6 Months and Counting...

(or life and the state of me)

It's been the most insane experience of my life. So much more than I expected... deeper, richer... a rush like nothing else.

We continue to get busier and we continue to learn and grow. We raised our menu prices slightly and that has helped a lot to assuage my fears that we would be slammed busy and continue to barely break even. I still have yet to start paying off friends who gave me money to get started and this is really important to me.

We have so much going on now. Lots of catering and I am REALLY excited about my first teaching and wine pared dinner with Sommlier Sean (Andrade of Andrade Wine Group). He selected Spanish Wines to go with a five course tasting dinner http://www.compassstarcatering.com/to_spain_with_love in mid June. Getting to talk to people about food makes my little black chef heart so happy!

We started a Friday Happy hour on May 25th. Our customers wanted us to stay open late one night a week and we choose Friday because it was Lita's Bocce night.  The picture to the right was the Chiccetti (Venetian Finger Foods) from last Friday. Bacon Freak with Crostini, Chicken Apple Bourbon Sausage Hand Pie, Meatball Slider, Pancetta-Sage and Orange Crostini, Soft Boiled Egg with House Made Andouille, And Smoked Eggplant Caponata on Crostini. It was a holiday AND raining (so no bocce) and kind of slow, but so much fun!

It's been a crazy few months... I split from my long time significant other and I feel like being single, 42 years old and autonomous has been an lusty distraction. It is a strange rock-star life of Caligula-like proportions... cook all day and obsess about food, hang out in my kitchen with two fantastically talented chefs that I adore (Stein and Haley), chat with customers all day, then roll out still smelling like blood and cinnamon with my room mate Mary (Chef at Pizza Antica) to Creek Monkey to drink amazing beer and hang out with the fantastic crew there, watch Matt and Jim Brew, then collapse in bed, sated. Wash... Rinse... Repeat.

I went and hung out Monday in Port Costa at this ancient bar/restaurant called the Warehouse down by the water. It felt so good to just be in the sun with an amazing beer, a beautiful man, and low key down to earth  people. I watched the river flow by and felt the bay breeze on my face and tasted the marrow of life.

I feel like there is so much more I want to write. My life is insane and scary right now, but so amazingly fulfilling.

Adjustments and hitting my stride

The past few months have been such a rush. I want so much to give the unvarnished truth about what it has been like to do this crazy thing (open my own restaurant), but it is so difficult to express the highs and lows... which are dizzying extremes.

This past week felt like movement. It started with a fantastic Friday night out in Martinez where I met up with friends at Creek Monkey for a burger and beers. The owner's assistant (the totally adorable Valerie or "Val") said there was something special going on at Ray' Lounge, which is kind of a smallish dive bar around the corner from my place. We all ambled over to Ray's and Val's new room mate's indie SCA band was playing. It was really really cool. We had cute 20-something hipsters following us over and we all headed back to Creek Monkey for a final beer before I embarked on one of the worst Saturday hang overs I've ever had. I tried to talk a friend into bringing me Pho, but to no avail. I canceled all but my most non-cancelable appointments for the day and laid in bed, moaning and sleeping.

Saturday night I met up with friends in Berkeley for my dear friend Adina's birthday pizza at Zachary's Pizza on College. I had never had deep dish pizza and it was REALLY filling. The place was PACKED too. I tried to get back on the horse and have a couple of beers... then a super cute friend drove me home.

Sunday I hit breakfast with another good friend and then into the Farmer's Market for the goodies for the restaurant for the week. Spring produce is finally coming around and the sun was shining and I met up with someone I am casually seeing for a coffee and fantastic conversation. Then back home to for a day of wine tasting in Napa with my room mate, Mary Carlson, who is sous-chef at the Peasant and the Pear in Danville and her mom.  We hit Oxbow Market in Napa First.

