Caution! Crazy Up Ahead!

Wow... I’ve been out of touch with you guys for over a month! OK, two. Whatever. I could regal you with numerous superlatives as to how stinkin’ busy I’ve been, but I’ll just throw this your way... I’m smack-dab in the middle of producing about 100..that’s right, 100, different Beverage menus.. one for each store, all festively unique, because God forbid anyone should compromise. Commence with the pity.

Much as this tries my very soul, it does allow me to momentarily stop the obsessing about what is to come in 2008 for our beloved industry. Being all goddessy and whatnot, I have intimate access to Oracles and what they’re saying keeps me awake at night.

Fuel prices are going through the roof, hops are becoming scarce and more expensive, no one grows barley anymore because corn is so lucrative, but all the corn is going to ethanol and feed, which is going up, up, up, so food costs more, breweries are panicking, no one knows what to do about the lack of hops crops, drought is hurting the Australian wine industry, keg theft has pushed cooperage to $30 a keg, brewers are foisting higher-cost 1/6th barrels on the market, with the requisite 20% increase in ounce cost, the minimum wage hikes are costing a bundle, oh and by the way, the Big R looms ahead no matter what the Fed says... customers are watching their wallets and staying home more or trading down and I don’t know about you, but I’m a little freaked!

In the words of someone or other, I think we are heading into a perfect storm. Lordy, I hope I’m wrong. But it doesn’t look good from where I sit and as an operator, the litany above presents a multitude of trickle-down problems.

To make sure I wasn’t just a Chicken Little Freak, I did a survey of about 30 operators, suppliers and distributors about two months ago, and it was a pretty gloomy task. Glad to know I’m not alone in my worry; terrified to have my worst fears confirmed from various aspects of the industry.

So we all agree that 2008 is gonna be a ‘witch’, but what to do about it?

Well, we can take price, and, most likely, everyone will, as least to some extent.. but I can’t mitigate a 10% increase in costs with a similar increase in prices...at some point, customers just say no.

We can focus on cost control.. always a winner, but not something ignored regularly, so unless one is not paying attention at all, the gains might be minimal.

We can re-engineer our menus...try to keep the flash with less costly ingredients...for example, pour Smirnoff Vanilla in a Signature drink instead of Stoly...but keep it sexy enough to maintain most of the retail price. We can put one ounce of croutons on a salad instead of two, cut the limes into 6ths instead of quarters...avoid those damned 1/6th barrels, build wine lists with less expensive wines from non-drought ravaged viticultural areas..

We could try to buy more locally to avoid shipping surcharges.. a lovely thought, but no one makes scotch in these here mountains. We could stand at our bars and hairy eyeball our bartenders for waste and over-pouring. We could browbeat our staff into upselling... we could, we could, we could...

We could do a lot of things, some of which will work; others will be an exercise in futility.

So I guess all we really can do is take a hard, seriously, business-focused look at the areas we can improve upon, like menu engineering, smarter purchasing and cost controls, and let go of the things we cannot influence, like the hop crops, the price of steel, shipping, minimum wage increases (which, BTW, I am completely in favor of as a human being...not so much as a restaurateur..). Forego some of the woo-hoo fun part of why we got into this gig and really think about how to weather this storm. Hunker down and accept the fact that we may have to realize slightly lower margins and profits to stay competitive...because if we’re hurting, so are our customers and slamming them with big pricing increases is a fast track to empty bars.

As I have been known to say while negotiating discounts with brewers who are overly impressed with their own product and charging based on that elevated opinion, ‘You can sell a lot of beer for less money or no beer for more. Pick.’

We’ll get through this, certainly...people have to eat and drink, after all.. but we should be well prepared to pro-act to the storm that’s a-comin’.

Fortunately, the nature of our business ensures that, if we do, at times, give way to despair, there’s plenty of booze at arm’s reach.

Cheers.

Saints Preserve Us!

Today, we shall talk about my favorite beverage in the world! OK, my second favorite, after milk...er, third, after tea...wait, pinot noir...

