I’m not going to lie – Saturday night was amazing in a lot of ways but today, I’m still feeling an endless amount of anxiety.
The truth is, nobody and nothing you do is ever perfect. And especially not on the first try. That night was definitely one of those examples. Things didn’t run as smoothly as they normally do and service was slow, even though for us, it felt like a marathon was being run. First of all, our last “busy” night was in November, and we served around 65 people in 3.5 hours. Before that, we slowly built from serving 30 people on a Saturday night, to 40 people, to 50 people, etc. We still had a few hiccups with 65 people but in general, we had eased into it. Suddenly once December hit, our Saturday nights slowed to a halt. Last week, we served 30 people for 3 hours. So imagine our surprise this Saturday when 85 people showed up in a 2.5 hour timeframe…
For the very first time since we opened, not a single table at the restaurant was empty. It was amazing to know so many people had suddenly decided to give us a try. Of course, I’ve been wishing repeatedly that we and our staff had expected it!
With only four people in the kitchen preparing three course meals for 85 people within a 2.5 hour time frame, I’m surprised a majority of the tables actually got served in a timely manner. I was even more surprised while making the rounds from table to table that one table actually got their main courses too early!
Luckily, for the most part, the guests were incredibly understanding. They know we’re new, they see we’re working hard, and they have amazing confidence that we will get our pacing down. Unfortunately, there’s always a customer or two that you can’t rectify the situation with no matter what…and it completely kills me.
For me, it doesn’t matter that 81 of our 85 guests were happy and understanding. In the end, all I can think about are those four customers who left unhappy. Why? Because I truly want everyone to be happy. I want everyone to have the best experience possible and to know that we couldn’t give it to them devastates me completely. To make matters worse, Yelp, always comes around to haunt you. Again, countless five star reviews but when that one one star review creeps up, it’s heartbreaking every time. I wish I could say I’m sorry to them or turn the clock back to make things run differently. But truthfully, no matter what I wish I could’ve done, I’m pretty sure if I repeated the day, it all would have turned out the same. No matter what, we couldn’t be everywhere at once and I can’t continue to beat myself up for it.
Because that’s the thing. When you’re running your very first business at 23 and 26 years old, or any age for that matter, your going to mess up. You’re going to have an off day. But how else are you ever going to make something successful in life? No one succeeds at anything in life without screwing up the first few times around, because honestly, that’s the only way you learn.
The most hurtful thing to me is to have our work be chalked up to being a result of “amateur management”. The hardest thing about being a young business owner is that all of our mistakes are considered a result of us being young and therefore incompetent. Yes, we’re young. Yes, things did not go as planned. That’s not amateur, that’s just life. For a fresh new business, there’s no way mistakes aren’t going to ever be made. However, many restaurants have these problems after years of being open, with experienced managers over the age of 40. In the end, I feel proud because we’re only four months in. In four months, we’ve dealt with so many challenges and have managed to arise to the occasion practically every single time. So we made a mistake. Who hasn’t? In the end, all we can do is learn and grow from the experience. And for the last year, my husband and I have done exactly that.
For the rest of our time in this industry, and in life in general, we will continue to learn from our negative experiences and use them to our advantage.
So to those customers Saturday night who left unhappy and angry, I am sorry. We didn’t intentionally fall behind in the kitchen and we didn’t intentionally avoid apologizing to your table. We will however, continue to intentionally work to fix these problems so they do not happen again on our future busy nights.