biggest task that takes up most good restaurants’ time.
A TYPICAL DAY OF RUNNING A RESTAURANT STARTS HERE
As a BBQ restaurant, we cooked our brisket and pork butts low and slow overnight in our smoker. Our typical day starts about 7:30am. But if we have a big catering on top of opening the store for lunch, our day can start as early as 4:30am.
So, our typical day starts with testing and taking last night’s briskets and pork butts out of the smoker individually based on whether they are ready to our satisfaction or not. Then, we load in fresh hickory wood logs (Never pellets, wood logs are the best!) to get ready for the morning meat smoking. We double check the smoker is set to the right temperature, then we quickly load the ribs, chicken, and other meat into our smoker to be ready for our lunch crowd. Each meat gets its own timer, so when the meat is ready to come out, it could be quite an exciting time because 4-5 timers could all be going off close to the same time.
DON’T FORGET THE SIDES
After the meats are all in, the person in charge of cooking the food would need to move on to cook and prepare the sides for the lunch crowd. Our customers favorite sides include Mac n’ Cheese, Mash Potato n’ Gravy, Smoked BBQ beans, Southern green beans, Smoked Corn, coleslaw and many more.
While one person is cooking, the other person would set up the hot table to make sure when the food is ready, we have a place to keep them warm. That same person would then also give our dining area and restroom proper cleaning and mopping so our guests have a clean and pleasant place to relax and eat.
RUNNING A RESTAURANT, IT’S LUNCH TIME!
Lunch time is an exciting time for us! We open at 11 am sharp! 6-day a week. Rain or shine. Short staff or not. We make it happen for our beloved customers. Knowing many of our regulars have a very short lunch break, we make sure our tasty BBQ food comes out quickly and efficiently for our guests. Most of our guests have long become our friends. They would come in and share with me all the good, the bad and the ugly that is happening to them; I always felt so honored to lend my ear and be part of their life.
PREP, PREP and MORE PREP
After lunch, there are tables to clean, dishes to wash, and floors to sweep. In between lunch and dinner, we prep and take care of our inventories to make sure we don’t run out of anything. As a small owner/operator, this is also a time where I find myself having to scramble and go shopping from time-to-time to get the emergency missing ingredients. Fortunately, our restaurant happens to be next to a Safeway.
DINNER TIME!
Before the dinner crowd comes in, we make sure we clean our restrooms one more time. The dinner crowd tends to be slightly different than the lunch crowd. While the lunch crowd tends to be more in a rush, the dinner crowd has more time to chat and converse. Besides BBQ and our sides, they love our home-made sweet potato pie and our M&M quadruple chocolate brownies. They are such comfort food for many, especially those who are originally from the South.
CLEANING, CLEANING AND MORE CLEANING
Besides finishing all the dishes and loading our briskets and pork butts into the smoker for the next day, our day ends with giving our kitchen area a complete scrub down. Making sure we keep our kitchen clean is one of our most important tasks and our commitments to our valued customers; we’ve never missed a day. The funny thing is we never knew any other way, we truly thought every restaurant would do that every day until multiple health inspectors came by our restaurant and were all pleasantly surprised by the clean conditions of our kitchen. I guess they probably have seen more than their fair shares of not quite desirable. I honestly cannot imagine any other way!
As you can see, for those who thought owning a restaurant is all just about cooking and creating great food, it really is not. Even though that’s a big part of why many restaurant owners decided to open a restaurant, in reality there are multiple facets to this business. It requires the owner not only to have passion for their food, but more importantly they must be passionate about the well-being of their customers. We had a golden rule in our restaurant: “We eat what we serve. If you wouldn’t eat it, don’t serve it to our customers!”
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