 It was pretty touristy, in a cornflake Napa kind of way. I had to go check out the Fatted Calf, which is a Napa place making their own charcuterie. I wanted to hate the place, but there is just no way to not love it. The guys were unfalteringly kind and respectful to their customers, even when it was wall to wall bodies they were constantly making eye contact and apologizing for the wait.

A place like this could be total assholes to their customers (Like they are at Big Sur Bakery) and people would still be clamoring to buy their stuff. It was great to see how well my own products hold up against such great stuff and I felt even more committed to the culture of Yes we are trying to foster at TCS.

We also got coffee at Ritual, which was kind of funny. They had this little hot plate and wire frame they were making single cups of coffee on which ranged in price from $5.00 to $7.00. It took like 5 minutes to get this cup of coffee that was kind of so-so. I suspect I have grown super spoiled by the coffee we have at work. Weaver's Coffee kicks all kind of ass.

Our first winery was V Sattui. I regretted it right away. It is like Napa's version of a Disneyland ride. With long lines for everything and every part of the winery is also a gift shop with kitschy stuff. Usually I like the wines but this time the only one I liked was $45 a bottle.  

Much better was Savour in St Helena. This fantastic tasting room is also one of my clients, but there was room to breathe and comfy chairs to sit in and all of the wines we tried were fantastic. It is always a lot of fun to go hang out with Dejan or Meghan and have a sip or two (or seventeen) of wine.

The last place we had time to hit before everything shut down was Prager Port Works. This is one of those places that has been around forever (hence the money stuck all over the wells as you can see below) but manages to still have the port maker in the tasting room to talk to people and retains an intimate and local flavor. Also... the ports kick ass! We stayed for a little while after they closed to chat with the guys and generally have a great time.

Most of the wineries close around 4:30 so we headed back to First St in Napa to grab a bite to eat for dinner. We tried to hit Oenotrie, but it was slammed. Mary and I went to school with Anders Bergen, who is the sous chef at Oenotrie and it is a fantastic place to eat if you can get in.

 We ended up at Celadon. I'd been there before with my sous chef, Brian Stein and they had this fantastic pork belly with watermelon salad. We tried a bit of this and a bit of that. Anyway, fantastic day!

The week at work was crazy. I am madly in love with our intern, who just completed six weeks of her internship. We are keeping her on part time to help with some of the work load this summer. I wish I could afford to hire her full time, but we are just not there yet.

We've finally done the 4 month temperature check on the restaurant and decided to try to get more fiscally healthy by doing a more reality based menu price costing. We determined we needed to raise a few prices. When we are as busy as we are and not making money, there is something wrong and we need to fix it.

We also are rolling out a few new things. Sliced meats in the cold display. Staying open later on Fridays starting the end of May. We will also be open for a champagne brunch on Mother's Day (info coming soon).

I told one of my regulars I would be raising prices on some of the items she likes and she asked me how much more for her latte. When I answered $.50 more she just handed me the extra $.50 right then... lol I love our regulars.

This past Friday was insanely fun. Stein had been sick a lot last week and was finally feeling 100%. We had a slamming day with customers hanging out til well after we were closed (I think our last one left at 4:30) and drinking wine. I was really proud of the holiday dinners we sent out this time. I have been unhappy with the packaging of the past few and I think we did a much better job of making the food as pretty as it (hopefully) tastes. Lots and lots of foodies in for the Charcuterie board. I especially had fun with one of our regulars named Greg, who is usually only in for lunch when he is working. He had Friday off and could sit and have a glass of wine and really enjoy the afternoon. It was a lot of fun to chat about my work background and why I do what I do and just generally geek out. It was a weird combination of me being able to chat with people and still being insanely busy. Usually it's one or the other, but Stein and I are really starting to hit our stride (WHEW!).

I also went into Residual Sugar this week to deliver a large order of our meats for their new lunch service. I ended up chatting with the owner Jim and had a fantastic conversation about salumi. He and his wife want to learn how to make salumi and I am going to try and carve out some time to spread the faith. They have a wine aging cave at their new house and I would suspect they could easily do curing for home use in that environment.

