disclaimer

full disclosure— we are (a bit) cheeky; we will  tell stories. some, all, or none of the following may be true and quite possibly could be false. you decide. believe what you want, or just ask one of us and perhaps we’ll tell you…

synopsis:

a short-ish story of an especially scattershot approach to restaurant 101~

after a short and certainly barely successful career traveling the world as a street performer, it came time for millie to settle into a slightly more stable lifestyle.  millie was searching for something a little easier on her no-longer-young self.  something simple & small,  with flexible hours and no long days. something where she wouldn’t have to work that hard because, remember, she wasn’t into that any more.

culinary school seemed like the perfect combination of many of my her favorite things…drama circus performance,  food, and self-gratification.  a year and half in the culinary program at  salter college, this millie emerged with more than  a few extra pounds and a shameless adulation for anyone who works in a professional kitchen.  school taught her a quite few tricks and showed me her exactly how inept one could be at multi-tasking and time management.

armed with a charmingly profound naiveté and the skillset of someone who has never set foot in a professional kitchen what-so-ever, it curiously felt natural to think it  a reasonably simple task to open a little bakery café. not even remotely ridiculous.   okay, it is possible that it did seem a bit daunting and might be a small but difficult task, but at least it was not a BIG and difficult task and that was a good thing.

it is precisely that kind of murky logic that led to an event that i may, quite possibly,never recover from.  it was a sunday, a regular old mind-your-own-business kind of sunday.  one of those where a person might ve-ry in-ad-vert-ent-ly push open the back door of an old, neglected,  vacant building.  that was 3 years ago.  three years ago when i  knew not of such things as grease traps, p.o.s. systems, pesky fire/plumbing codes, labor laws, employee handbooks and payroll.. three addled years of deconstruction, no-construction, reconstruction, and beaurocracy of such epic proportions that i have never  encountered the likes of, ever.  this has been the seriously worst most unique experience, filled with unusual “learning opportunities” and the peculiarly unavoidable  tendency to electrocute myself every two or three months. yet i am not upset, no, not at all.

on the bright side, i have since learned to speak with a modicum of confidence of such things as pars, covers, labor laws, venting systems,vendors, unit pricing and food cost. truthfully, of all things i didn’t know, what i didn’t know most was just how much i seriously did not know.

soooo, with that said,  fortunately for all of us, I am NOT in the kitchen, no, not at all.

it turns out idiocy and perseverance sometimes pays off and we have an amazing chef.  i am  convinced he is part wizard as I have watched, tasted, tested and tasted again. chef louis is wicked pro. him  and his  crew of ninja-magicians are the real deal. we have a seriously awesome menu and just the  best biker-friendly, great food, coffee drinker, dog place ever.

…~and that, my friends,  is just how we came to possess, of all things , an old neglected brick building with a little coffee shop and some seriously awesome food~……