This seems to happen every May. My restaurant falls apart. Refrigerators break down. Like we all need a vacation, refrigerators included. The heat hits San Miguel and customers flee. The staff is overheating and slowing down. And I’m having a hard time keeping the energy reved up as unexpected projects build.
The other week my oldest refrigerator died. I had it for about 18 years. Ever since my first restaurant, El Burrito Bistro. It was my very first for real I have a restaurant refrigerator, it’s mate a full vertical freezer, still working. It had survived 3 moves and honestly I don’t remember when it failed me. Not like my other appliances. My industrial oven that wouldn’t stay lit right before Thanksgiving. My monster, 2 door industrial refrigerator that broke down last May, again this May, has caused me to lose food on many ocassions and cost me a lot of money in repairs over the past 4 years. This fridge, despite it’s tendency to leak regularly, was a trouper. Most of the rubber between the door was falling apart, door compartments cracked, vegetable drawers long gone. I decided not to resucitate. Instead I stopped by the local industrial appliance store and purchased a new refrigerator and new freezer for the bar.
…I’m resuming this post after an extensive intermission. I was at a party the other night and one of my dear customers and friend, Everett, said to me in his thick southern accent,
“I think I’m ’bout ready for another post.”
I had started this ode to past appliances in the midst of a wave of repairs right before closing for a week for vacation. I think I had intended to share my many refrigeration moments in the history of my restaurant. Like when I was laying on my side with chop sticks trying pull a dead mouse out of the fan of the deli case. Its tail had been whipping the blades making a horrible noise, forcing me to unplug and investigate. As I was lying on the floor squealing with each failed attempt at freeing the freshly slain rodent a woman was walking down the stairs.
“Oh, look, she fixes the refrigerators too!”
But I got distracted by the 2 leaky cisterns. The brand new fridge was delivered and didn’t work, the waiters were rearranging refrigerators as if they were squares on a rubix cube. The money sucking monster in the kitchen needed a new fan. Plus I had to set aside funds for the pouring of the cement in the parking lot entrance whilst filling 7 envelopes of the staff’s vacation pay. I was fed up and getting out of town was not in the budget. I scheduled a facial with a friend while Jack got groomed. I went to the dentist for a teeth cleaning. I had some plants repotted. I slept through the night without teas or gummies and if I woke up too early I went back to sleep, an attempt to stockpile sleep like a toilet paper hoarder at the onset of quarantine.
2 days into my staycation I received a call from my head waiter, Rodrigo, he was in the hospital. He had fallen off his roof and broken his clavicle bone. He was given a month’s paid leave from work to heal. I was thankful that it hadn’t been worse, I wasn’t concerned about the inconvenience. I called a stand in dishwasher, so the steady dishwasher could help in the bar. It was covered. But 2 days later I received a message from another waiter, Carlos, informing me that he was taking a job in Cancún. I didn’t have anyone to cover this and for some reason none of the employment sites would let me post an ad. For a night I wallowed in tequila and self-pity of what was inevitable, waiting tables with my only remaining waiter, Paco. Paco the waiter that has been consistently irresponsible in the past. Who I have threatened to fire and given countless last chances. Now he was all I had left.
I dreaded doing a fraction of what my former self used to do without a thought and without a staff of 5. When I started this blog I was working from home, posting elaborate menus, taking the orders, shopping, cooking, packing and delivering the food myself in my beat up Volkswagen stationwagon that had a screwdriver for a stickshift while raising 2 children on my own. But now I was scared, as if I was going to be hurled back in time, the alarm was going to go off before the sun came out and I would have to wake the kids up for school, pack lunches and scramble to not be late.
I messaged my remaining 5 employees to let them know what we would be coming back to, asking them to get the help wanted word out and begging them to come back…rested and ready. And so they were. Even Paco who made amends for his past, stepping up as a star waiter and teacher to the young, new waiter that walked in application in hand and big smile on his face. The refrigerators stayed cold, the doors to the gate opened and closed. It took a lot of sweat and hard work. But I didn’t have to wake up to an alarm. Progress.
Under the Table 