Today we shall talk about my fourth favorite beverage in the world! I am completely enamored of a newly fashionable liqueur, the stylish and beveled St~Germain Elderflower Liqueur!!! Holy smokes, I love me some St~Germain! Love! Love! Lu-uh-uh-ove!

Why do I love it so much? Have you tasted it? It tastes like the scent of honeysuckle on a breeze, like fresh, musky lychee fruit, like succulent peach nectar, like liquid happiness! All packaged in a beautiful beveled glass bottle bearing a remarkable resemblance to a top-heavy femme. And apparently, there is a guy in France traipsing around the Alps on a bicycle picking elderflowers just for me! Right now! As we speak!

Being a simple goddess, I prefer the signature St~Germain cocktail...a delectably large tot of the liqueur with champagne, club soda and a saucy twist of lemon. But in perusing their website, I found numerous cocktails that I will hasten to try, not least because of their clever asides embedded within their recipes. Such witty repartee reminds me of someone.. thinking ..thinking...

I discovered this elixir several years ago at one of our golf tournaments, when one of my distributors donated a case of the minis, also festively clad in the sexy bottle. (sidebar: it just tickles me that mini’s are just that.. teeny, tiny Lilliputian versions of themselves..same bottle, same labels... it cracks me up to see the teensy little Crown Royal bottle or the Dimple Pinch or the Tanqueray... but then, we have established that I am easily amused...). I had never even heard of St~Germain before. The minis were destined for the goody bags.

Sadly for some, after cracking it open, sucking it down and rejoicing in the sublime glow, I then absconded with as many minis as I could find without actually wrestling the bags out of our golfer’s hands.

Fast forward to about a month ago. We were having a farewell dinner for one of our comrades who was leaving. (another sidebar: a futile and wasteful practice, because we must have the highest percentage of boomerang employees on record...the latest was only gone for 3 weeks before she came back. “Hey, sad to see you go! Here’s an expensive party! See you in a few weeks!”). As I waited at the bar, I, being a writer of menus and also unable to sort through the myriad of options for cocktails entrenched in my brain, rendering it impossible to order in any semblance of quickly, picked up the sticky bar menu and right there at the top of the page was my old friend, The St~Germain Cocktail, singing her siren song of promises of deliciousness.

“I’ll have this”, says I. I said that about four more times through out the evening...which is awesome!! It is light enough in ABV for me to have several, which I promptly did.

Now, you may be asking yourself, why the long stretch of time betwixt discovery and enamored? Well, as I have noted in past blogs, I’m actually not much of a drinker. I am a lover of all things beverage, but not a consumer so much. So, since I hadn’t seen it around anywhere, nor had anyone presented it to me (bad reps!), I had forgotten about it.

But thanks to that sticky menu and my revolving co-worker, I was reminded and am now firmly in the cult of Germain. And now that I know there are bicycling Frenchmen risking life and limb in the mountains of France just for me to possess the heavenly nectar, I shall not ever again forget. In fact, it is the only liqueur I have actually me myself purchased in years! (I am a ‘buyer’, which means I don’t actually ever have to buy anything to have the world’s best liquor cabinet. Ironic.)

So, if you haven’t tried it yet, do yourself a favor and hie on down to the liquor store and pay your money. You will not be sorry!

And if I see a rash of baby goddesses named Oenoli in the future, I will know you appreciated that advise. Vive la France! Vive la St~Germain!

(All goddessy opinions are free and sincere. No recompense was paid for this or any endorsement. Though I’m open to that. I can be bought.)

If you have a question or comment for the One Most High, email her at beverage.goddess@yahoo.com

Not Overly Goddessy

Aaah, Goddessdom.. not an easy thing to maintain, ya know? Life has been a bit rough lately and i haven't been feeling overly goddessy.... more like road-kill than ethereal being... but I hope to be back in the oracle again soon. until then, go forth and drink!

La Goddess

A REAL Job

Ah, Spring. Birds kinda singing, snow melting and then freezing into treacherous sheets of death, watery sun peeking out behind the clouds...ahh, Spring.