OH and I am teaming up with Sean Adrade of Andrade Wine Group for a Spanish teaching dinner! http://www.localwineevents.com/events/detail/417872/fb-post I am SO excited to be in the thick of this creative primordial ooze of the babyhood of my restaurant.

I have also been invited to Australia next year for 8 days to teach a class on breaking down a pig and making salumi. This seems freakishly exciting to me!!!!

Anyway, so there it is. My life as a (sort of) Rock StarTM Chef! Also the Best of Diablo Magazine 2012 closes on April 8th (hint hint) if anyone wants to check that out and vote... you know... for thier favorite restaurant (insert evil grin here)!

The baby is four months old!

We opened the Compass Star on Nov 15 and so in just a couple of days the baby will be four months old!

It's been such an amazing four months. I am still not getting paid and money is a constant struggle, but we are managing to pay our other bills, which is pretty good for a first year restaurant. I have an extern now, her name is Haley and we simply love her. She is finishing her last requisites for the Cordon Bleu school in Sacramento.

We spent Sunday at my house breaking down a 240 pound pig that was organically raised for my friend Ajax. It was a GORGEOUS pig, very thick and lustrous fat, great color and texture. I feel so good about the education Haley is getting at the CS from Stein and I. Remedial knowledge of butchery is a great skill to have in any high end kitchen and salumi is very trendy right now with few restaurants are doing it. She is already a bad-ass, but when she leaves our care, she is going to be even more so!

I am still madly in love with Martinez and enjoying the foodie scene downtown. I spent Monday Night at Creek Monkey hanging out with Jim Blair and his new brew master Matt getting a lesson in beer making. It was (of course) ridiculously interesting especially how amazingly delicious all the parts of the beer making process are. The mash was like oatmeal made out of Grape Nuts and the wort was.... SO yummy, I could drink that like tea. I can think of 20 things I could make with these tertiary ingredients that would be amazing. I really love the brew pub, the bar tenders (I think Valerie is my favorite) are great and lots of good beers on tap. The beer they are currently making will be served at the April 21st Craft Brew Festival and we are planning to make a fresh sausage that incorporates that beer and serve it at the festival as well. It seems unbelievable to me that it is almost April.

I feel a lot of kinship with Jim, we both opened our first restaurants right around the same time and have been both horrified, brutalized, inspired, exhausted and delighted by the process.

It's strange, we've been so well received (we have a five star rating on Yelp... sure it's only like 10 reviews, but lol, still!) but I seem to obsess about the failures. Unhappy customers make me lose sleep. It doesn't happen a lot, but when it does... it's awful. One of our regulars came in specifically for the bangers and mash special and we'd sold out by one pm. We made easily twice what we normally would have for a Friday special, but people have been waiting for us to showcase some of our fresh sausages and they came in droves. She came in, we were sold out and she was so upset! I hate that kind of thing, but I have to let it go and try not to fixate.  (also, note to self... make some frickin sausages for your retail customers... they want them!)

Stein was saying the other day, we can have someone come in a ton and then suddenly disappear. It can be because they are on a trial that ends, but it's hard not to wonder if we did something wrong. I want so much for people to be excited and happy about their experience.

We are also getting ready to reprice our menu. The price of brisket has gone up, in addition to just being a lot more realistic about costs now that we've been open for four months (YAY!). I've been doing the menu price costing so Stein and I can meet and chat about exactly how we want that to go, then I will have to change all the signage and menus and give fair warning to our customers of the changes.

I adore my regulars, funny food snobs for the most part (and as Alan says, "Good food, plus I like your tight jeans!"). I feel so at home there. I will be teaching a sausage making class soon at the shop for some of my regulars. They are small game hunters and want to make some Duck or Goose pepperoni (which sounds fabulous!).

