Delancey by Molly Wizenberg

Author:Molly Wizenberg [Wizenberg, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781451655124
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-05-06T07:00:00+00:00

14

About three weeks out from our projected opening, we began hiring a staff. I guess it seems risky to wait so long, and it probably was, but it’s not uncommon in the restaurant industry. You don’t want to hire someone too far out, because unless you’re a big corporate gig, you probably don’t have a retainer to offer, and anyway, we were too busy with inspections and the last details of construction to think about anything but building codes and margaritas. Restaurants are works-in-progress even as they serve their first customers; that’s why there are soft openings. You can train all you want, but a restaurant is unpredictable by nature: a refrigerator will break, or twenty-five customers will arrive at once, or a ten-person reservation will pull a no-show, or the table of drunks that you cut off will dump their water glasses on the floor in protest as they leave. (But if you’re lucky, one of the drunks will slink back an hour later, apologize to the host, and slip her a twenty.) The only way to work out the kinks is to smooth them as you go—and send a complimentary dessert to the next table over while you dash for the mop.

Neither of us had ever hired anyone. Because we lived in an apartment with a fairly upstanding landlord, we’d never even had to hire a plumber. We were always the ones being hired. We had always been employees (and sometimes, in my case, a mediocre one). Now we had to figure out how to be bosses, a tall order in any situation and an especially awkward one in ours, since we would likely be the same age as most of our staff. All we had going for us was gut instincts and Susan the Oracle.

We would likely need two servers and one host to run the dining room, which seats about forty people. The kitchen would need three cooks: a pizza cook to stretch the dough and put on the toppings, another cook to work the wood-burning oven, and a pantry cook to make starters and desserts. I would be the pantry cook, so that was taken care of, and Brandon has, from Day One, manned the oven. The baking of the pizzas is the trickiest part, he says, and like Domenico DeMarco of Di Fara, he wanted to do it himself. (That’s why Delancey is open for dinner only, five nights a week; any more than that, and he’d burn out quickly and spectacularly, like a pizza left a minute too long in a 750° oven.)

We didn’t have to put out a call for a host or servers. Our first host, Erin, lived in the neighborhood, heard about what we were doing, and stopped by one afternoon with a resume. She’d never worked in a restaurant, but she was articulate, well mannered, and pretty, a strawberry blonde with freckles across her nose. I also liked her outfit—a red-and-white polka-dotted blouse, I think. These were the kind of rigorous, painstaking criteria we used.

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