As Spring waxes into Summer, you will hear that phrase that irritates me right down to my eternal, goddessy bones. As school lets out and the teeming masses of Gen Y/Millennial/Whatever Stupid Generational Moniker That Comes After Millennials come home to roost, they will descend upon the modest, unassuming restaurant looking for jobs.

But not just ANY job... a job they can do ‘until they get a REAL job’.

Yes, folks.. those of us who have spent our lives in the food & bar business.. we apparently do not have real jobs.

Forget those slammin’ nights behind the stick, pouring and blending our little hearts out.

Not real, those days when the ‘bus lets out’ and you, your one closing server and your scruffy line cook pull off a miracle of food preparation and service.

Completely faux those long days in the office trying to find a snowball’s chance in hell of meeting your budget.

A mirage that you sleep in your office in your chair after a 16 hour run with a banquet tablecloth as a poor excuse for a blanket because you have a clopen.

No, apparently, the only ‘real’ jobs are those outside of the food & bar service industry. But don’t believe me. Just try taking any kind of poll or survey. Scan the abundant list of jobs someone considers real.

If you are lucky, and only recently, you MAY find something like ‘food service and manufacture’ or ‘hospitality’. As if those limited categories could cover the range of positions within them. But a server isn’t a cook isn’t an assembly line worker isn’t a concierge isn’t a pastry chef isn’t a front desk clerk isn’t a bar manager isn’t a sommelier.

When you check ‘accountant’, that pretty much says it all.. you account for things. Or you are a doctor, a lawyer or an indian chief. Perhaps an retail associate or a miner or a carpenter. All these jobs have their special category, as many do and are fairly obvious as to what they entail.

For us, there is the ubiquitous ‘Other’.

OK. So those are real jobs, but so are ours and, as the biggest industry in America, if not the world, you’d think that we would get the justice we deserve and not just be a bi-way where young people stop on their way to respectable industry.

You know, I believe that OUR industry is, in fact, the oldest profession. The default is, of course, of the silver boot wearing, hoochie-mama, saucy tart persuasion.

But let’s consider...before there was pay to play, there were people eating and drinking and someone making and serving all those comestibles. In fact, the very first thing we do after getting squeezed out and slapped is have us a nice long drink of mother’s milk off the proffered tap.

So, when you hear.. or rather overhear.. a young’un talking about how they are ‘only doing this until I graduate and get a real job’, ask them these questions:

§ Is there a roof over your head?
§ Are you eating?
§ Do you have money?
§ Gas in your car?
§ CD’s, clothes, an I-Phone, shoes?

That’s a real job that provides all that.

And then ask:
§ Do you really think that you are gonna pull down $1000 bucks a week, drink pretty much for free, eat like a king, party like it’s 1999, have a slew of PYT’s at your fingertips, tell the boss when YOU can work and watch a million beautiful sunrises with a posse of great friends-for-now at your entry level accounting job?

Food and Beverage work is REAL work. Important work. We feed the hungry, water the masses, provide a place to celebrate, hang out, watch the team, break up, entertain the kinder, people watch, try the latest trendy cocktail.

We remember our guests, know their stories, look forward to seeing them, run our butts off at their every bidding. We work long hours, rarely get weekends or holidays off, do double shifts, clopen, fill in, take on, bust out.

In fact, we get to do the funnest job on earth...a job that pays us well, allows us to delay maturity, provides a steady stream of new friends and lets us live large.

My little goddessy friend Andrea likes to say that, when it came time to chose what to do with her life, she ‘checked the fun box’ and picked the restaurant business.

So, go ahead, be a shopkeeper or a computer programmer or a scientist or a realtor. Find your path. But don’t for a minute think that this hospitable life isn’t a real job.

It’s real, all right... real fun, real hard, real lucrative, real exciting, real crazy, real important, real life. A real job.

Ya coulda been an accountant. But yer not. Snap. Go on, check the fun box.

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