I am also officially single, which is a little strange. It is so stressful to dissolve a 6 year relationship on top of opening a restaurant, but I think I am working through it all and I feel like I am getting to the other side. I go back and forth between being terrified and being euphoric. It feels right that Spring is coming. I went to the Farmer's Market on Sunday and my favorite small family farm had beautiful hand picked asparagus and so many treasures. I stood there smelling the produce and thinking that if Spring had a smell, it would be like produce fresh from the soil.

Crazy Day

Monday is a big prep day for Stein and I. We start each week fresh and so our sauces an other staple items must be rebuilt from scratch. I usually start the weekly special in the early morning and Stein will often get soups going when he comes in later in the morning. Today I didn't get enough product to do more than a days worth of the special (lasagna),so tomorrow I will need to come in early and get all that done.

So today we were happily meadering about our morning getting things prepped (A very quiet morning too!) and then people started coming in and asking for lunch stuff around 10:30am (lunch doesn't usally start until 11:00 am). Stein always asks me, "Is everything ready in the front for lunch?" I said, "yes"... it felt like famous last words.

Then we got slammed. I'd made double my normal amount of pastrami for a Monday and three times as much corned beef. We sold out of both by 1:30pm. We sold out of quiche. We sold all but one serving of the lasagna. It was so busy. I heard rumor that they'd done an auction for forclosed homes at the court house.

It was a fun foodie day, but I felt like I couldn't spend time with the new foodies that came in. I did get to do some charcuterie stuff with patrons but not much. Ahhhh well I hope people had good experiences.

I had a wonderful relaxing weekend at the River wrapped lovingly around some of my most beloved and cherished friends in a place that is full of magic for me. I know I am not as focused right now as I could be on work. I know the recent break-up of my 6+ year relationship along with the brutal schedule of being a new restaurant owner is taking it toll on me mentally. It is one reason I am really grateful for Steain, who is a rock in the midst of my chaos, and Haley (our extern). It is so important to us to really arm her with some specialized skills that will make her a bad-ass in any kitchen she is a part of. She is already a hard worker and great to work with. Charcuterie is a hot trend in our industry and when she is done with her internship, she will know more about it than almost anyone she will work with. I feel really good about that.

As much as my heart is at the River, if I can get a weekend of work at home in I will feel like I am carving some clarity out of Chaos. I need to sit with Stein and reprice our menu, and then I need to redo all of our signage and also our web page. Plus I despeately need to go thru the list of checks the acountant sent me and label what they were all for. If I can get some quaity time with my kids, that would be really awesome as well. Clarity from Chaos. It must happen.

One of my favorite wholesale customers is trying to get his sausage truck on Off the Grid in the City. So I will be giving him some samples of my Andouille, Chicken Apple and Bratwurst, plus the Berber Blackberrry Organic Katsup for the oganizers to try. It would be pretty cool to be a part of something both high profile and cool like Off the Grid. I am looking forward to showing Haley how to make fresh sausages and how to use the sous vide set up to get them cooked to the perfect temperature.

Life is motoring right along. It feels so different and strange now. Like the road ahead of me is wide open and the horizon is an endless unknown. But I don't feel afraid. I feel wanderlust; I want to see where the road goes. I feel like it's MY road. Life is truly a gift... so rich and amazingly beautiful.

Three months...

This week's specials:

Duck Cassoulet with side salad

Soup tomorrow: Kale and Sausage in a rich garlic beef stock

Soup TBD... not sure yet but I picked up some butternut squash today

Today was Monday. I spent the weekend out at the River (the Stockton Delta) with some of my oldest and dearest friends... It felt good to get some down time! I spent all day Saturday prepping some box lunches for one of my favorite clients. He is the bank manager for next door (he and his staff are so nice we switched our merchant bank) and the event was a Napa wine excursion for this club (something like the Young Overachievers of America... I would presume he is the president of this club?). We did 115 box lunches (they were awesome, I hope everyone liked them). So I busted my ass Saturday from about 7am to 4pm (The power went out! It was such a pain) then ran home to grab my daughter and stopped for groceries before making the so achingly familiar trek to my childhood stomping grounds.

There is no way to talk about the magic that happens at the cafe without sounding full of hubris... It was easy to blog when I desperately needed to vent about the many difficulties and travails getting the shop opened. Maybe I am a glass half full kind of girl, but even though I am still not taking home a paycheck, I feel over-the-moon ecstatic about how well we have been received by this beautiful town we've fallen into. People come in every day and engage Stein and I in conversations about the cafe, the meats, what we are doing... they treat us like a special treasure (even when I am sporting dishwashing gloves and a cleaning rag in my hand).

Yesterday three distinguished elderly ladies happened by the shop, they each bought a beignet and french press coffee and snuggled in the corner table in the thin morning light. We've had some trouble getting the beignet to cook right recently, so I always ask people how they are right away. The quieter of the three sipped her coffee and stopped suddenly and stared at me intently. She asked how long we'd been open and then said the coffee was the best she'd ever had. I told her about our coffee roaster (John Weaver) and a bit about the coffee. Then that lead into the meats and all of the hand made food. She solemnly nodded and they spoke in hushed tones. So simple... just beignet and coffee, but they were so complimentary and encouraging!

And I am so excited to be welcoming  my first apprentice, Haley, to the Compass Star. She is finishing her culinary education at Le Cordon Bleu and is interested in making salumi. She will be coming by the shop tomorrow and I will take a picture of us together for the blog. I plan to work her through the full progression from basic to complicated: cured meat, smoked meat, fresh sausages, fresh smoked sausages, pate, dry cured meat, dry cured sausages, and emulsified sausage. I am relieved to have a focus for the next six weeks for making some sausages! We've been so busy it has been hard to squeeze in the time to keep up on our supplies.

Anyway, so things are motoring along. I love my vocation so very much.

A day of rest...

Today is Saturday. I met up with Stein and his lovely bride at the Restaurant Depot for some weekend shopping for the cafe, then we hit Aunt Mary's in Oakland for a noonish breakfast. It is odd... everything was really good, but not really to my personal taste. The portions were really big! Above is a Eggs Benidicto, which was a corn based cake with an egg, (really good) mole, guacamole and pico di gallo.

It feels strange to have down time... a guilty pleasure. I should be working! I spent some time designing the labels for selling sliced salumi in the cold display. We have so many customers ask for salumi by the pound so we got some nice vacuum seal bags and new labels and we are going to roll out some sliced salmi for sale next week. I also trolled the Internet and picked up some aluminum individual sized pie pans for future pot pies and quiches.

It's been a strange few weeks. My long term (6+ years) relationship ended (amicably). The foodies continue to embrace the restaurant more than we could have possibly imagined and Stein and I slip into an ever more regular and comfortable routine. It feels strange to be single. I've dropped a bit of weight and it is nice to feel sexy, in control of my life and thriving in my vocation. I feel like the next year is going to bring about changes that I cannot begin to fathom as I sit here in a sunny corner of my house. I feel excited and energized about the future.

Money is still a constant issue, but it feels like there could be some progress and things are getting better and better.

Foodie Fridays are developing as we'd hoped with our regulars coming in for extended lunch time schmoozing. It is my favorite day of the week!

Tomorrow I will go to the restaurant in the morning to prep for next weeks specials and fill a catering order. I will probably head over there around 8am. We got a delivery of organic beets that were too small for chips last week so we pickled the golden ones and will serve them next week with duck confit, arugula and some soft goats milk feta. The other special will be apple bourbon sausages with beet greens (we chopped them off the organic beets) and I am not sure what starch we will serve with that? I am hoping to done prepping by noon to get the catering stuff delivered and get home in time for the super bowl and to prep the food for the Culinary Symposium here at the house.

Very Cool!

http://www.martinezgazette.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8434:old-world-italian-meets-modern-delicacies&catid=39:opinion&Itemid=57